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 have special pleasure in talking to Camille Pahlia, who is in Philadelphia.

We're going to be talking about her new book, Break Blow Burn.

It's published by Pantheon.

It's her reading of 43 of the world's best poems, and consistent with it is the assertion

that poems can still be read, that in some crazy lapse people have started doing other things with poetry, theorizing

about it, doing everything but the thing that we did know was successful, that you could

read them line by line and perform explication of the text. Now, Camille, these poems and these

explications have stood the test of the classroom and a very diligent and demanding students,

sometimes night students, as I recall. That's right. This book is the result of my some 34 now years of classroom teaching and the enormous range of students that I've had. I haven't just taught it at elite schools, but also at community colleges and night classes and a helicopter factory in Connecticut when I was trying to finish my first book, sexual persona.

And so I have, I think, a good sense of the general audience in ways maybe that people who teach for the Crem de la Crem don't have.

You suggest, in fact, that all over the country, it's the people who are teaching in community colleges

and who are not teaching the so-called elite, who are keeping literature alive. Can you

explain that? Well, in the 1970s, there was an influx of post-structuralism from Europe that

I think totally through the humanities off track and has diminished the prestige of literature departments and of poetry generally since.

The theorists were interested in doing theory, not in engaging directly with works of art, whether literary or visual.

I believe, as a product of the 1960s, in subordinating myself to art, not in lording over it and dictating to it with a laundry list of demands and complaints.

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