You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

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

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Barbara Guest,

and it's the occasion of the publication recently

by Sun and Moon Press of her selected poems.

Sun and Moon also publishes her recent books

of poetry, Fair Realism,

more recently defensive rapture, and they will be republishing her novel seeking air.

I wanted to begin by saying of Barbara Guest that it has been a slow immersion for me in her work.

I discovered it when reading the novel seeking air

and was delighted by her sense of the unity of all times, a complexity of selves, the ability

to flexibly move from literary style to literary style, to incorporate the world, say,

of Ezra Pound and its elusiveness, but to make it personal, to bring his extraordinary

objectivity, say, but to include madness. And then, as I began to read her poetry,

because I was more at home in prose, however experimental, I discovered a thrillingly constructed

an original world, one that repays repeated and gradual reading.

Thank you for joining me today, Barbara.

Thank you.

I wanted to ask you, you were in the first generation of the New York School of Poetry, so-called, including Frank O'Hara and John Ashberry and James Schuyler, eventually to include Kenneth Koch and Kenwood Elmsley.

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