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B: I think Creeley would claim that he is
responsible for writing the poem--he generates the
language. However, if you're going to talk about
the ego, super ego, or the unconscious as sources
for poetry, then you might just as well talk about
Martians.
G: The source is outside. That's what
Blaser titled that essay: "The Practice of
Outside". Spicer's word was that it always comes
from "outside"
B: Did you connect with these ideas and
teachings in terms of your own writing?
G: I was influenced by Spicer's poetry,
by Creeley and I was influenced by Zukofsky and all
of these I think were not particularly good
influences on me ; they sort of narrowed my poetry
down, made it more tight but then again I
was--Spicer noticed this when I wrote
Pony Express
Riders he said," well
you're finding out"--like when I wrote Flowers
that was just
juvenilia, unexamined undisciplined exploitation of
feeling and lyricism and pain and emotion, and then
when I started trying to create a poem out of
language in poems like Pony Express Riders, I was influenced by people who were
doing very small poems like Creeley and poems of
Creeley wit and Spicer's poems and Zukofsky's--but
I don't think these were particularly good
influences on me. The influence that I picked up at
that time that really did, that was crucial for me
was Charles Olson--the use of history in the
poem.
B. I can see all of these influences in
your work. This morning reading poems " after
Creeley" shows that you mastered that short line
and then of course in the new work,San Francisco's Gone, I can see history--personal family
history.
G: Well, the biggest influence on my
poetry all the way back is T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot
of Prufrock
and the Waste
Land.
B: That's interesting, because T.S.
Eliot was not well accepted in certain circles of
modern American poetics.
G: That's right, ya. It was that ironic
stance in Eliot's poems that I find deeply
influenced my poems for good or for bad. I got this
sense of you could use history in a poem from
Olson--I also got that at the same time from Robert
Lowell--his book Life
Studies and those 3, Eliot, Olson, Lowell seem
to be the people who affected me the most and they
all go back to Boston.
B: Absolutely. Eliot's large brick
family summer home in Gloucester and Lowell of
course lived in Boston, and I think they were all
connected with Harvard.
G: I don't think Olson was but it's just
such a coincidence all of those 3 influences, in a
way, going back to Boston. My father's father's
father may have come from Boston. So may have my
father's mother's father come through Boston from
Ireland, but I sense that there is some connection
back there with Boston or with New York.
B: It's funny you mention Eliot because
he's the first poet I heard on CBC, a recording of
him reading, when I was 15 years old and starting
to write. I was dumbfounded. I didn't understand
the poem, but I heard the music and I guess--he was
reading an iambic line of sorts. His rhythm carried
a tone of great seriousness and drama and I loved
it. Anything else on the radio in those days in
Calgary, would have been country and western
music.
G: It's that kind of ironic detachment
that I picked up that "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor
was meant to be."
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