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, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Ron Kirchie, who is a poet who has been living for as long as I've known him in Pasadena.

I've known his work since I arrived in

Los Angeles 20 years ago. Now, it's a kind of marvelous thing. The strangest thing has happened.

Billy Collins has become the nation's poet laureate. He used to be seen hanging around the poetry workshops in Los Angeles in those days

at Beyond Baroque and other places. And it is no small coincidence that Ron Kirchie is one of

Billy Collins' favorite poets. In fact, he includes three of Kirchie's poems so far in his poetry 180, poems to be read one a day over the PA system in public schools.

And it's because they're fun.

And there was all of this poetry happening in Los Angeles that I didn't know how to take seriously or unsuriously because it was so different from what I had been taught was poetry. That is to say, something I couldn't understand, something as difficult as opera, something that you had to acquire a taste for. And there was nothing that was required to read a Ron Kirchie poem. I thought that rather than ask him,

why are your poem so easy to read and so much fun,

I would let him begin with a rare, long, autobiographical poem

called Why I Believe in God, Ron Kirchie.

I'd failed the examination allowing me to bypass the MA and go straight for a

PhD. So I was obliged to let my friends forge ahead reading, if possible, longer and fatter books than before,

while I worked on something by the Pearl Poet for my thesis. My advisor was Mrs. Hamilton, a world-class

medievalist and the most patient lady in the world. Every week I'd bring her a few pages of

translation. She would smile and correct everything, and with her help, I finished. Now, an Oral's

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