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CM: You find yourself in kind of an ironic place in that, you know, here you are, I think it was at your launch that someone referred to you as "the grandaddy or father of poetry in Prince George." In one sense you're that--I mean you have to admit that you're the most prominent literary figure in the community. And also here you're being recognized by the college for 25 years service, whatever that means, and yet you seem somewhat underappreciated, obviously--judging by what the college did--in the academic community, and in the larger literary community. Do you think that's a factor of the distance from elsewhere? Do you think it's a factor of your unwillingness to kowtow to their demands, so to speak? BM: Well, I'm not much of a rebel. There's that great Creeley line that goes, "when I know what others think of me I'm plunged into my loneliness." On the one hand, as a writer you want to be invisible; on the other hand, if you're publishing you're in the public eye. There's a kind of a paradox with it. What point is there in being famous in Prince George? Or anywhere for that matter? Why would one want to be treated any differently than anybody else? You can think of so-called writers-in-residence who wander around, you know, just an inch from putting on the ballet costume or something. Playing up those parts, right. I think the first thing is to live, and to--. Somebody said to me about winning that bp Nichol chapbook award that, "Gee, you must feel great," and I said, "No, not really." I knew Barry Nichol, and I thought it was a nice irony, you know, that he's up there in the heavens saying give it to me. Because he was my editor for a number of years, and a wonderful editor and friend in poetry. But I said, "No, I have no ego for such things," and she couldn't believe me. It just absolutely, it meant very little to me. What does it mean to get a gold watch after 25 years? CM: Are you wearing the gold watch? BM: No, no. It hurts my wrist. CM: Spiritually or physically? BM: It pinches the hairs in my arm. It's tough, because it's--I think all a poet wants is to, if you're in pursuit, it's like you're in pursuit of your own life, you know what I mean? As if you don't even exist yet until the poem gives you that legitimacy. So if somebody gives me a prize or a gold watch, you have to nod and acknowledge it, but it really has very little to do with my consciousness. I've known writers who've gone coo-coo for recognition and so forth. I think it's not good for the poetry to get too much of it. There's not much danger of it anyway, really. So I don't know if I can answer your question, but you can't go on an ego trip. But on the other hand, you want poetry to be recognized. If I'm doing anything, I'm working for that. And then that reflects into what can be a community of these imaginations we're talking about. If we're not getting the news from the newspaper or on television--or just parts of it--a fragmentary sense of the world, then I'm just trying to get poetry into whatever world we have here by organizing readings or promoting books or whatever-- that it should be a possibility amongst others to get people thinking. And that's my work. I'm just happy to be writing when I do. Every two or three years I get to write a poem. Because I'm not doing it every day, I don't need time for it, I don't need money for it or anything like that. I think of William Carlos Williams, who worked as a baby doctor, and just wrote at night or wrote when he could, and just did it. I'm sure earlier on he probably wanted more recognition; I think he was in his fifties before anyone really recognized him. Because it is important work. It has to be recognized somewhere along the way. CM: Well at some point I think everyone wants some recognition, because, fine, you can write poetry for yourself, but you're not going to send it out to get published for yourself; you're doing for some other reason. And maybe that's to keep the poetry alive, or to keep your self alive. BM: Exactly. And it's, you know, little presses, magazines, this reading series I'm working on--it's a tremendous amount of work, but I'm just really enjoying it, because it's, like, putting it out there again. Because this community, it seems to me, really does love poetry, in an odd way. More people here will come out to a poetry reading--I don't think Lorna Crozier could get, I hear she had a hundred people, I couldn't make it that reading, --and Denise Chong, with her book, a family memoir, had about 200 people. So there is an audience for it, and I think that's what people want. I think poetry is--it's a source of information about the self and the world. We don't have very much of that. So, I mean it is a big deal in that sense--to make life a bit more bearable. CM: It's almost like we didn't even know it, but we were culturally starved for so many years that all