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.

I'm KCRW and KCRW.com.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I have as my guest, Brenda Hillman,

whose new book, Practical Water,

a Book of Poems,

has just been published recently by Wesleyan University Press.

Now, this is interesting because every time people talk about Brenda Hillman to me, the words experimental and difficult become part of the conversation.

And, you know, truth is, I don't really know what either of those words mean in general,

but also in particular in this case, because the poetry seems to me

to be playful and enjoyable and a kind of magnificent toy, complex, sometimes obscure, but difficult.

I'm not sure.

But I'm one who's always thought, well, you read it out loud and see if the sounds give you

pleasure, do they make you laugh or, you know, and that seemed to me to be as good a criterion as any that I know.

What do you think of these words like difficult?

You know, I think that they're used probably in expectation that a particular kind of poetry has become a dominant mode,

which is an autobiographical, apparently autobiographical narrative kind of poetry in which you know immediately

who's speaking or you think you know who's speaking. You think you're pretty sure that the poet is

...