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.

I'm very happy to be with my guest, Carol Muskie Dukes, who has published a new novel,

channeling Mark Twain, which is published by Random House.

And she is a poet as well as a novelist and an essayist as well as a poet and novelist.

And I want to leap right into the subject of the book because what I feel was so impressive

about this book. It's a book about a young woman named Holly who goes

to teach poetry at a woman's prison, the woman's house of detention on Rikers Island. But the novel

channeling Mark Twain succeeds in opening all of the political and aesthetic and ethical

questions that were raised in the late 1960s and have been not so much solved, but put to bed

or backburnered by the last 30 years or so.

And so as I read, I remembered what it was like to live in the anguish of being asked to take myself seriously.

The very first question that is raised, and it's raised in the first chapter,

Holly has gone to the prison, has had her first session with the inmates, and has brought back a poem from one of them, which she shows to a very well-respected poet at a dinner party, who laughs and says it's worthless.

It's not a poem at all.

And says that the entire question is whether in teaching poetry you are stimulating genius.

So the question becomes who is a poet?

That's correct.

...