publishing route. I think some of it is just a result of the economics of publishing. Talon, in order to survive at the level they were publishing at had to start publishing drama, cookbooks - and poetry as you know doesn't sell unless its promoted KB I think it could sell if it was promoted, but it isn't promoted. BM: In the case of bissett ... KB: He had promotion. BM: And also a wild man reputation - you know, painter, poet, a Blakean outsider who was controversial and often mentioned at the various levels of parliament. KB: Well I certainly didn't follow up on it. I think I was not able to for a host of reasons I just didn't follow up on it. I couldn't. I just simply could not. I could not do it . On one level I felt that I needed to be older and to know more about how things worked on the western slope, in the mountains of this province. I wanted to know more about it - how it worked. What the people were like and what the economy amounted to, and I felt that to really write the kind of writing that I wanted to write could not be done unless I knew more about how things worked and I thought it was arrogant to form political opinion that was polarised without that kind of knowledge, without that kind of experience. I didn't feel good about it so I chose to not do it - I chose not to go that way and I think also on another level I had - I was unconscious about my own grief, my own cultural grief and my family grief, and there was a lot of healing to do. I had some pretty tough issues when I was a child that I had to resolve and to learn about, to do something about before I could really be the kind of writer I wanted to be. I think a lot of the writers I knew then, a lot of the young poets weren't so troubled as I was. There were troubles, yes, but I know that I certainly was troubled and I know that I was unconscious psychologically at the time and that while the writing was really all that had meaning to me - it was everything - and became everything. At the same time I knew that I could not continue it . BM: For what reason? KB: Because I thought that it was politically arrogant to formulate opinion without experience, because I felt hindered by what I saw as urban barriers to the content and to the style of the writing that were imposed on the writing that really seemed to me that there was on, an unspoken level, they were saying that others who were not of the same milieu were of a lesser level than they were. I felt there was a political class consciousness there that I didn't feel good about which I know is contrary to opinion (laugh)- but there was something there that really bothered me. BM: What's always in your poetry is a sense of it ringing true. " alices sweater looks like a dog" (laugh) and from there going into making a kind of drama out of the incidental with direct lines like, "hannah arose moody today." KB: That was all I could get out of those years. They were tough tough years - probably about 10 or 15 years there in Smithers, and Hazelton. I spent a lot of those years...actually I would go into town. After I got my chores done in the morning, I would go into town by noon and meet up with the old natives - some of the old white men and mountain men, and the farmers - and sit around with them for 3 and 4 hours and learn from them, and go stay with them sometimes and travel with them. I spent several years doing that, learning from men that were something like an average age of 70, some of them as old as 80 - so just being with them a lot. BM: And also picking up the skills, and knowing how to do a lot of things that farmers would have to do KB: Ya there was, what it was in fact, was a form of building that I think eventually related to the writing - but it was a form of building that utilised, or used the free-hand tools as opposed to the rigid square tools of the colonial builders. It was the draw knife, the spoke shave, the axe - all of the tools that were sculptural, and you worked in the 3rd dimension with them, and the round - as working with the whole from all sides. Conceptually that formed my sense of how to make things. It was from all sides. It wasn't just flat, and then from that you learn from the use of those tools -