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.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm. Today I'm very happy because my guest is Larry Rivers,

and he has just published his unauthorized autobiography called What Did I Do?

He wrote it with Arnold Weinstein.

It was just published by Harper Collins.

And I thought I'd start, since this is, you know, for the most part,

you're the first artist I've had on the show. I thought I'd start by talking about the poets that you knew. What did you learn? Did you learn from them? Yes, of course. I mean, we learned from everybody, but I learned. I think that I got a certain interest in literature that I don't think I had. It wasn't very well developed.

I mean, to the point where I began reading with a dictionary.

If I was reading, I always had a dictionary with me.

Now, that sounds academic or something.

That wasn't what it was about.

But they just showed me their poetry and spoke about poetry so much

and which I would sort of be inspired to either find

out what they were talking about. And I finally got to be interested in poetry.

Just as there was the New York School of Painting, there was the New York School of Poetry,

and shared among you seemed to be an interest in kind of pageants, like high school pageants. And, you know, I think that George Washington

crossing the Delaware, your painting, is in that way very closely related to what some of those

poets were doing, writing these great Jerkola kind of crazy school plays, sort of. Well, I think they

came later, if I may take a little credit.

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