Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read. From read from kr w Santa Monica I'm Michael

Silverblatt and this is bookworm today I'm very honored to have as my guest

Richard Howard one of the real and primary citizens of the Republic of

Letters two collections in inner voices of his selected

poems from 1963 to 2003, and paper trail of his selected prose from 1965 to 2003, have been

published by Farah Strauss and Giroux.

There's to be a new book coming out from Turtle Point Press called The Silent Treatment,

Silent Treatment, which follows his book Talking Cures,

and recently attended the Los Angeles Times Book Festival and received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry.

There is so much to talk to Richard Howard about. His poems are rich with the drama of artistic

interceptions with passion and history. His essays cover almost all of modern American

poetry, most famously and alone with America. If you have read any French literature,

you have encountered his skills as a translator of Gide, of Proust, of Breton,

so many books, not to mention the bulk of the early work of Roland Bart, so that encountering his

essays is encountering a mind replete with, but not overly influenced by all of the developments in critical theory that have transfigured the university and, you know, a full body of work. Now, I wanted to begin. One of your essays talks about,

but discreetly avoids the influence of Henry James on modern American poetry, avoiding his influence on you.

But it seems to me that the perfection of that Jamesian sentence that insists that you

board it the way you would at train so that whatever is happening cannot be happened outside of the moment-by-moment perceptions

...