Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we mean without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Peter Gizzy.

He's a poet.

He has a book from Wesleyan University Press. It's called Threshold Songs. It's his fifth

full collection. And in the book, within poems, unanswerable questions occur. I think the first one

I remembered seeing was, what is the role of art? Later on in the book, he asked if they still call it a

world. Why the unanswerable questions that occur in this book? First of all, thanks for having me

on your show, Michael. Thank you. I think the unanswerable questions are the ones that is the job of poetry to try to give voice to and answer.

It's the difficulty of life and the things that we experience every day that otherwise go either unrecognized, unhonored, or unsaid, and that the poem

can somehow give voice to. Why do you think that poetry has become so difficult contemporary

poetry, what they call experimental poetry? Well, for me, I guess I kind of value all sorts of modalities of poetry.

I don't kind of put it in those terms, but I think the world has become complicated,

and I think that the field of writing and of poetry has exploded in such a way that there

are now people who have become very, you know, educated in reading poetry, and so therefore so much poetry is being written to other poets.

But that said, whether a poem is simple or complicated, the history of poetry is poets singing to one another.

If we have anything as a poet, if I have anything in my life, it's others' poems.

...