G: Yes. I mean the battles with Tom Wayman's poetry. Tom Wayman has somehow set himself up as a sort of a major kind of obstacle in the language game. You have to argue about Tom's poetry, which I find is wonderful, but I don't feel any moral commitment that Tom is right or that I am right. That part of it has gone out of it and it is simply a kind of a language game which one can play or not--which is, by the way, what I think of politics. It's a game. B: Well, we used to take these matters awfully seriously at one point. You'd lose friends. G: It was a disaster--it's a caricature, waking up the next morning and saying, "oh what did I say at that party to that influential critic?" [laughter]. B: Or, "oh no! Now I'll never get a grant!" G: I'll never get a grant! Ya, and it turns out we never got a grant so, so what? We still have beer! [laughter]. B: And we're still having fun, being in such an obscure occupation. G: Well it seems to me why I'm writing poetry ... somebody who I read recently put it much better than this, but something to the effect that--oh ya I remember what it was, but I can't remember who said it--that that's the one thing that when I'm doing it I don't even have the shadow of a thought that I'd rather be doing something else. B: Right. There is that famous Jackson Pollock line: "I'm in my painting." G: Uh huh, well you're sort of dealing with that court of last resort in a way, which is your own ability to judge in a completely unprejudiced way what you're doing so you ... B: Surprise yourself at the same time? G: And surprise yourself at the same time too,ya, and be willing to be surprised and the next day come back to it and say," it went flat " [laugh]. There's a line that's been in my mind for a few days now. This is a one line poem:"this line has no force" [laugh]. B: A self referential line--the line that defines itself! [laugh] G: Yes, that would be a wonderful line for a poem, and then I thought, well no, it is just a poem--it is a one line poem. It doesn't have to be printed, except I guess it will be printed now[laugh]. There are the anxieties of living and of growing old, mortality--and nothing really relieves them for me like poetry does. Poetry is that activity that seems to have a kind of a transcendent value, unquestionable,--absolute, that's the word I'm searching for, absolute value while I'm doing it and then even I can look back5 or 10 years. What I find is that when you look back about 5 years--I look back about 10 I can see some things that still seem to me to be good poems and that's a kind of a secondary pleasure you get out of poetry, is seeing that. Well, even though I'm having trouble with this poem I'm writing right now, I did 10 years ago write a good poem. I did one year ago write a good poem so it doesn't matter really whether the tangle of words and concepts and emotions I'm involved in right now ever gets anywhere. B: I was asked by Al Purdy: are you writing? And I said,"no, not for about 2 years." G: I have a standard response for that: I always have a couple of things in the works.