Alexander Stuart

Screengrab of KCRW's Bookworm webpage I only caught the last few minutes of this week's Bookworm on Los Angeles' outstanding public radio station KCRW , but they were quite exceptional. Bookworm presenter Michael Silverblatt was interviewing America's octogenarian Poet Laureate, W S Merwin , and asked Merwin what made him accept the position of laureate - a post Merwin most likely would not have been offered in the 1960s, when he was a vocal anti-Vietnam War poet. Merwin replied that part of the terms he established for accepting the position was that there would be a theme to "string the whole thing along" - and that theme would be, "the human imagination." The next five minutes, which I listened to as I drove, were absolutely mesmerizing: a highly eloquent and entrancing meditation on the human race. "The human imagination," Merwin said, "I think is the one really distinctive thing that humanity has - not intelligence o...