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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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

You know, I'm often accused of taking risks on the show,

and one of the pleasures and risks is the luxury of talking for two weeks in a row to Frank

Bedard, an American poet who recently won the Bolagin Prize

and whose most recent book, Watching the Spring Festival, has been published by Farras Strauss and Giroux.

He's the author of seven books of poetry, I believe.

Now, after many years of reading Frank Bedard,

I very recently heard him read.

And I found it a fascinating experience

because, among other things,

Frank Bedard has written about performers in his work about Nijinsky, Oulanova.

He mentions Lee Wiley, the singer of American popular song.

But I, in particular, got the feeling that that impulse to call a book, your second book, the book of the body,

that when you're reading, you're using the body and its full resources to focus and express the poem. Can you talk about that, the bodily impulse?

Right. What you're saying is certainly true. I think that a poem is itself a body. It is something made out of words. It's a body made out of words.

And to embody that orally in a reading is not simply to read the words as if they are, all have

the same weight and the same meaning.

...