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.

I'm Michael Silverblatt.

Today my guest is Calvin Beedian.

Calbedient.

He's the author of Candy Necklace,

a book of poetry that has been published recently

by Wesleyan University Press.

He is also an ongoing critic

of contemporary American poetry, and it's been my surprise since I met him around a year ago to find how incisive and cocky and funny and thrilling his criticism is. But this has been known by others for a long time.

The fact is that he has published his first book of poetry.

It is really a remarkable debut.

I wanted to ask what it took to go from the critical act to writing and then publishing the poems that you write.

Well, it took a daring, it took an act of faith. I had written, excuse me, had written some poems in the 1970s, which I was unsatisfied with and finally abandoned.

And looking back on them recently, I saw that I was right to do that.

But in 1990, I was doing some research on Catatonia because they thought maybe that Bartleby's

Grvener, Melville's story, could be partially accounted for by the pathological type of

the catatonic.

And I looked into a book called Catatonia by the 19th century German doctor who named the disease. It had formerly

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