Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zendiburg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is bookworm.

You know, it's a funny thing. People don't think of it, but most of our great American literature

is not so much discovered, but rediscovered.

Emily Dickinson's poems were hardly known during her lifetime. During his lifetime,

by the time he died, Herman Melville was thought of as basically crazy. People thought that

that novel, Pierre, was just insane. And Henry James, by the 1950s, he was forgotten.

He was being resurrected.

And today I have a poet.

He was born in 1914.

He published one book during his lifetime, same as Emily Dickinson, by the way, in 1970

from a press, an eccentric press called The Jargon Press.

His name itself is beautiful.

His name is Alfred Starr Hamilton. and the book that has been republished by a press

that has a beautiful name. The name of the press is the song cave. And the title is beautiful.

The title is A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind, the Poems of Alfred Star Hamilton.

...