of a sudden things seem to be happening now. "All of a sudden" even though you were doing this 20 years ago. BM: Yeah, off and on I've been doing it. I've tried to keep doing it. You have to keep doing it. I mean part of the trouble I'm talking about is that, you know, is that literally I got into trouble for it. I think the reason that I was in trouble at the college in '80 and '81 was that--it's not because of me so much; it's because of what poetry could have represented to that group of people that didn't want it around. I think they were embarrassed by the idea that--like, they made a mistake thinking that poetry was somehow a specious activity, or unimportant. I mean the real world is industrial, right. Poetry is some kind of meringue. CM: And for the college to justify its own existence it has to have tangible results. BM: Yeah, you get a bunch of rednecks and industrialists and know-nothings running the college and they see poetry, art and drama--I mean what is this? It's not that it was a threat to them. They made the mistake of not knowing what it was, or they would have gotten rid of me for sure. Because poetry is one way of revealing the world that they don't want anybody to know about, really. It's the most dangerous thing that they could touch. So I think they thought it wasn't dangerous; it was embarrassing. Do you understand what I'm saying? And they had it all mixed up with homosexual activity or something. You know, god knows what they were thinking. CM: Well they don't understand it, so they can't justify it. BM: They don't understand, you got it. You don't understand it; get rid of it. They understand a course in pulp and paper technology that draws 3 students and costs a million dollars to run, but they don't understand 30 kids in a room discussing a poem, you know. Or maybe they do. You know, I'm really flying off the handle on this one, but I think that's sort of what happened. It's a threat when you get people thinking this way,--you get them thinking the way the mind demands you think with poetry, then you're subversive, you know. There is no literal A-B-C rational world, mechanical world. We've imposed an idea that that's the way the world and the system does work. And that's why people are trapped, knowing it or not. It's just that their minds and bodies do not work the way the system says they should. So, lots of tension. CM: Now I have a loaded question for you. We've been talking a lot about distance, the distance from the Centre, being part of a centre, Prince George as a locale that's often forgotten and what not. You've said that you often feel that distance in terms of being left out of the mainstream literary community. Something that I came across as I was reading some of your older work was I Wanted to Say Something. BM: Oh yeah, that goes way back. CM: You probably haven't thought about that in a long time. What was it, '69, '70? BM: I wrote it in 1970. CM: The edition I read had a forward by Andrew Suknaski, and he talks about the influence that your poem had on the rest of the prairie long poem tradition. And yet what I found is that I enjoyed that poem, but I got angry as I read it, and I got sad, in a sense, as I read it, too, because I think that Suknaski is right in saying that, yeah, you had this influence. And yet someone such as Robert Kroetsch, who wrote Seed Catalogue--which now, in light of reading your poem, seems to me to be a complete rip-off of your poem with no acknowledgement whatsoever--in The Lovely Treachery of Words he never mentioned your poem. Your name is not even in the index, in spite of the fact that he has one essay devoted specifically to the Canadian long poem. I wonder if you feel that in a sense it was some sort of rip-off, and if so, how does that make you feel in terms of being here? BM: It's probably my destiny. Again, I know what you're saying, and there have been periods when I've felt--just odd, and maybe it's just one's character. I don't know. But back to the Suknaski thing. I had a couple of people--and Suknaski really promoted that book in what he called the samizdat, because it was xeroxed for years. He used to carry that around. CM: Surely Kroetsch must have seen it. BM: Oh sure he did. But you know you've gotta pay your debts. It's like, none of this exists in a vacuum. See, the real kingpin, for me, would have been John Newlove who took on that subject matter quite early on in his long poem called The Pride. But the writing of that book is a different story. I ended up self-publishing it years later. So I finally got it out. CM: Was that because you couldn't find a publisher? BM: Couldn't find a publisher. It went the rounds and I couldn't find a publisher. So I published it myself and sent out maybe a couple hundred copies. And then, being up here, again --Williams had a book called, what's it called?