Summary
Poet, author, and co-founder of The Song Cave, Alan Felsenthal guest hosts this episode’s focus on poetry. As a close friend and mentee of Michael Silverblatt’s, Felsenthal recalls Michael’s revelation that he had trouble finding his way into poetry until he had several formative experiences, including one he described in 2019 during a Walt Whitman tribute. We’ll hear from that tribute with poet Pattiann Rogers reading Whitman. We’ll also hear from poets John Ashbery, Coral Bracho, Forrest Gander, and Lucille Clifton.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:03.7 | Boots! |
| 0:08.7 | Where would we be without booms? |
| 0:12.6 | Where would we be without good? |
| 0:14.8 | No, Tensberg. |
| 0:16.4 | It's a rhetorical question, sir. |
| 0:19.7 | But where would we need without books? |
| 0:24.2 | From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Alan Felsenthal. |
| 0:29.7 | Welcome to a bookworm retrospective show, a celebration of 33 years of bookworm on KCRW with Michael Silverblatt. |
| 0:38.3 | Michael recorded more than 1,600 bookworm conversations. |
| 0:42.3 | He is on hiatus now for health reasons. |
| 0:45.3 | Michael has been a mentor and dear friend of mine for most of my life. |
| 0:50.3 | When we first met over two decades ago, I was ashamed to say I was a poet. |
| 0:55.2 | Based on a poem of mine that our mutual friend, |
| 0:57.8 | Alan Howard, had shown him, |
| 0:59.8 | Michael invited me to dinner. |
| 1:02.2 | I was extremely nervous. |
| 1:04.4 | What would I say? |
| 1:06.2 | We ended up talking all night about Kafka, Plato, and Kabbalah. |
| 1:14.5 | From then on, we went to breakfast each weekend, |
| 1:18.0 | and Michael basically taught me how and what to read. |
| 1:21.5 | He has been the most significant influence on my writing. |
... |
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