BM: Your recent writing is still much concerned with the things I see in your earlier writing. If you go back to Fireweed, at feast in my mind, there are the references to - not poetry about being in the woods, - that would be too simple, it's not nature poetry but it's poetry that gets its energy and resonance from being engaged in the woods and the mountains and the ecological concerns if we can call them that. Now, maybe with the latest work, Holding Land, those concerns are more articulate for you. KB: A real breakthrough for me. I felt good about it. I think it was ok at the time. I felt good about it because I was finally saying things that I just wanted to say that I was withholding, and it fully represented a real break through for me on a personal level - finally being myself, being very clear about what I was having to say and what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. BM: Then extending from that book is the last group of poems that you wrote for the Caitlin anthology Four Realities edited by Don Precosky - which from your experience here in Blackwater, deals with in a very current way what's happening to this landscape. There's a lot of traffic coming through here. Those poems are expressing the fear that you're involved in a great change. The values and the anger, expressed in some of the poems go beyond the Lyric and the pastoral. The work embraces activity on various levels; for instance, the bureaucracies' relationship to land. That's not easy to write about without getting angry. KB: It was very difficult for me to write about. A lot of it, as a matter of fact, was difficult to write about and I think part of it is that, that I want to write about those things that make me most - that I'm most uncomfortable about - subjects that are most frightening or that I'm most confused about and that I need in the poem to find some way out of a double bind - some way out that allows me to leave it behind and maybe to put an issue to rest. Resource development, whatever the hell that is and the anger that our culture seems to feel about the land as just a place to vacuum energy from for new homes and new money. - it's something that most poets don't really write about . I wonder why they don't. BM: They maybe don't see it. The further you are away from places like this the harder it is to see those forces. I was surprised 3 days ago to see those planes arrive un announced. KB: A helicopter and a 206. BM: That gave me a clearer idea about your last group of poems - how a place like Blackwater might look isolated when you look at it on a map, but when you actually come up and see, that without any notice, bureaucrats on every level drop in to either make a demand, or make a query. They want something. People in the city might think about land claims but here we actually see the process - the urgency of it, these people looking at maps and territories. What you are seeing and expressing is a big change. You seem right in the middle of it. KB: Ya. Right in the middle. Smack dab in the middle. We think of it not as a - it's not really land claims, it's a first nations treaty and unfortunately there are about, it looks like about 7 different machines at work that seem to have an idea of what this treaty will amount to. There's the federal government, there's the native government, there is the provincial government, there's the enforcement people then there are the resource people, and there are people like myself that work in renewable or what we call non-consumptive resource. But I'm not just sure how that ties into the writing right now except that I know that very few writers want to write about it or write from it or write with it, to have it at hand when they write. It seems that most thinking that I read in verse that has to do with the land sees it as, I think, as a European might see it - as a place that they never go to, that they know very little about but assume that it is idyllic somehow. It's a strange kind of polarised view of this earth that I think that the European mind has that the city is the place of light and noise and evil and that the land is the place of solitude and hope - and I think I have a real problem with that opinion or that feeling and so I don't feel comfortable about that and I don't feel comfortable about a lot of language that I read that assumes that that is how it is. It might be that some of that is changing. I think it is and I think it will in time change - in our lifetime I think it will change, and I think that with it so will our understanding of writers that had something to do with it. I think the writer won't any longer be an underpaid sort of victim of our culture. That bothers