all. I think people on the extreme left like Robin Mathews have criticized me for not shouting down the American corporations and the military industrial elite, and so on, in my Kent State poem, but it's too easy to do that. We do that in all other dimensions of our lives. We point the finger and shout. And I think Yeats was right at one level: sometimes our public distress comes out as rhetoric, but our private distress comes out as poetry. I've found it is difficult to walk the line between rhetoric and private utterance, and I tend to trust the private utterance more than the rhetoric, whereas that poem you mentioned "Time out for Coca Cola" is perhaps a little closer to the public utterance, and I don't think it's one of my best poems because it points a finger more directly and doesn't have as much of a subtle psychological base to it. Don: Coco Cola is also very protective of the brand name and you can be glad, perhaps, that the executives haven't read the title or they'd sue you for using their product. Gary: Well Dave Godfrey wrote a novel or a book of stories called Death Goes Better with Coca Cola. I don't think Dave was ever sued for that. Barry McKinnon: Who was that writer who wrote Fords Eat Chevs? Gary: Yes. (laughter). Don: Probably lucky that they're semi-literate or not civilized enough... Gary: I'm not sure whether I didn't actually send a copy to the Coca Cola Company. I certainly sent it out hoping it would be seen. Don: You mentioned Yeats a moment ago, and another poem I was going to ask you about is "General Cemetery". Yeats says, "a terrible beauty is born", and one of the difficulties for you is--or might be--that writing about something terrible, writing about it in an artistic way, you could be in danger of making something terrible, beautiful. Gary: Yes Don: I was very moved by this poem because it shows the terror, but on the other hand, it has this repetition that creates a thing of beauty, but it doesn't gloss over the terror. Is it difficult to get both of those things? Gary: Well yeah it is. You've put your finger on an important problem for anybody who is writing. If you want to maintain something of the rawness of the terror, if you want to transmit the terror, you have to be willing not to prettify it. You want the beauty to come from the psychological resolution or aesthetic resolution, but there