DP: I'd like to wind this interview up with a couple of broader questions. 
First off, what are you working on now? In what directions are you looking?

KN: At this point in my writing life, twenty-five years in, I think the
question of what I'm working on now subdivides into three divisions:
1) what I'm publishing now; 2) what I'm typing up/editing now; and
3) what I'm writing now. In the early days it was always the same thing:
that is, the work in front of me was the stuff that I was typing up and
editing for publication within the next six months. Now there's much
more of a time lag, and also a sizeable backlog of work.

My next publication is going to be a New and Selected Poems
that Talonbooks will be publishing in the Fall. I just saw the catalogue
copy yesterday. There will be a sizeable chunk of new work in it,
with only a few of those poems already having appeared in magazines.

The typing up/editing stage is where everything really gets slowed
up now. Right now I'm typing up the manuscript for Report 16-18.
I'm in the middle of Book 16, which is called Notes For
Reconstructing Babylon. It's a pretty interesting text, but
somewhat difficult to edit. I thought I'd be finished with this
manuscript by June, but I can see that it's going to take me until
September to really nail it down. And it will probably be another
three or four years until all of the Report sequence is finally in print.

In terms of what I'm writing, I just finished the compositional
stage of a new book of lyric poems about three weeks ago.
That's a manuscript that I'd been working on for three years or more.
So now I'm back out into open territory. I don't know what happens
with other poets, but when I'm in the latter stages of a manuscript
I really start to feel oppressed by it. After a while I feel like I'm
very industriously hunting around for the Exit sign. I always feel
that the ending of a book has to have an inevitability to it, and
I have to expend a tremendous amount of energy clearing out
the static and the interference.

Having spent almost twenty-five years writing a long poem, and
having found the Exit sign that got me out of that, I would say
that one of my aspirations right now is to avoid writing another
long poem. That was really twenty-five years of being lost
in the funhouse. So my big direction, or directive, is Avoid
The Long Poem. And really, I've done the long poem, in
twenty-two books, in twenty-two ways, and when it's finally all
in print, the critics and other poets can make of it what they will.

So, I think that leaves me with the mission of trying to write
significant lyric poetry. And what I should probably not do is get
all Yeatsian about it, but rather carve a path that is more like
Creeley's. That is, try to stay in natural voice while taking
on the weightier issues. I've already given myself permission
to take five years with this next book, which I anticipate writing,
one lyric poem at a time, until I'm maybe fifty-four or fifty-five.

DP: What are your impressions of the state of Canadian poetry right now?

KN: I think we're in a really weird time of flux. We're losing our
elders--Purdy and Dudek most recently--and the poets of the
sixties are now becoming the elders. Pushing the poets in my
generation into a middle position. And it is really odd for me to
realize that, when I first met George Bowering, he was ten years
younger than I am now. Purdy and Dudek were the fathers, George
was an older brother. But now George is probably something of a
father figure to a poet like rob mclennan, much in the same way
that Dudek was a father figure to me.

It's very clear to me that we have now had our three generations
of Postmodernists, moving from George Bowering to Artie Gold
to rob mclennan, from Margaret Atwood to Sharon Thesen to Stephanie
Bolster. And that delineates as clear a lineage as the one moving
from A.M. Klein to Irving Layton to Leonard Cohen in the
Modernist part of the story. So, Canadian Postmodernism
is a complete story after all. I don't know if all of our critics
know that yet, or if they care.