Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special dream.

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 Patchett,

whose most recent book, it comes from Coffee House Press,

is You Never Know.

Also, there's a nice pamphlet from Cous edition, CUZ, called Poems I Guess I Wrote.

And he is the author as well.

I'm not going to name all of these, but from the beginning there was great balls of fire

and Tussure Lamour,

several books that were published by Z-Press, like Tulsa Kid.

More recently, The Big Something and new and selected poems that came from a coffee house.

The poems are beautiful, casual, formal in some strange ways, sudden, immediate.

Let's begin by hearing one.

Do you have any favorite you want to hear?

Oh, I would like to hear the Bluebird poem.

Bluebird.

You can't expect the milk to be delivered to your house by a bluebird

from the picture book you looked at at the age of four.

He's much older now.

Can't carry those bottles neath his wing.

...