G: Yes. I mean the battles with Tom
Wayman's poetry. Tom Wayman has somehow set himself
up as a sort of a major kind of obstacle in the
language game. You have to argue about Tom's
poetry, which I find is wonderful, but I don't feel
any moral commitment that Tom is right or that I am
right. That part of it has gone out of it and it is
simply a kind of a language game which one can play
or not--which is, by the way, what I think of
politics. It's a game.
B: Well, we used to take these matters
awfully seriously at one point. You'd lose
friends.
G: It was a disaster--it's a
caricature, waking up the next morning and saying,
"oh what did I say at that party to that
influential critic?" [laughter].
B: Or, "oh no! Now I'll never get a
grant!"
G: I'll never get a grant! Ya, and it
turns out we never got a grant so, so what? We
still have beer! [laughter].
B: And we're still having fun, being
in such an obscure occupation.
G: Well it seems to me why I'm writing
poetry ... somebody who I read recently put it much
better than this, but something to the effect
that--oh ya I remember what it was, but I can't
remember who said it--that that's the one thing
that when I'm doing it I don't even have the shadow
of a thought that I'd rather be doing something
else.
B: Right. There is that famous Jackson
Pollock line: "I'm in my painting."
G: Uh huh, well you're sort of dealing
with that court of last resort in a way, which is
your own ability to judge in a completely
unprejudiced way what you're doing so you
...
B: Surprise yourself at the same
time?
G: And surprise yourself at the same
time too,ya, and be willing to be surprised and the
next day come back to it and say," it went flat "
[laugh]. There's a line that's been in my mind for
a few days now. This is a one line poem: "this line has no force"
[laugh].
B: A self referential line--the line
that defines itself! [laugh]
G: Yes, that would be a wonderful line
for a poem, and then I thought, well no, it is just
a poem--it is a one line poem. It doesn't have to
be printed, except I guess it will be printed
now [laugh]. There are the anxieties of
living and of growing old, mortality--and nothing
really relieves them for me like poetry does.
Poetry is that activity that seems to have a kind
of a transcendent value, unquestionable,--absolute,
that's the word I'm searching for, absolute value
while I'm doing it and then even I can look
back 5 or 10 years. What I find is that
when you look back about 5 years--I look back about
10 I can see some things that still seem to me to
be good poems and that's a kind of a secondary
pleasure you get out of poetry, is seeing that.
Well, even though I'm having trouble with this poem
I'm writing right now, I did 10 years ago write a
good poem. I did one year ago write a good poem so
it doesn't matter really whether the tangle of
words and concepts and emotions I'm involved in
right now ever gets anywhere.
B: I was asked by Al Purdy: are you
writing? And I said,"no, not for about 2
years."
G: I have a standard response for
that: I always have a couple of things in the
works.
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