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body of work, or David
Phillips' body of work, but I don't have any sense
of my own. I am it in a way--I'm too much in it to
see it, so I go by what other people tell me. If
other people tell me that--well, no one ever talks
to you about your work, I mean other people tell me
about a particular poem ... George Bowering once
said to me what really makes him happy is if
someone will point out to him something about a
poem that he wrote that only he knew what's in
there--a little secret message in the poem, and
someArial it'll get across to someone--someone will
say, "I saw that." I like it when someone says,
"well, what I like was ..." Going back to
Mountains &
Air which I still
think is such a good poem, is that Harvey Chometsky
and Brian DeBeck both had these sort of astonished
reactions to parts of the poem which were--I
remember Brian saying"this is about nothing!"
[laughter]. That's a good point . This whole poem
is about nothing, and that's exactly what I was
feeling--the emotional state was a state of that
absolute nothing was going on. So I like
that. B: DeBeck had a real understanding of
the poem. G: But mostly it's just my own
approval of the poem when I say, "ok, that poem is
finished," and usually what I mean is I can't do
anything more with it. It is a poem and not one of
the things balled up and thrown into the waste
basket; in fact, I no longer ball these things up.
I just throw them into the waste basket without
balling them up [laugh]. But it is a poem if there
is no more I can do with it. One of the sources of
my method in writing poems is from the abstract
expressionist painters. So I relate very much to
that. I knew a number of them in New York in the
60's and that's what I picked up from going to New
York was not so much the poetry as the way the
painters would work. They would get a canvas and
they would just do anything to it. Like Jasper
Johns says, "do something to it and if that doesn't
work, do something else to it." One of the
analogies that I have is, I'm working on poems
there in my studio, the studio is the folder, and I
go back to the studio to see how much paint has
fallen off, by which I mean, how much language when
I look at it after a month, I think, "oh, that's a
lot of bullshit ." B: I went to a friend's studio and one
of the painters sharing it with him had a huge
wall-- sized painting. He was painting over a
painting--a painting that he'd put on display. I
thought, why would he do that? One reason is that
he was saving money by not buying a new canvas, and
the other thing was that he didn't, or no longer
liked it. The first version wasn't so precious
after all. G: Well one thing I like about the
computer--I don't like computers, but one thing I
do like about it is that if you don't like
something you can just touch a key and it's gone.
You can destroy things completely so you don't even
have any drafts left. That I like, but I don't want
to talk about computers. B: Readership is interesting. There's
a lawyer in town who gave me the same kind of
surprising insight and response response that Brian
DeBeck gave to you--the least likely person I
thought would pick up the poem--and says hey, "this
is good". Do you think that the more sophisticated
the reader, the greater or more accurate the
response? G: Well I depend on Stan Persky--the
one person I will always show a new poem to. This
is again, kind of a tradition which I got from
Spicer. Spicer could always depend on Robin Blaser
and even when Spicer and Blaser were feuding and
not speaking to each other, Spicer would have some
new poems, and he'd go up & there'd be a truce
and show the poems to Robin, and this is the one
person you could trust as much as your own
judgement without the partiality that's inevitable
in your own judgement--and Persky does that for
me.
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