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.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Because today's show was recorded at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA,

you may hear background noise during the program.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Michael Ondaja, the author most recently of a book of poems, handwriting published by Alfred A. Knopf. He's the author as well of the cinnamon peeler, the English patient, running in the family, several other novels, memoirs, books of poetry.

Every time I speak to him, and this is, I believe, the third time,

I'm able to speak to him a little bit more closely because I understand a little bit more

about what it is he has to teach me.

And I wanted to say that the book handwriting seems to me to be mysteriously consistent and

to come from several traditions or interests in poetry that are unknown to me.

And I wondered if you could begin to describe the backgrounds of the

book. Well, this was a book that I, first of all, I began this writing this poetry after I'd

written the English patient. And I hadn't written poetry for quite some time before that.

So, I mean, in the middle of, I think, in the skin of a line, I'd stopped writing poetry

because the books, that novel seemed to be so complex and difficult to kind of hold together.

And then I went into the English mission after that.

So it was about seven or eight years, you know, of no poetry.

...