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 Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I have as my guest, a poet Lucy Brock Broido, whose most recent book, Trouble in Mind,

has recently been published by Alfred A Knopf.

Her earlier book, The Master Letters, is also in print and paperback from Knopf.

Her first book, A Hunger, I believe, is now out of print.

But coming back into print from Knopf, wonderful.

Now, Lucy Brock Broido is a very special poet in that when you read her poetry,

the brocade of verbal textures and beauties is so extravagant that it almost is hilarious. There's a kind of beauty to the point of Edwardian affectation, in a sense,

very wonderfully done, so that it's almost as if you see through the strangeness and beauty of the poem to a simultaneous comedy of style and tragedy of content.

And that these work through the poem simultaneously, and I thought I'd be crazy not to let you hear one right away.

So this is the first poem in the book, Trouble in Mind, by my guest, Lucy Brock Broido.

This first poem takes its title as several poems, a handful in the book,

from discarded titles from Wallace Stevens' notebooks.

And this is a title that haunted me for a long time. It's called The Halo that Would Not Light.

And it's for my friend Lucy Greeley, whose work you may know,

autobiography of a face, and this is my elegy for her,

the halo that would not light.

...