--Sour Grapes--which is sort of a neat emotion in a sense. You want to feel cheated, you know, everybody needs that once in a while. I remember there were conferences on the long poem and I'd never even get the brochures for these things let alone some money to go to them. And then really having a rush of prairie books after that--Kroetsch's for sure, Gary Geddes had a book called Snakeroot, and Eli Mandel was working on a long prairie piece--and other writers followed. CM: Well you can never say that this is a rip-off or a copy, but it just seemed that those 2 were way too similar to be a coincidence, and yet it seems to me that, you know, here's Kroetsch, the internationally famous author/poet, whose obviously a big self-promoter too, taking credit for something that I don't think you've been given due credit. I don't know how you feel about me saying that, and whatever you say about it we can edit it out if you don't want that, if you don't want sour grapes. BM: Well it's, it's like this--in music it works this way sometimes. When I started to listen to jazz, I'd get my mother to buy me the odd record when we shopped at Safeway. Occasionally you'd snag a so-called jazz record. It always had a title like, Like Cool, or something. And so you get this version of jazz and you think, well, yeah, I can hear it, but a year later you buy your first Thelonius Monk record, who's considered absolutely weird, but you knew this guy had, he was the source of a certain kind of, again, imagination. Well, what happened to Thelonius Monk? He couldn't play in New York his entire life, or most of his life, because of a trumped up dope charge, which meant he lost his union card, and he was banned from playing in the place that produced him and most needed him. I'm not comparing myself to him, but it's just the story that sometimes--and now I'm thinking of the great A.M. Klein poem that says that sometimes the poet gets cuckolded, so to speak. The people who take what there is--which is very little, unless you get a big grant our something--sometimes take that recognition and don't deserve it, because nobody's checked to see where the sources are. You know, if you're going to listen to, let me see--Holly Cole's a great singer, but Abbey Lincoln, who's in her mid 60s now--has the weight Cole doesn't because every syllable of her singing contains her life. You're not fucking around when you're hearing her. And then somebody would say, well Billie Holiday, who Abbey sounds a bit like, is the source. Well, sure, but Abbey Lincoln would acknowledge that everything she knows came from Billie Holliday. So I think it happens that lots of people are overlooked, people are ignored, people are discovered. The wrong people are rewarded. People who need Canada Council grants because they're starving don't get it, but the professor will get it, you know what I mean? Andy Suknaski is really talking about himself as well, and I feel worse for Andy than I do myself. My rule is--not a rule, but my mode, my modus--is very simple: as long as I worked, took care of myself, I could exempt myself from some of the politics we're talking about. I didn't have to hustle; I didn't have to promote myself; I wasn't looking for a professorship; I wasn't looking for a--I've had a few small grants, but that's nothing really. So I was never hustling for grants. I never joined the League of Canadian Poets; I never joined anything, because I worked. I guess it's an old prairie upbringing--something I learned growing up was always try to keep a job and have a few bucks in your pocket and have some independence from all the shit that's going on, right. So I learned that somewhere. So I always had a few bucks in my pocket--of my corduroy sports jacket--a couple of beers stashed in the fridge, and a good bunch of friends, to be independent of corrupting forces. I'm a fan of Kroetsch's writing, but somewhere along the way you'd like to be a footnote in some of this activity. I've had my footnotes, I suppose. Sometimes in the earlier anthologies, there would be--there's this standard line that, and you've probably run across this--it would be "If we had room or space to allow it, we would include Cam McAlpine, Barry McKinnon, John HarrisÖ" you know. So I got into a lot of those introductions to anthologies. You know, "If I could make a bigger selection etc." CM: "Due to space constraints, we want to give a fair selection of the poets presented." BM: Yeah, so I don't know. I've had sort of some fun with it in one way. Sometimes you have to do that. You have to just go completely somewhere else. If you had one reading in London, then people would take you more seriously. It's the politics of literary activity, which can drive some people just crazy, because there are very few spaces, right. Margaret Atwood can occupy a space, which she has for a pretty long time, and I think it's OK, because she's talented. But, you know, who else is going to come, who's the next to occupy that space? I still really