Gil Roth, over at the VIRTUAL MEMORIES podcast, recently interviewed the Author, Essayist and Poet, J. D. McClatchy at his home in Connecticut. Their conversation not only revolves around his amazing career but also covers a ton of interesting literary ground as well.
Stuff like: Adapting a novel (The Leopard) to opera, having his life changed by a course with Harold Bloom, collecting letters from the likes of Proust and Housman, and marrying Chip Kidd! We also get into his friendship with James Merrill, pop culture’s triumph over high culture, his genetic inability to read comics, why he loathed Ezra Pound as a person and as an artist, how sexual politics has replaced social politics, the experience of teaching the first gay literature course at Yale in 1978 (and getting dropped from the university because of it), how a serious poet writes for the dead, not the living, and more!