An Interview with Ken Belford In September of 1993 I interviewed Ken Belford at his fishing camp at Blackwater Lake. The camp is one and a half hours N.W. of Smithers B.C. and only accessible by float plane or helicopter. Over a few days in between the camp chores and guiding, we sat in Ken's workshop near the pot belly stove talking about poetry, politics, ecology, love, language - the subjects we've been discussing since we met in 1969. This transcript is a reduced version of the talk.I hope it will give a sense of Ken's life and engagement as a poet. I've selected some of the poems he refers to in the interview and include "Limbic Journal" Ken's most recent poem. --Barry McKinnon   Barry McKinnon: What prompted you to begin to write?   Ken Belford: I started writing on the farm in Alberta. I think I remember having something in the order of 50 poems when I was 10, all written in Shakespearian fashion, a lot of sonnets. I wrote sonnets until I was about 15 I think. I can remember having collections at various times in my early writing of sonnets, and a lot of rhyming couplets too with the same metre that so many of those things were written in. Somehow or other I was reading it then. I don't know where or can't remember where I even learned any of this from but I know that I felt that I was a poet and that I should be writing poetry. There was no influence from anyone in my family to write it, that I can remember. I don't recall anything, any books of poetry. There must have been a book that I was reading at the time. When I got into the city I started to hang out in bookstores at an early age and to read poetry and I think one of the great early influences on me was Irving Layton. I was really interested in his early books. They seemed to me to be such wonderful years, poetry wise. They were so interesting. Milton Acorn was publishing and Alfred Purdy was hanging out, and I read early Leonard Cohen.   BM: This would be in the early 60's I imagine. Layton was getting quite visible then.   KB: Ya, who else? I lived in the city and began with more conventional American hardcover books of collections of poems. I remember reading when I was 13 or so,T.S Eliot, not knowing anything about it. I was just reading it - and Anne Bradstreet, Lowell and just stuff that was being published in very boring books usually with black covers and small print. But it was interesting to me even so, but then I remember getting those early Contact Press books and reading books like Love Where the Nights are Long, and this was a little bit before I became aware of the Tish writers but I was already well into it at that time. I left home when I was 15 and moved into the west end of the city which at that time was mostly just wonderful old houses with eccentrics living in them. So it was a good time - a lot of fun and it didn't cost a whole lot of money. I worked on the log booms for MacMillan & Bloedel on the Fraser River as a boom man and I worked in a few sawmills out on the Fraser and sort of hung out in the early years of Robson Street when not working - when it was a place where young people from all over the world hung out there and it was pet stores and interesting people who were travelling, crazies and haywires and drunks, and then I became aware of Jaimie Reid because his mother - I think Jaimie had grown up in the West End - certainly lived there for along time - and I learned that Jaimie lived not so far from where I lived, and I learned then that John Newlove lived only a few houses away and so did Gerry Gilbert and I think it was Gerry Gilbert, the first poet that I met, and Gerry and I would travel around when we were young - go places together and do things like - we'd lay on our backs on floors and take scarves and throw them on ceilings and watch the scarf calligraphy and (laugh). We had a lot of fun. I liked Gerry a lot and he always carried his camera and tape recorder and he was always on poetry business.   BM: Exactly, and he's still doing that. Newlove at that time might have been published by Contact Press.   KB: He was, yeah. He'd published I think - one book I can remember, Elephant*, Mothers and Others.   BM: Actually that was a Vancouver publication by Tako Tanabe who ran Periwinkle Press. A great title, Elephants, Mothers and Others. and then his Contact book is one of the great books in