me too - that the writer has always been someone who has to wade through so much despair and pain in order to be an artist. I think that's a very awful way of treating our artists. BM: I think poetry is, if it has any function, first of all puts the writer in touch and then perhaps put other people in touch with whatever the poem discloses. KB: I think so. I think it has always been a kind of prophecy for me to write something . It has always birthed me into a better world somehow. Each piece of writing, especially in the last few years, the writing that I've been able to do is - I 'm thinking of the word reverberations and some of the celestial harmonies that seem to, in my mind, reaffirm themselves when I write as much as perhaps a bird might hear some earthly rhythm migrating from one continent to another, or a great salmon in their hundreds of miles offshore coming to the streams. They must surely have some kind of a grid or something that they're reckoning from. BM: I think your poetry also deals with the loss of that sensibility. KB: Ya, it talks about loss in the big picture and part of that probably is the loss of the integrity of the land and what concerns me about that is the arrogance and the anger of so many of our citizens who use it up and throw it away, and I think that disturbs me a little bit. It's not something that I lose a whole lot of sleep about but I assume this is so - assume it's there in the writing. I'm not upset about it - it's a given to me - it's a given that I know that the bulldozers are coming, the helicopters are just over the hill, the police are looking for the desperado, and I can remember a case of something like ten years ago being alone out here in the mountains and suddenly in the distance I heard a chain saw - a strange sound. Obviously a mining company had dropped a couple of geologists off in the mountains. I don't even know if I like the concept of a wilderness too much, and I think I would rather see people living and working in the landscape than just to have large zones that no one is allowed to enter and that we somehow think we should protect. I would rather see something that we can work with and live in and be involved in, and have our hands on it in one way or another. I think my poems are somehow - they're part of the old growth in a way. In my mind when I'm writing they have a sense of being kind of a component of the living breathing community. There is something of that order that informs my sense of language and speaking - and words, usage of words that I have in mind when I am writing - that is somehow organic and some are lying on the floor of the forest. But it seems that it's ok to have a river running through a poem somehow (laugh). Jack Gilbert said something about it's ok or it should have some very strong other current or energy of some kind going right through the poem despite our driven intention. I like to read poems that allow that to occur. I think it was in one of Jack Gilbert's poems where he is going along and talking and says "you must change your life" and then goes back into the rest of the poem. He seems to bring something like that in, an opportunity to allow something else to come into the language, and so I don't feel very good about writing these controlled - whether it is language poetry or narrative or whatever the hell it is - it feels as though the writer is not letting something else come in, then I think this is too much an apparatus, too much a seamless construction and I like to write poems that maybe some of the pilots I know would read or could read or feel ok about and some of the back country people that I know could read and at least in part feel ok about. BM: The last line in Robert Creeley's book Hello is interesting. After you've been writing for a long time, you've gone through the stages of exploration and technique, and then you get Creeley at the age of 50 at the end of his book saying, "here comes the sun, lets do it lets do it, lets have some fun." (laugh). Poetry can take in a huge range, from, as you say the political voice to ... where else could you write about love but in a poem. KB: Especially today when we're beginning to understand maybe finally a little bit more about what love really is. Finally it seems that our culture is beginning to know. Don't you think it's finally beginning to learn something about, really, how to love and whom to love and if its exists at all. BM: A good question. Does it exist at all? KB: Well, I'm not so sure that our culture has known love or that any culture on this earth, for that matter, has really known love. I think it, in my mind, we have not known what love can be or is and that virtually most all of our marriages are to the very worst person that we could choose to