work has been dismissed in
a way. Some of those great poems--I'd like to have
on the record. G: Ya, I used to feel that much more
strongly than I do now. B: Eliot said something to the effect
that what makes this poet (whose name I forget), so
beautiful is his lack of ambition. G: Yes, I like that. B: I think the writers that we've been
connected with, haven't made "careers" with their
writing; they didn't get it mixed up with that
careerist aspect like many others. G: Well, I think we grew up into a
world where, or at least I did, being now 57--the
world that I grew up into in the 1950's was a world
in which a number of modernist poets had made
careers as poets I'm thinking of W.C. Williams,
Marianne Moore, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens
and maybe 10 others--Eliot and Pound--and it was a
world, the bourgeois world where things stood out
from each other. It was not this background of
static and trivia. The world now is sort of like
those diagrams that they give you when they're
testing your eyes for colour blindness--nothing
stands out [laughter]. But at that time, I think,
and beginning to write poetry and having all of the
ego problems that an unhappy young person has and
wanting power and fame all of that, I sort of
imagined, well, that's what I was aiming at, say,
looking at myself as 19 years old where would I be
at 50. I would think,well, I'll be a well known
poet in New York with my selected poems being sold
in bookstores, and department stores. I didn't know
that there would no longer be any department stores
(laugh) or bookstores. No one could predict.
Another trick of perspective is that I knew in 1950
that the world had changed tremendously in the last
50 years but I also sort of knew it was never going
to change anymore. We'd come now to the final
stage. so I imagined that idea of having a career
as a writer would continue, but then gradually
that, particularly when I came to Canada and I got
involved in literary fights with people and I had a
feeling which was half that I wanted to still make
it again except it was Toronto rather than New
York, B: That's important in the sense that
you as a writer aren't mixing up things that have
nothing to do with this art. G: Well those things too--I get in
these arguments about language poetry for example.
I used to have more of an emotionally committed
argument. It seemed like this kind of writing is
taking over and our kind of writing is losing out
and we gotta fight back. Now I see this as a--well
it obviously is, a language game. To me it's a lot
of fun to talk about because it raises questions in
linguistics and philosophical questions about
language and question of artistic intent, and I'm
beginning to think about abstraction and discourse
and things like that. B: And meaning.
and the other half was sort of an oh
no feeling. I've ruined my chances of making it by
having this fight with oh Frank Davey or Warren
Tallman and gradually the whole subject has just
faded out of my consciousness--the whole thing has
just faded out of my consciousness and I've become
aware that the fact is not that there are a certain
number of people who have made it and a certain
number of people who have not made it, but that
there are--that every writer, poet, has his or her
individual relationship to friends and magazines
and his or her own ego. I mean look at Margaret
Avison. I don't think Margaret Avison has any
connection with the group of writers that are in
Toronto that are connected with writers in
Vancouver. It doesn't matter to me anymore.
