Funds for bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a 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.

Hello, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is the last show in Bookworm's four-part series, A Month of Miwosh, which honors

Nobel Prize laureate Cheshwa Miwosh, whose career has ranged across the entire history

of the 20th century, from his childhood in Lithuania, his years in Warsaw

during World War II, his defection and exile from communist Poland in the 1950s, his immigration

to Berkeley in 1960, where he has lived for nearly 40 years. Today's show will discuss Milosh's

work since winning the Nobel Prize in 1980, his enormous impact

on American poetry, and his new book, Roadside Dog, which is published this month by Farah

Strauss and Giroux. Poet Robert Haas's most recent book of poetry is Sun Underwood, published

by Echo Press. At an international festival

of poets and scholars held at Claremont-Mecana College in honor of Cheshwa Mewash, Robert

Haas and I talked about Miwosh's work after winning the Nobel Prize.

A lot of writers, as you know, are stopped cold by the weight of the Nobel Prize. Between 1980,

when he was almost 70 and 1989, he's published probably another 10 books of poems and prose,

in their way, as wonderful and inventive as his early work.

Some of the most recent work. I've read the translation you did with him of the book

A Roadside Dog, and the second half of the book is a single sequence that is so astonishing.

...