Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

From KCRW, Santa Monica,

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Charles Simmich,

the author most recently of Knight Picnic,

a book of poems published by Harcott.

He is the author, of course, of many books of poetry

from dismantling the silence in return to a place lit by a glass of milk, to the recent Jack Straws

Walking the Black Cat, A Wedding in Hell. He has written critical essays, many of which have been appearing in the New York Review

of Books and have been collected in books from the University of Michigan Press.

He is the author as well of a really beautiful, subjective explanation, examination, analysis of the work of Joseph Cornell.

He's one of my favorite American poets, although I want to talk to him in part about

immigrant poetry here. When I started reading you, it was, as I've in fact told you before, the object

poems, the poems about the fork and the knife, and they formed very beautiful air balloons

in my mind, and I saw them at the time as hermetic poems. As time has gone by, and the poems have

been filled with dark alleys and bloodied streets and figures of horror.

I have become aware that the poetry really is a response to the century, that it is not a purely

internalized poetry.

...