DP: You must be psychic because you have anticipated and partially 
answered my next question. You write about the "war between the lovers of 
material and the lovers of pure spirit" in "The Deadly Art". I was going to 
ask you if you are an observer or a combatant but it’s s sort of clear 
from your previous answer that you are both at different times. Anyway, 
the line just quoted encapsulates one of the issues that runs 
through your career. Would you like to talk a little about the 
conflict and what it means to you. Can it be resolved? Should it?

KN: That's a really good question, and it is a tough one to answer.
Let me start to try and answer it by offering a poem:

RIGHTNESS

Irving was right
about the Philistines.

Louis was right
about the Barbarians.

Phyllis was right
about Despair and Suicide.

Leonard was right
about the crack in everything.

bp was right
about the saints of language.

That's a poem of mine that just appeared in the latest Queen Street
Quarterly, and I have been getting a bit of e-mail about it.

To my mind, all of those poets I invoke are "lovers of pure spirit." 
That's what poets are. And they are, ultimately, anti-materialists. 
They know the value in life resides elsewhere.  This debate about 
spiritual value versus material value has been going on ever since 
human civilization began. And it is a war, that only "the lovers of 
pure spirit" can ever resolve.  So it shouldn't really be a mystery 
why poetry exists on the periphery of a material culture like ours. 
It completely contradicts the values of that culture. It tells us 
everything should be otherwise. 

For whatever reasons, I think the poems in The Music are trying 
to present the line of argument that the conflict can be resolved, 
within the context of a marriage. In the domestic arena, 
a poet married a girl from the suburbs and peacefully co-existed for a while. 

But I think The Commentaries  are saying that that conflict can't be 
resolved, that the war is real, and that the poets better not lay 
down their arms, or allow themselves to be seduced by the mainstream 
values. A materialist life is the death of poetry. How could it not be?

I think poetry always emphasizes the spiritual dimension, 
ultimately. I think it is deeply concerned with all of the things 
that you cannot hold in your hand, keep in a safe, deposit in the bank. 
It is about all of the things that you can't insure. 
Living in materialist North America in 2001, I believe that 
more strongly than I ever did. Everything Layton and Dudek and 
Souster said in Cerberus back in 1952is all true, and then some.