language poetry, and as I was saying earlier I do not understand what that activity is all about and it's again my ... I no longer have this--I no longer think it's some moral battle I'm fighting. I simply don't understand it. I don't fault them for doing it except in a way both Brian Fawcett and I were talking about this--I kind of have a resentment or a disappointment that so many of these--the very bright and talented and sensitive poets in the language poetry movement didn't deal in some realistic discursive way with the events that are changing people's lives and consciousness in the 1980's, but instead went after what Fawcett calls, quite rightly, virtuosity. But even that feeling--I don't fault them for it. I mean why should I say that Jeff Derksen or Dorothy Trujillo Lusk or Peter Culley should do something with their lives and their minds other than what they're doing (laugh). Only, oh I wish I understood it, I wish I understood what the principle is by which they get from one word to another. B: And hoping that the explanation of that wouldn't be more difficult than the poem itself [laugh] G: Well, yes, I read articles about Derrida. I just read recently an article by the writer Kate Soper in the New York Review about deconstruction and about the metaphysical justification for Derrida's theory of differance. I just bring that up to indicate that I'm able to understand things at that level. So why is it that I have never found any comprehensible explanation of language poetry? I just don't know how to understand language poetry, but every so often I read something like Dan Farrell's review of Jeff Derksen's book in the Frontmagazine that suggests that I'm not--that no one is intended to understand it--that my expectation should not be understanding it, but rather participating with Jeff Derksen in the production of the poem, and on an abstract level I understand what that means--I understand what the words participate in the production of the poem "means", but I don't know what it is I should do with my mind to participate in the production of one of those poems and how will I get from this word to that? Something's missing. B: So your experience of reading and thinking has been disrupted by a form or an approach. G: That's right ... disruptive, that's true and if it's intended to be disruptive that's fine. I admit to being disrupted. Disrupt. That's what Whitman would say. B: When a poem does that to you is it almost the opposite of what T.S. Eliot would do? G: Well, Eliot, or Ashbery or any of the other poets. I read Ashbery because there is, I'm sure that's the word--interanimation of minds going on so that it is a kind of telepathy like Benjamin says--that I can feel Ashbery's mind dealing with this human situation we're in and at the same time dealing with New York and art and landscape and other features of our beautiful world. Then, of course, there are other poets who want to make us squirm and scream with horror like Sharon Olds. She has a poem about her father dying of cancer that is so horrifying that it almost ... well, you wonder at--but then if it's necessary for her to do that, it's necessary for me to read it. It's in an anthology. A lot of university students are reading it. It's necessary for them to read that and know. And it's funny that there would be no question raised if this were in a novel, say,but the fact that this particular piece of horrific description of a man's agony is put in lines as a poem, it's framed in a way and I want to question the reason for the framing, but I don't question it. B: I'm not quite clear about what you're saying. How does her poem relate to Nowlan's poem about the moose?