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 Mike Silverblatt, and this is

Bookworm, KCRW's literary show. Today we're going to be talking about a new

anthology of poems called Under 35, the New Generation of American Poets. The anthology was published by Doubleday under their anchor book in print.

It's available in paperback.

And it was edited by Nicholas Christopher.

With me in the studio are two poets, two L.A. poets who appear in that anthology,

David Trinidad and Jack Skelly.

And we have the editor, Nicholas Christopher, who just this past year published his third

book of poetry called Desperate Characters, which contains in it a kind of Chandler-L.A. poem,

a novel in poetry called Desperate Characters.

Nicholas, are you there?

Yes.

Nicholas is talking to us from New York.

Why under 35?

Well, I thought it was a good, for very practical reasons, the Moro anthology of younger American poets published some years ago,

began with poets born in 1940 and ended with poets born around the Korean War.

And I was one of the younger contributors to that.

And it seemed to me there was a huge number of people of real younger poets at this point

who were out there who weren't included in that book or in any others.

...