has to be a certain power in the imagery. I often listen to country music and folk music, and there will be this incredibly ghastly message being conveyed, but the lyrics are saccharine. One of the reasons I think my poetry doesn't appeal to the formalists is that it insists on a certain raggedness and roughness so as not to prettify things, and one of the reasons it doesn't appeal to the extreme left is that it doesn't shout enough. If you think of Robin Mathews--who has written some work that I really like--the least successful poems of his are those in which he's just shouting at the National Fruit Co. And shouting at the Americans and so on. There's nothing subtle about it or depth to it. Barry: I think that kind of writing is tricky because it's rhetorical and also it's presented in such a way that you can't disagree with its emotion. When I heard the piece today about the woman who has gone through the torture, I wrote down that Geddes is" objectifying the horrific". So, for me that's where much of the power comes from in those poems. You give the details; the objective details themselves contain and present the outrage. Gary: Well Atwood addresses the problem in "Notes for a Poem that Cannot be Written". Several writers have talked about that. Some of the people I really respect as writers have resisted this whole attempt to write about horrific things, partially for the reasons that Adorno mentioned after Auschwitz. It's not possible to write poetry, the argument being that somehow it is offensive to appropriate or to try talk about things you haven't experienced at first hand. And I feel that there is some truth in that. I feel there's a certain uneasiness myself in writing about these things, and yet, in the case of the Chilean materials, people actually told me the stories because they wanted them to be recorded and to be sent out, so I had to find some way to do it without drawing attention to myself and pretending that somehow I was part of the great struggle--and that's the difficulty in that book. I don't know that I've succeeded very often with that, but it was sure a problem for me. Don: Did you maintain contact with any of the people whose stories you've told? Gary: I maintained contact with a lot of Chileans. I didn't see those people in the Human Rights Commission again. Although that's not quite true, because there were twenty Chilean women who came to Canada about five years later and a couple of them were within that group. Their whole life had been given over to protesting the disappearance of their families. Just imagine never being able to get back to anything ostensibly normal after that. Don: Did you have to do anything protective in your writing so that people wouldn't be bugged by the authorities? Gary: I used only first names mostly. In a couple of poems that