right point in the poem. Gary: I sent this manuscript to Keith Harrison at Malaspina College, (a Vancouver writer who taught at Dawson in Montreal a few years ago). And Keith said he'd just been to see Breaking the Waves. It's a movie about a series of disasters off the coast of Scotland. A woman falls in love with somebody who works on the oil rigs, and he goes out to the oil rigs and gets wrecked, then comes back and their lives just go down rung after rung, disaster after disaster. But it's relieved by black comedy. And he said that he thought the Orkney poems were sort of the reverse of that. There is this light humorous touch, then you're legs get cut away with something ghastly happening. I hadn't intended it this way, but that poem is an example of that kind of thing. Barry: I'm curious to see it in printed form. You've got the World War working away, and research that I imagine is quite extensive, subs sneaking in, and that kind of thing. I'd never heard of that before; in fact, I've never thought of the Orkneys as a place with this kind of history, thousands of years of activity. You seem to have generated larger subjects than other Canadians who do this kind of travelling such as Barbour, Scobie, Frank Davey, Pat Lane. They tend to work out of a more lyric journal mode. They don't include, or they exclude, or don't take much from the outside in terms of research. Gary: Well Pat has done that in his Machu Picchu poem and in his South American stuff. The historical elements began to intrude. The thing that I've been enjoying about the Orkney sequence is that it began just as a kind of joke. A student of mine was trying to write a poem--his life's history--in iambic pentameter. And the lines were coming down; he was using only nouns as rhyming words (laugh), and they were coming down like bricks at then end of every line. I said, "William, you've got to learn to use verbs and adjectives and enjamb and run on your lines so the rhyme is almost imperceptible except subliminally." I said, "I'll show you how it's done" so ( laugh) I went home and thought, shit, what have I put my foot in now--and so I ended up writing this poem. I looked in my Orkney note book and there was this one line from the Orkneys called "you don't expect them so far north these tender cabbage." So, "you don't expect them so far north" became the first line and I did this ABBA poem, and dumped in all of the Orkney history that I could remember, and took it back and showed William. He was absolutely stunned because he'd come up from the States having fought a life-long battle for formalism and probably thought none of us free-versers could write a real poem. And I cranked one out in an hour at home that he thought was better than anything he'd seen for years. And so anyway, it began in a totally kind of whimsical way, but the poems just wouldn't stop coming, and everywhere I went I met people with stories. Barry: What is your time span for writing a long poem?