have to self-promote. So in a way, what you're talking about is being recognized, but at the same time I'm no different than a young man I talked to today who's sending his book around to publishers. And I thought, well yeah, thankfully this one went through with Caitlin, but it got rejected everywhere and I had to self-promote like crazy, and I hate doing that. Just to get a reading, you've got to make up a little sheet, and pretend that you have a literary agent. So you know, I've had fun with it. The guy who gets more bitter about these politics, I suppose, is John Harris. He attacks the writers he thinks don't deserve anything, and yet seem to have all of the benefits. At some point you're going to come to this problem yourself. If you've got a book--where do you get it published?--I don't know--where you're forced into self publication. In this system where somebody who's as gifted as Ken Belford or David Phillips, who've been active Canadian writers, I'm talking 30 or 35 years, cannot find publishers, or anybody who's interested in their writing, even in the places that they live in. I mean they've got it worse than I have. CM: Or they're not part of the current school of thought, or the current movement. BM: Not part of the current movement--or the new schools of poetry. There's a line from T.S. Eliot who's writing about some poet; he says, "What makes this person so beautiful is their lack of ambition." As I say, you want to work for poetry, but as long as you've got a job and you're taking care of your own business, that means you're independent of all the outside forces. I would hate to have to schmooze to people who were on committees. CM: I guess it depends a lot on what you want out of it. Like I said before, everyone wants some kind of recognition, so you maybe feel a little bit jealous or upset about some of the stuff that goes on, but at the same time you can feel comfortable. It's almost more comfortable being out of that. BM: Yeah, well I've done pretty well. I mean I get to read in Vancouver once in a while, occasionally go back east. You know, I'm not--I think at some point I'd like to live a little easier in terms of work, so I had more time, because there's other kinds of writing that do take time that I'd like to do. CM: Like what? BM: Just at some point, you know, a memoir about, in a way what we're talking about here, living through these things with poetry as the focus of your life. In mine it's been a pretty consistent one, because I haven't given up for anything, so I feel really blessed that I can still do it off and on. But usually by the time I get to the summer, I'm burnt-out completely. Somebody's was asking me, well, what's teaching like in a college? And I said, well, it's like factory work. Except you have to have a personality, which makes it even worse. So you get into the situation where college teachers go up to university teachers and say, gee, it's great that you've only got, like, six or nine hours of classes and all this other time. I don't know if I'd want that, but some day I'm going to have to buy down my work load so I can do a different kind of writing. I don't know when that'll come. I don't know what to say about the literary politics. I used to get more disturbed by them. My advice is to--any politics are interesting, and of course everybody would have their version of what happens and how it happens. You know, somebody like Robin Skelton--for god's sake, he was whining even when he was at the top of the heap, you know. He had his job, the system, publishers, publications, and the guy was still whining. CM: Yeah, I read recently where he was complaining because some people don't appreciate his poetry. BM: Well, you know, why should they? That's not what it's about somehow. Those kind of sour grapes are despicable. You can do anything, you know, you can be a total nut case, but if the poetry stands up under whatever measure we put to it, then I'll put up with anything. I know writers who are disgusting human beings and I crawl toward them because of their talents. Minor people are winning lots of awards and getting grants and representing the country internationally. I mean I don't want to name these people, but there's people out there who have given poetry a really bad name. Canadians have been really good at it, because there's been a lot of money floating around for international travel. But the other thing, Cam, is that the stakes are so low in one sense. What do you really get out of it if you put too much energy into that part of it? You have to really ask what you get out of it. CM: That's the other thing that I think a lot of people lose perspective on. You know, you can be a Margaret Atwood or a Robert Kroetsch, whoever in the Canadian literary world, and think you're sort of hot shit, but if you really look at yourself in perspective in terms of the world or whatever--well none of us is of any great