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

Today, it gives me great pleasure to have us my guest, Rita Dove, whose most recent book

is Sonata Moolotica, and she has been with us before with American Smooth.

She's a former American Poet Laureate, Poetser Prize winner.

Her previous books include On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Mother Love, the Poetzer-winning Thomas

and Bula.

She's written novels, and now she's written a book-length poem made of shorter poems.

In fact, it's musical in its orientation.

It's a poem in five movements, but more than that, it contains a short play and prologues and epilogues.

And it makes me think that the piece required a lot of organization to get its diversity, yes?

That's absolutely true.

And organization is not my strong point, so it was daunting going into it.

It required both being messy in terms of organization and being absolutely clear in terms

of chronology, in terms of research,

and how much to filter in and out of the poems?

It's to some extent a narrative poem, a historical narrative, but it has lyric sections in it,

and dramatic ones, literally dialogue sections.

...