Interview with Gary Geddes (Spring, 1998 at the College of New Caledonia, Prince George B.C.). Interviewers: Don Precosky and Barry McKinnon Don Precosky: I was reading your book Light of the Burning Towers over the weekend and I was struck by this poem "Time Out for Coca Cola." If you look down the line, here are the Coca Cola executives at the top, and here are the workers being oppressed at the bottom. But if you think back the other way, you're accusing these people of being international criminals --accusing them of being on a par with, almost, war criminals. Gary Geddes: Well I think the Coca Cola people are at certain levels of the administration quite culpable in major crimes, and that poem was written out of a reading of something that came to me through The Catholic Worker--stories of things that have happened to people in Central America as a result of large American Corporations, whether it's United Fruit or Coca Cola coming in and trying to subvert any kind of union activity, and actually going out and murdering union people. So it's a major indictment. I don't know whether the Coca Cola company has ever seen it--they'd sue me if they did, but all the information came from pretty reliable sources. Don: Is this idea of a chain of guilt something you seek to establish in several of your poems, particularly those about Latin America? Gary: Well I hadn't thought of the phrase "chain of guilt", Don. I don't know exactly what you mean by that. I just get hit by a number of atrocities or travesties of justice and I don't know if I ever try to link them up with any single source. It's pretty hard to be a Canadian and not see a lot of the source of this in the US in the last 50 years. Don: Is it a Heart of Darkness moment when Marlowe's listeners realize at the end that the darkness flows from them into the so-called uncivilized world, and that a lot of the evil that has taken place up the river someplace is a result of their own behaviour? Gary: Well, certainly for me, the whole process is not one of simply pointing a finger, but of owning the guilt in myself. We are all born with Hiroshima and Bergen Belsen and all those things that are part of our legacy. Finding it in yourself, at some level, I think, is crucial. I've been writing about Central America and South America for a long time--from The Letter of the Master of Horse, which was written 30 or 35 years ago, to more recent pieces. And the conquest itself was such a major travesty with all the disasters--political disasters blessed by the church--so I don't know whether I've been so much concerned to point the finger as to record the dilemma, first of