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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. This is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very happy to have as my guest, a poet whose work I like very much. His name is Charles North. His most

recent book has the fabulous title, Everything and Other Poems. It's published by the Song Cave

Press. And so he first came to my attention when I received in the mail a book called

The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight.

It was from a press called Adventures in Poetry.

Its main editor was Larry Fagan.

And as soon as I saw the title, I thought of the two songs it's based on,

The Nearness of You and The Way You Look Tonight.

The Nearness of You is a fabulous song by Hogi Carmichael.

The Way You Look Tonight, I'm sure some of you know it, was sung by Fred Astaire,

it was written by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern, two beautiful songs.

But amazingly, the poem itself is derived from still another popular song.

That was a song.

It was called Younger Than Springtime.

It was from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical called South Pacific,

...