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'm very pleased to have as my guest, Philip Levine, whose most recent book,

Breath, published by Knopf, has recently appeared in paperback.

Now, I want to celebrate Philip Levine because the fact of the matter is,

as people who've been listening to the show for some time, no, poetry did not come naturally to me.

In fact, it bewildered me for a very long time. And, you know, I went to a college that was

swarming with poets. Re readings were

constant. It was the middle of the so-called revolution, and so, you know, the popularity of poetry

was at a height. But it wasn't until I heard certain poems, among them Philip Levines, they feed, they lie, and

that I started to get thrilled by it.

And I want to always recognize that, you know, for a lot of people, everyone thinks that

if you say you like poetry, that you must be pretending

or something, like saying you like opera. But, you know, refinement doesn't come easily to certain

kinds of people. It didn't to me. And this poem, they feed their lion. It was the title poem

from the book, They Feed the Lion, was the poem really that

ignited me. Would you like me to read it? I would love you to read it. Okay. Let's see, I wrote this

poem back at about 1967. So it's got some years on it. It's a little long in the tooth, but I think it's hard

...