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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.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Jerome Rothenberg.

He is the co-editor of an extraordinary new anthology called A Book of the Book, some works

and projections about the book and writing.

It comes from granary press, and the reason I invited Jerome Rothenberg is because he's practically,

to my mind, the inventor with his first large anthology, Technicians of the Sacred,

of a new kind of anthology, an anthology that begins by redefining its field.

He said back then when Technicians of the Sacred came out, and that book is still in print from University of California press,

that a poet is a technician of the sacred, and then went on to consider what the range of being a technician of the sacred would involve.

So by the time I finished reading that anthology when it first came out, my ideas about

poetry had entirely expanded and altered.

Now we have a book of the book at a time when everyone is saying, we doubt it, that the book

is over.

This is to remind us of the radical aspirations

and possibilities that artists, writers, poets have found in the very idea of the book itself.

Now, I believe that at one point when this consideration of the book began, that you were re-inspired

by Malarmay, who said that the book is really a spiritual project.

...