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 Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm honored to have as my guest, C.K. Williams, whose collected poems was published

recently by Faris Strauss and Cheru.

The, um, it's the entire work, years and years. recently by Faris Strauss and Giroux.

It's the entire work, years and years of work, of a poet whose work has gone from the intensities of shocking symbols

that one imagined connections between to the more recent work, which

is a wording of what might be called inner silences, finding how thought can be wordable.

And the principle seems to be that of continuity, continuous

connectedness, the mind displaying itself at work within the poem itself, and that thought

is something like a natural growth. The poems sometimes sound

the way William Carlos Williams describes a flower growing and opening, the syntax, taking on the nature of thought and movement itself.

I thought that we would begin with a poem that quite explores inner space and time,

a poem among the new poems called The Gaff. This is C.K. Williams. The Gaff. If that's someone who's me, yet not me, yet who judges me, is always with me as he is,

shouldn't he have been there when I said so long ago, that thing I said? If he who rakes me with such

not trivial shame for minor sins now were there, then,

shouldn't he have warned me he'd even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?

I'm a child then, yet already I've composed this conscience beast who harries me. Is there anything else I can say

...