that's just one of the many tricks because I really do think you do have to--and I found I have to trick myself, trick my mind--ultimately write the poem despite myself. B: Exactly. I hear what you're saying. G: Despite my knowledge, despite my intention, despite my emotions. you've got to somehow--this is really something I guess I learned and inherited form Spicer--how to get somehow all of that stuff out of the way even if what comes through the finished poem does use a lot of personal stuff... B: Going to the dictionary would break up ... well, there's nothing worse for the poem and writing than when you have that self conscious feeling--"I'm writing a poem." G: Ya right. It's like living a life--it gets to that level of generality. Many years ago I would have said, "oh I'm writing a poem! I'm being creative!" But now I would no longer say that anymore than I would reflect upon "I'm living a life." What else is new? B: Ya, right [laughter] (pause) B: Bob Creeley is such a clear light. G: Creeley I think is the one American poet; of course Creeley is great--no question about it. Creeley is among all of us. I think he and Al Purdy perhaps are the--I want to say the men, but the one poet to me that is most important is John Ashbery. Al Purdy has the common touch. Al Purdy is the one poet, and the other one is the late Alden Nowlan. You can read a poem of theirs to anyone who has never heard a poem before or perhaps dislikes poetry or thinks that he or she dislikes poetry and they'll immediately react. I don't know what it is--there's very very few poets like that. Those are the only 2 I can think of . I can't think of any American poets like that. It's not true of Creeley. I don't think it would be true of Olson or Duncan. It's only true of those 2 men: Alden Nowlan and Al Purdy. It's the common touch. B: Their ability to tell a story, the timing of the humour. G: A kind of having the same receptitivity as the reader--being like the reader. Purdy and Nowlan can get across to insensitive people. B: When you think of Nowlan's poem about the moose--there is no mistaking the horror and cruelty of the experience he describes. Who else but the poet can capture that ? G: Yes, Nowlan has a great sense of human meanness and cruelty in some of his poems. B: I hope poetry doesn't lose that sense of human experience and emotion in its progress toward wherever it is going. G: Well, again, the variety and individuality of poetry I guess for 2 reasons: 1) is that as one gets older one has a more complex view of the world, and then 2) is that the world is becoming more complex because the activity of poetry is not set apart from other things as it used to be--so it all gets lost and so where it's going immediately my answer to that would be who do I know? What young poets do I know and I find it very hard to think of very many poets younger than myself. I don't know whether--maybe it's changing into something else. I have no idea what's happening with poets... the young people are doing