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 Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. Today, my guest is

Michael Ryan, an American poet who is most recently the author of an autobiography published by

Pantheon called Secret Life. His previous book of poems was called Godhunger. It came out in

hardcover from Viking, and he's the winner of many

poetry awards for his previous two books of poetry. I thought it was particularly interesting

to invite Michael Ryan onto the show, because in his autobiography, Secret Life, an attempt has been made to avoid the poetic voice.

Can you say why?

Well, I guess what I would call the poetic voice, I couldn't accommodate to a narrative of this length and vice versa.

A story like this couldn't be accommodated to poems because of the complexity and interrelationships of the elements.

So it's prose and it's very much my voice, though.

I think people tell me that it's my speaking voice and the voice of my personality for better or worse.

Well, it's interesting because, you know, there's... personality for better or worse.

Well, it's interesting because, you know, there's definitely an attempt between the poems, which however tough or even sometimes brutal they become have a voice of wisdom.

Maybe form, metric, confer that authority, cadence on language.

But here, there seems to be a deliberate attempt to confess to being a braggard, an intellectual bully,

a liar. Everything seems to have been done to rob the voice of any possible cheating oratorical power.

Yeah, that's an interesting observation.

The language is submitted to different criteria when you're writing poetry.

...