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 Thorpeblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. Today I'm very

pleased to have as my guest, Frank Bedard. His most recent volume of poetry, watching the

Spring Festival, came out recently from Ferris Strauss and Giroux.

He won a recent Bologen Prize.

His previous books include Desire and Stardust.

These are not in the right order.

And in the Western Night, Golden State, the Book of the Body, and Sacrifice.

I started reading Frank Bedard in the late 80s when a poem, long poem, appeared in the Paris Review.

It was a poem about Nijinsky, and it dramatized the growing insanity of Nijinsky, separated from

Diagolev, who had at least taken care of him under the ministrations of Romola, who supposedly did her best,

but he chafed under the bondage of her attention, and he danced to the kind of Western civilization in his insanity.

The poem was so extraordinary that I went and got Frank Bedard's first two books,

and I've been reading him ever since.

Now, it seems to me that one of the first things a listener should know is it seems as if it's barely a poem for you if it doesn't take an extraordinary risk.

That's true.

That's true.

Can you speak about that?

...