Thanks for listening to Bookworm. I'm host Michael Silverblatt. If there's another podcast that comes from us at KCRW that I really like is the treatment with Elvis Mitchell. I've said it for a long time. Elvis's style of interviewing is like jazz. He orchestrates so many interesting moments and gets people to say such surprising

and interesting things about film, about popular culture. He really knows his subject, and he's

one of the very best in the country. Listen to the treatment. Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without

books? From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad, and this is bookworm. I'm talking to Cordia Rankine, an American poet whose work to me becomes more and more exciting, meaningful, crucial to our moment in the world, and her new book, which is published by Grey Wolf Press, is called Citizen, an American Lyric.

And I wanted to begin by saying that the work is hugely accessible in a way that modern poetry often is not.

How important to you is that accessibility?

Michael, thank you for having me on the show.

Oh, thank you.

It's a great honor, a great honor.

I try very, you know, a heart is not even the right word.

There's so much that I do in the writing to try and create a kind of transparency in the work.

So it has to do with kind of distilling it down to the thing that matters. So draft after draft has to do with kind of distilling it down to the thing that matters.

So draft after draft after draft has to do with taking away anything that I feel unnecessary

and having each word work as hard as it can in service of whatever the piece is.

Because I have all five of your books of poetry, beginning with the one called

Nothing in Nature is Private, and I feel that over the books, the work is clarified like

butter, you know, distilling, clarifying, bringing things to the point

...