On Being with Krista Tippett

Yeah, well, Sholem suggested that the Zohar was a novel.

I think, yeah, I titled my last book, I'm God, You're Not.

And he gave it to me and I ran home and tried to read it and at about 10 o'clock I fell asleep because it's really tough, serious, heavy Jewish history. But it's extraordinary.

And he gave it to me and I ran home and tried to read it and at about 10 o'clock I fell asleep because it's really tough, serious, heavy Jewish history. But it's extraordinary. And what Sholem did in that book was that he brought the Jewish mystical tradition to the English reading public.

You won the Pulitzer for Stag's Leap, which was about the end of your marriage.

I wrote an awful lot of poems in the maybe four years in which this book was written, most of them in the first year.

Known to be Left. If I pass a mirror, I turn away. I do not want to look at her and she does not want to be seen.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Stag's Leap about walking through the end of a marriage

I wrote an awful lot of poems in the maybe four years in which this book was written, most of them in the first year.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2012 collection Stag's Leap, which she wrote over a period of several years through the end of her long marriage.

Your newest book, your 2016 book is Odes and this is the one that has lots of words in it that we can't say on public radio

It includes the ode to the hymen, ode to the clitoris, ode to the penis, ode to the condom, ode to the tampon, lots of others.

I'm not going to ask you to read the ode to the penis because most of it would get, but I'm going to read a little bit of it because it's fabulous.

I have realized that this book came about as a book of odes. I was traveling with my then boyfriend and a book of Neruda's just about fell off a shelf in an old used bookstore, and it fell on him.

Her most recent book, Odes, pays homage to aspects of the human body and experience that get bleeped out on public radio to follow FCC rules, including ode to the clicks, ode to the and ode to the tampon.

Your newest book, your 2016 book is Odes, and this is the one that has lots of words in it that we can't say on public radio, and I'm going to say a few of them right here, and we have to, we'll probably have to cut it out. It includes the ode to the hymen, ode to the clitoris, ode to the penis, ode to the condom, ode to the tampon, lots of others, ode of withered cleavage, celibates, ode to balls.

And I pulled out a few... I wonder if you might want to read the Unmatching Legs, Ode? Because I think that also is part of the story of where you are and with your dancing and just that piece of drama in your life right now as your life is progressing.

I have realized that this book came about as a book of odes. I was traveling with my then boyfriend, and a book of Neruda's just about fell off a shelf in an old used bookstore. And it fell on him, and he said, here are poems. This is a book of poems.

So in this book as well, because it's the dead and the living, and I think you pick up on something that also runs all the way through your work, which is the love that we have for our children and the intimacy, that particular intimacy is there.

And when I look at The Dead and the Living, which I think was one of the books that made your name as a poet,

Exclusive for my daughter. I lie on the beach watching you as you lie on the beach, memorizing you against the time when you will not be with me.

So this book came out in 84. So the poem would have been written maybe two years before then. So maybe 10 years old, 12 years old.

Exclusive for my daughter. I lie on the beach watching you as you lie on the beach, memorizing you against the time when you will not be with me. Your empurpled lips swollen in the sun and smooth as the inner lips of a shell. Your biscuit gold skin glazed and faintly pitted like the surface of a biscuit. The serious knotted twine of your hair. I have loved you instead of anyone else, loved you as a way of loving no one else. Every separate grain of your body building the god as you were built within me, a sealed world. What if from your lips I had learned the love of other lips? From your starred gummed lashes, the love of other lashes. From your shut quivering eyes, the love of other eyes. From your body, the bodies. From your life, the lives. Today I see it is there to be learned from you to love what I do not own.

in this book as well, because it's the dead and the living, and I think you pick up on something that also runs all the way through your work, which is the love that we have for our children, and the intimacy, that particular intimacy is there.

My novel Open City begins, and so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.

She's written a magnificent first book, Figuring.

Her new book just out this week is titled Figuring.