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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. My name is Michael Silverbladden today. I'm very honored and

pleased to have with me as my guest, the poet Jory Graham, to talk about her newest book, Swarm,

which is published by the echo imprinted Harper Collins.

I want to report a very unusual and very moving experience that occurred to me in connection

with this book. I knew that I would be talking to Jory Graham about Swarm. I had read it twice, had been impressed by the beauty and spareness of the line.

And I remembered what Ezra Pound said about a certain kind of poetic line, that it's like hard scrabble,

that the line should be etched deeply into the ground of the text and hers were.

But I found myself thinking that it had been derived from a kind of language poetry that I didn't necessarily understand, but intuitively knew the depth and beauty of.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the book again to read it from the beginning and what the

book's jacket said turned out to be true. All of the small poems cohered into one large poem. The implications

and resonances of that large poem seemed vast and unimaginable. Suddenly, I felt like I was reading

really the closest thing to it was coming to an understanding of how the four quartets work together.

That the poems were spiritual, are spiritual, and in particular, that they have as a sort of common subject for spiritual meditation, that moment when, at the sounding of the last judgment, the soul will

rejoin its body.

And so the swarm to my mind is the swarm of souls awaiting reincorporation, awaiting their

bodies.

And we get news of the various waiting rooms,

...