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, you're listening to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is William H. Gass.

We are recording this program in a hall at the Lannin Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the sounds you may hear

during the interview are the sounds of people who have chosen to be here out of their admiration

for William Gas. One of the things I've always wanted to talk with Gas about,

who seems to me to be our greatest living writer of prose in America,

there has been inadequate talk about the content of his work,

but I think still more inadequate talk about the content of his work, but I think still more inadequate talk about its influences

and the way in which it developed as a literary style.

In the last several years, Gass has been writing essays on the poet, oh, with so many names,

Rainer Maria Rilke, but who began with the name Renee, sometimes called by his mother, Sophia,

when he was good.

Rilke was dressed as a girl when he was a child, and as a good girl, he was Sophia.

And the forging of an identity as a poet seems to have depended upon his casting off identities put onto him,

almost creating them as ghosts, writing elegies for versions of himself

that were no longer supportable to him.

Gas, whose work on metaphor and image is very profound, seems to trace in Rilke a movement that takes a trajectory from voice to groove, the groove on a record,

...