G: That's true and you're insulated
from that in a city. In the city you're usually
with your own group of friends who are interested
mainly in the arts. B: Right. And those conversations
often deal mostly with politics and poetry--but I
someArial wonder if their work has failed to
include some of the subject matter were forced to
deal with in these smaller settings? G: Yes--the direct exploitation of the
environment by say a company like Alcan, and you
happen to know people who are in the
environmentalist movement who are opposing
that--and people in the native villages. In
Vancouver that simply is an item of the business
page of The
Sun which you may
not even read the details of. B: Those items are abstract.
G: Exactly. B: Do you think poetry brings a
judgement to these issues as part of its
function? G: Does poetry have any social and
political function? Poetry has a function and you
can't go any further than saying that it has an
effect upon the person who reads it--that is, a
person can be affected by a poem. I know that
Harvey Chometsky was affected by some of my
poems--he told me he was and I have been affected
by poems of other people: Margaret Avison, Blake.
Beyond that? I don't think it goes beyond that. It
has an effect. There is a kind of interanimation;
that's a word of John Donne's--there's a word like
that where 2 souls meet. Walter Benjamin said that
reading is like telepathy--you are encountering
another person's thoughts. B: Over the last 20 years you've have
had some interesting connections with writers. I
think I know the writers you feel connected
with. G: Well, you, to start. I still feel
connected with the group of us that were in
The
Body in 1979, I
guess that was. So with you, David Phillips, Ken
Belford, Pierre Coupey, Hope Anderson, Sharon
Thesen, and going back even before that, Scott
Watson, Stan Persky, Brian Fawcett, George
Bowering--this is the group of writers I've been
connected with in B.C. Stan recently said to me, "I
can't understand why there is not more attention
paid to your work". So I thought, he means Toronto
[laugh]--and it's true, but then again there are
not many people who pay attention to my work in
Denver or St. Louis and I wouldn't expect it. So
it's just this accident of Toronto. Now I'm not
saying that I wouldn't want people in T.O. to be
interested in my work , but I think it's nothing
that I would expect as a matter of course, whereas
I'm happy to be recognized in British Columbia as I
was in the 60's, that very brief moment with the
Beat Generation when there were about 20 or 30 of
us around San Francisco. B: Sure. You were in a couple of major
anthologies as an American writer.(reference to
The New Writing in
the U.S.A., edited
by Creeley and Allen, and Open Poetry, edited by George Quasha). Part of
my motive for doing this interview (these
interviews with you, David Phillips and Ken
Belford) is that I feel that some very important
writers and their
instance was president of the Socred
Party; we've had a few beers together over the
years. He's also owns a fairly large mill and was
involved, or blew the whistle on a major lumber
grading scam that involved major politics and
economics. So I had the privilege to be involved in
the details of a major case ...
