B: I think Creeley would claim that he is responsible for writing the poem--he generates the language. However, if you're going to talk about the ego, super ego, or the unconscious as sources for poetry, then you might just as well talk about Martians. G: The source is outside. That's what Blaser titled that essay: "The Practice of Outside". Spicer's word was that it always comes from "outside" B: Did you connect with these ideas and teachings in terms of your own writing? G: I was influenced by Spicer's poetry, by Creeley and I was influenced by Zukofsky and all of these I think were not particularly good influences on me ; they sort of narrowed my poetry down, made it more tight but then again I was--Spicer noticed this when I wrote Pony Express Riders he said," well you're finding out"--like when I wroteFlowers that was just juvenilia, unexamined undisciplined exploitation of feeling and lyricism and pain and emotion, and then when I started trying to create a poem out of language in poems like Pony Express Riders, I was influenced by people who were doing very small poems like Creeley and poems of Creeley wit and Spicer's poems and Zukofsky's--but I don't think these were particularly good influences on me. The influence that I picked up at that time that really did, that was crucial for me was Charles Olson--the use of history in the poem. B. I can see all of these influences in your work. This morning reading poems " after Creeley" shows that you mastered that short line and then of course in the new work,San Francisco's Gone, I can see history--personal family history. G: Well, the biggest influence on my poetry all the way back is T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot of Prufrock and the Waste Land. B: That's interesting, because T.S. Eliot was not well accepted in certain circles of modern American poetics. G: That's right, ya. It was that ironic stance in Eliot's poems that I find deeply influenced my poems for good or for bad. I got this sense of you could use history in a poem from Olson--I also got that at the same time from Robert Lowell--his book Life Studiesand those 3, Eliot, Olson, Lowell seem to be the people who affected me the most and they all go back to Boston. B: Absolutely. Eliot's large brick family summer home in Gloucester and Lowell of course lived in Boston, and I think they were all connected with Harvard. G: I don't think Olson was but it's just such a coincidence all of those 3 influences, in a way, going back to Boston. My father's father's father may have come from Boston. So may have my father's mother's father come through Boston from Ireland, but I sense that there is some connection back there with Boston or with New York. B: It's funny you mention Eliot because he's the first poet I heard on CBC, a recording of him reading, when I was 15 years old and starting to write. I was dumbfounded. I didn't understand the poem, but I heard the music and I guess--he was reading an iambic line of sorts. His rhythm carried a tone of great seriousness and drama and I loved it. Anything else on the radio in those days in Calgary, would have been country and western music. G: It's that kind of ironic detachment that I picked up that "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be."