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American poet WD Snodgrass won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for his first collection of poetry, "Hearts Needle". His controversial fifth anthology "The Führer Bunker" received heavy criticism but in recent years their importance has been recognised. [Listener: William B. Patrick]

TRANSCRIPT: I feel it's my… it's my major effort. I worked at it for 35 years. I read all those awful books, all those lying books. And sometimes, when I go back to it now and again, I think: Hey, this is pretty good, you know? And I'm… and I'm surprised because, you know, I tend to believe what other people tell me about it. They say it's rotten. I think well, you know, you never know for 75 years whether it is or not. Maybe they're right. But whe… then I go back and I… as a matter of fact, there… there… it's been 23 years since that performance. That was 1981. Some former students of Wynn Handman's are putting together a new one now, you know. And it is funny because my reputation is beginning to come back now that I don't need it so badly; I'm retired. I… I don't really need a career. I can… can live on my retirement fairly well. But… and every now and then, young kids will come up to me and say: 'Hey, I've been reading 'The Führer Bunker', and that's my favorite of your… of your work'. You know, I kiss them and give them… give them every cent I've got. I really… Jesus, have they got nerve. I… I don't usually read them in… in… when I give readings just because I don't want all this controversy, I… I just get sick of it.

You know, it's really funny. I… I gave a reading once at Philadelphia for Phil Berg. Or, Phil… Steve Berg, you know, who… who edits The 'American Poetry Review' and who has always been a supporter of… of mine. He's a lovely guy. He said… he had me do a reading. And I did one or two poems out of the 'Bunker'. The one that I almost always read is the Eva Braun poem where she sings 'Tea for Two'. And then I think I did one other. A man got up at the back of the auditorium and said, 'How dare you glorify these monsters.' My jaw dropped down to here. I thought… I mean, I just… I thought, glorify? I mean, these poems say such… say worse things about them than any historian has ever said. Fortunately, I didn't… Steve was there, and he sort of set his hand on… on my arm and said: 'Just wait'. The audience… the rest of the audience sort of rose up and answered this, and answered it very well. I didn't have to say a word. The very next day, I got a letter from that same man repeating all those accusations except that he had changed 'glorify' to 'humanize'. You've humanized them. Well, I wrote back to him and said, 'You know, one of the things that we… that… that we really basically accuse the Germans about is that they claimed that the Jews were not human. I don't think we ought to imitate their manners… by saying that whoever we see as our enemy was not human.'

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