B: It really reflects the experience.
You'd have to be in a small plane above Terrace to
... G: Well, the poem starts in Terrace,
not knowing why I'm there B: There is a kind of wonderment about
the place in the poem. G: That poem does express that sort of
wonderment about the place--about the bears, about
planes, the mountains. B: But not in any, as you say, in an
extended narrative about the place. G: Well the narrative is implied. The
narrative is fragmentary. Sharon Thesen paid me the
greatest compliment when she wrote this in an
essay--that that poem reminds her of David Hockney,
David Hockney's great art. And David Hockney has
that wonderful quality of things not having taken
any particular effort to have come into the forms
they are. B: I think that's a real secret to
poetry. No matter how hard you might work at
it--and maybe its part of that detachment you're
speaking of too--you want the poem to float by
without any screaming, or devices to gain
attention--but to be real among other things. Your
work does that. G: So that's when at a time which was
very--a lot of change going on in my life. I wrote
a lot of those poems in those little light planes
in a sense to control my anxiety about the
plane. B: Many of your poems mention
airplanes. G: Ya, that's true--that's another
characteristic of my poems--a lot of them are
involved in some form of transportation. Those
poems came almost accidentally and they do retain
that kind of accidental quality which paradoxically
gives them a kind of a permanent value, but the
other side of it is that when you hook onto a poem
like a big fish and it's something that you have to
struggle with--and you may struggle with it for
months and months before finally realizing there
isn't any poem there at all, or the other side of
it, realizing,yes, there is a poem and it's taken
me 6 months of work and it'll take another 6 months
of work and all the time in putting all that work
in--a great deal of that work is to erase any
evidence of the work, so as to kind of fake that
quality of having come into the world without any
anticipation. B: Or preconceptions. G: Or preconception, ya. G: As if it just occured to me, except
I've been working on it for 9 months [laugh] and
often it does. Cynthia Flood, was telling us about
W. D. Valgardson. He had been working on a story
and he'd done something like 19 drafts of this
story and on the 19 th
pilot holds up and
says, "okay smoke" It is so filled with that random
stuff that it is in a way like the world untouched
by the so--called creative mind. So the great stuff
in those poems just comes out unexpectedly without
any rhetorical preparation, and it goes away just
as quickly and the whole poem at the end seems to
have been almost a kind of a natural event rather
than a contrived structure.because it was one of
the biggest changes in my life to suddenly be in
Terrace--a kind of place where I'd previously never
lived except for a very short period of time when I
was in that little town in Arkansas. I never lived
in any city of less than a quarter of a million
people.
