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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

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

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

Today, it's my real privilege to be talking to Rita Dove. Do I have to say that she's a Pulitzer Prize winner? Well, I will,

and that she has been the U.S. Poet Laureate. She's the only poet to be honored with both the National

Humanities Medal and the National Medal of the Arts.

She was awarded with the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her book is called Playlist for the Apocalypse.

As soon as we opened the book, my friend and colleague, Sean Sullivan, said, what a great title.

Rita Dove, can you tell me where that title came from for you?

Michael, first of all, it's so great to be here on the program and talking with you again.

I, that title came late in the process of writing, of putting together this book, but it was with

me all along. And that's because every time I would go out to give a reading, this is pre-pandemic

times, of course, I would try to put together a list of poems to read that would take the audience

on a journey, that they could, it had a trajectory. And I called these lists, playlists, much like we do with music.

And so when I was putting, when this book began to come together, let's put it that way,

because I didn't really consciously put it together, the poems found each other, I realized that it was, in fact, a playlist for the times that we were living through.

So that's where the title came from.

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