Gary: War and Other Measures, which was my first really long poem, took nine years. The Hong Kong Poem took eleven years. The first section of War and Other Measures took a week for the first sixteen pieces, and then the rest of it took nine years. But The Terra Cotta Army which is longer, twenty-five pages, came over about four or five months. I guess the Orkney poem will take two or three years perhaps. I was tempted at one point to put them in the new book, to give the new book something surprising, but in the end I thought, something that is as rich as this, don't put an end to it . Gary: How long have your long poems taken? Barry: I wrote the prairie poem, I wanted to Say Something in a week, but then revised it for about two years. I wrote Pulp Log as a daily journal and it went for several months of daily writing. Form for me is not so much having an actual form in mind. The poem takes the form of my life. Arrythmia was prompted by a physical condition--by being thrown into a medical state--and meant that the poem's time-frame was partly a result of waiting in the process of the diagnosis. The poem kept going until the condition had been described by somebody from outside, until I no longer had the anxiety that was generating the content. The second last line reads "knowing is paradise." I'm working on a piece now that I think has abandoned me. I'm trying to take on this difficult matter of trying to write a love poem. Gary: I admire you for trying to write a poem out of a single voice. My refuge of course is the old one for me and that is, I couldn't for the moment come up with anything coherent in a single voice. So I'm just using my multiple voices and taking bits and pieces of it and trying to discover at the end some new things about my relationships with people. Barry: You get to a certain age when you've got to--well, there are certain things a poet is given in a life to deal with--the process of aging itself, and a sense of unfinished business. This thing in you that has to be said. I tried to say some of this in a statement I wrote for Event. What do you think the subject of poetry is in the largest sense? Gary: Tell me what you came up with. Barry: Time is the poet's subject--the largest condition we're in, and the condition that also implies your own demise. Gary: It reminds me of Susan Langer, the aesthetician who wrote Feeling and Form and various books like that. She says that the aim of poetry, in fact, the whole strategy of poetic prosody is to make us conscious of time. Time only exists in its literary constructs, in a way, and prosody is a way of marking it, slowing us down so that we become conscious of ourselves in time.