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 reason?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy because my guest is Dennis Johnson.

He's the author most recently of Resuscitation of a Hangman, which Farah Strauss and Giroux published this year,

also of the novels Fiskadooro and Angels. His most recent two books of poetry are the veil and the incognito lounge. Both of them were published

by Knapp, and he's really one of my favorite and most, he's one of the young writers that

I feel most interested in, partly because of the extreme

intensity, bleakness, and bleak comedy of his language. And I thought I'd start by asking you,

I know where in the street that language comes from, but what books are attuned to that frequency?

Well, it seems to me that most recently I've been reading, getting a lot from reading

under the volcano by Malcolm Lowry.

But, you know, when you talk about streets,

that's not the language that comes through that book.

I'm trying to think where that comes from.

And I'm afraid that it's not from books.

It's mainly from rock and roll songs and from hearing people talk.

I'm really interested in the language of people who are jammed together,

like in the military or in prisons, because those are the pressure cookers of language,

and they're on the cutting edge, it seems to me.

...