Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very lucky to have as my guest, Alice Quinn, who is the poetry editor of the New Yorker

and the current director of the Poetry Society of America.

And she has had the great extraordinary opportunity to put together from among the 181 boxes of material in the

Vassar Library to put together a collection of the poems, drafts, and fragments of Elizabeth Bishop under the

title Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox. Now, you know, many people have had the chance to talk about

this volume and it's inspired controversies and arguments about whether the material should have been published or shouldn't

have been published. And to be honest with you, I feel the controversy is irrelevant to the book.

What I read when I read the book was a lover of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, who's had the opportunity

to wander in what exists,

the closest thing that exists, to the corridors of the poet's mind, to choose and put together

an imaginary Elizabeth Bishop, of whom we are receiving 105 poems, fragments, versions,

and then to free associate about them in footnotes.

These are not footnotes in the conventional sense.

Many of us are citizens of the literary world who are not citizens of the literary academic

world.

And the desire to have a kind of variorum or scholarly edition can follow.

...