KB: Well if we had lifestyles that were simpler we could probably get there. No more wives and children and all of that - approximate it or parallel it somehow. I thought of setting out to do that for a year or two sometime, just to take it kind of easy and let the poems happen again ... quite an influence from Tish magazine I think, but at the same time I didn't feel ... they had us interested but I didn't feel compatible. BM: Not part of their agenda if that's the word for it. They used to say to writers, "gee we think these are great poems, however, they're not the kind we want to publish" - a kind of dogmatism which...is ok in one way. They were working out their own poetics and prosody. KB: Oh it was fine. I chose not to be included in Tish. I think I could have - I don't recall every having sent anything to them. I don't know if I was ever published in it or not. I'm not sure but at the time even I consciously chose to go another way because I didn't seem to feel too compatible with it. It seemed closed even though everyone it seemed to me, publishing in it, were advocating an openness in language in an open kind of poem that in fact seemed to me to be kind of closed - not necessarily in the poems, but something else in addition to the poems seemed to close it off. BM: Some of the Tish work was a kind of incidental projective lyric verse that didn't last - experimental and disposable stuff in a way. Your poems always seemed to me to move toward some maybe " old fashioned " notions of the poem having a meaning, an emotion driving it, a passion working away, the poem as a dramatic event. KB: What matters to me is my sense of how my writing and how my beliefs and passions and content is fitting with the world that I live in so that its useful to me - it's a way of connecting me to this earth and that has meaning to me, and it has purpose and I have community and I have things that matter to me and even then I learned for myself that while on the one hand I liked and respected a lot of that kind of poetry, I didn't really feel it had anything in it for me and it didn't, couldn't answer the needs that I had. Because of my politics which were on the left and labour- related and somewhat because of that I felt that poems that didn't have - poems that couldn't be not necessarily read to people you lived with, or down the hall from, but a poet should be able to be in the neighbourhood and to be a poet and to have people know that he or she wrote poetry, and that to write in a way that had no or little social meaning - if those people in the neighbourhood were to read that poem they would have some kind of neighbourhood consciousness that even if they didn't like or understand the poem, at least they could sense that this occurred in this culture and in this area- and so it seemed to me that language that was written that didn't have that in it was politically bourgeois even though it was supposed to not be that because it seemed to me that it was insular, that it was irresponsible and took everything further south, and it was akin to moving back to the land with lots of tools and equipment and saying ,"well I'm going to survive this world out here on my 5 acre plot of land while the rest of the world goes to hell" and which is an antisocial attitude, and I think that's' whet really bothered me about so many people who were writing that stuff and I still see them as anti social. BM: David Phillips and I were talking about the Talon days and your book Fireweed, published in the late 60's. Jim Brown and David Robinson were the editors. KB: I don't remember how I first ran into Jim Brown or David Robinson. I think they were living on Broadway. David Robinson was living, I think, in a place with no furniture - just a place that was warm and it was dry and it had running water and a bathroom. BM: He lived at his parents house for quite a period on the UBC campus. He used the garage for collating, publishing, storing books. KB: I remember going out there to see him at his home. I think I heard of him through writers I knew. At this time I was now hanging around the University of B.C. writers. BM: How did that come about? KB: Let me see. I think it was Dorothy Livesay actually who got me up there. I think I sent some manuscripts out to her. I was living downtown on Hastings on the corner of where Eatons was, in