importance in the world. But literary figures, especially in Canada, are even less so. BM: Well, I think you're right. I'm just happy that Robert Creeley can send me an e-mail and say, "Thanks for the terrific book, man." He's been a hero of mine from the age of 16. To me it's an achievement--to have one of your heroes, somebody who, in his case, has taught me a tremendous amount, somebody who's career I've followed--not only his career, I've followed his life. This guy's got the goods. And to have contact with him, I mean, that's really tremendous to me. In other words, you're taken into that company, right. I mean it has been a great life - the writing scene. It's great be recognized in the company of other people who do what you do, who you admire. CM: Like any profession. I don't know what makes a good doctor, except that they can deal with my aches and pains and not kill me. So they appreciate a smile and a thank you from a patient, but I'm sure that they also take a lot of pride in respect within the medical community. BM: Yeah. And likewise. I've met a lot of what I consider the top writers, whether they're popular or not, just by being in Prince George. Something that we should maybe just mention briefly is that, by running a reading series here, people often come for 2 or 3 days, get trapped by a snowstorm or something, and you get to know them. And, you know, you form a correspondence or friendship. You see, in one way the irony is that you can be in the Centre of a place and be more alienated than you are here; everybody passes through here eventually. And, you know, I've hung out with all of them in a sense. Atwood was here a couple of times. Earle Birney. Al Purdy. You know, the list just goes on. You're better off here. Ironically. I mean I can go to Toronto and I'll sit there and I'll be drinking beer by myself, and this is The Centre of literary activity in Canada? You know what I mean? And I'll go to Calgary and I'll be drinking beer by myself. I mean Vancouver is almost as bad. You're going through your address book. Do you think Bowering and Lionel Kearns and all that old generation still hang out at the Cecil? No way man. They're nowhere about. It would be very hard to access them as writers in a town where the group of young folks hang out now. Because you get older and you get probably more isolated in some sense. But David Phillips and I have talked a lot about this--yeah, you think it's a community there--it's actually a vicious little scene. People are clawing at each other. Nice to you, as it's the habit of Vancouver people, nice to your face, and then bad mouth you within seconds of leaving the beer table. At least that's what I found. And I like Prince George, as I do New York, because people are more forthright. Eventually they come around to saying what they have to say. CM: Prince George and New York. BM: Yeah, my 2 favourite places. I was trying to say to somebody the other day--it was sort of stupid line--saying that Prince George is just like New York only New York is bigger or something. But I think what you said is important. To be in a place like this you have to be more self-reliant, you have to generate your own space. As I said to this fella today, I said, you know, if you can't find a publisher for your book, I think, what I've read of it, you can publish it yourself without any embarrassment at all. And if you don't like this reading series, well then you start your own. This has been interesting for me to talk about this stuff. I'm not putting my finger on it. But the paradox is--Liz Hay and I were talking about this. She wrote that book, Captivity Tales, Canadians in New York, and it's a wonderful book. But her problem is, in a nutshell--well, I don't know what her problem is--but her feeling was that, being a Canadian living in New York, she got just simply homesick for Canada. So I said, yeah, I've been thinking about this, that Canadians are kind of double exiles. I said, you don't feel at home here, necessarily, either. How do you take root in a place? Well maybe it's impossible. Maybe it's an impossible notion. But she lived in New York and felt exiled there, obviously, and through her own homesickness comes back to Canada and feels exiled even all the more--triple exile as a condition. So what we're talking about is being in a community etc. etc., and it's really tricky, because in one sense you can't be there. I think you can be in your language, you know, if that's your home. Maybe that's what it comes down to. That's where your home is, in the imagination and your language. Places reject you very easily. The college doesn't love you necessarily. You think the gold watch is something, wait till they start naming buildings after you. You know what I mean? I mean, come on. So where were you? Or where are you? You're always trying to get to it. And you can't.
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