body of work, or David Phillips' body of work, but I don't have any sense of my own. I am it in a way--I'm too much in it to see it, so I go by what other people tell me. If other people tell me that--well, no one ever talks to you about your work, I mean other people tell me about a particular poem ... George Bowering once said to me what really makes him happy is if someone will point out to him something about a poem that he wrote that only he knew what's in there--a little secret message in the poem, and someArial it'll get across to someone--someone will say, "I saw that." I like it when someone says, "well, what I like was ..." Going back to Mountains & Air which I still think is such a good poem, is that Harvey Chometsky and Brian DeBeck both had these sort of astonished reactions to parts of the poem which were--I remember Brian saying"this is about nothing!" [laughter]. That's a good point . This whole poem is about nothing, and that's exactly what I was feeling--the emotional state was a state of that absolute nothing was going on. So I like that. B: DeBeck had a real understanding of the poem. G: But mostly it's just my own approval of the poem when I say, "ok, that poem is finished," and usually what I mean is I can't do anything more with it. It is a poem and not one of the things balled up and thrown into the waste basket; in fact, I no longer ball these things up. I just throw them into the waste basket without balling them up [laugh]. But it is a poem if there is no more I can do with it. One of the sources of my method in writing poems is from the abstract expressionist painters. So I relate very much to that. I knew a number of them in New York in the 60's and that's what I picked up from going to New York was not so much the poetry as the way the painters would work. They would get a canvas and they would just do anything to it. Like Jasper Johns says, "do something to it and if that doesn't work, do something else to it." One of the analogies that I have is, I'm working on poems there in my studio, the studio is the folder, and I go back to the studio to see how much paint has fallen off, by which I mean, how much language when I look at it after a month, I think, "oh, that's a lot of bullshit ." B: I went to a friend's studio and one of the painters sharing it with him had a huge wall-- sized painting. He was painting over a painting--a painting that he'd put on display. I thought, why would he do that? One reason is that he was saving money by not buying a new canvas, and the other thing was that he didn't, or no longer liked it. The first version wasn't so precious after all. G: Well one thing I like about the computer--I don't like computers, but one thing I do like about it is that if you don't like something you can just touch a key and it's gone. You can destroy things completely so you don't even have any drafts left. That I like, but I don't want to talk about computers. B: Readership is interesting. There's a lawyer in town who gave me the same kind of surprising insight and response response that Brian DeBeck gave to you--the least likely person I thought would pick up the poem--and says hey, "this is good". Do you think that the more sophisticated the reader, the greater or more accurate the response? G: Well I depend on Stan Persky--the one person I will always show a new poem to. This is again, kind of a tradition which I got from Spicer. Spicer could always depend on Robin Blaser and even when Spicer and Blaser were feuding and not speaking to each other, Spicer would have some new poems, and he'd go up & there'd be a truce and show the poems to Robin, and this is the one person you could trust as much as your own judgement without the partiality that's inevitable in your own judgement--and Persky does that for me.