Don: Interesting too because each character is static, a statue. You have a dynamic relationship with them. Did that emerge later as well? Gary: I guess the ghost behind this is pretty obvious. It's the ghost of The Spoon River Anthology for one thing, by Edgar Lee Master. I read that early on in my career and I think that had some influence on my sense of voice and personae too. As I was writing that I could hear Master's work in the background and if I hadn't known that I don't know whether I would have had quite as much dramatic interplay. I didn't go back and read it while I was writing it, but I must say I've absorbed it at a very deep level, I think, with all of it's strengths and limitations. I guess one side of my interest in poetry has been the theatrical or dramatic side. I was attracted to narrative because I could make things happen that would be disturbing and be noticeable, and that would touch people, so I thought anyway. The lyrical and the dramatic are pulling me, sometimes in different directions. Narrative was a way of resolving those different pulls. I don't think I could ever have been a playwright, although I have dabbled in that area, because I'm more caught up with monologues than individual voices. as you can tell by the way I'm running on here. I can't really work terribly well with characters on stage or with multiple characters interacting, so that was just a sort of moderate attempt within the limits of a polyphonic narrative to exploit as much dramatic interplay as I could. [DON LEAVES THE CONVERSATION AT THIS POINT] Barry: We've found here that Heart of Darkness is a very interesting metaphor for the Canadian north in terms of how the bureaucracy works, and how in isolation all kinds of strange things can happen that would not happen further down the river. At the source of the civilization you don't often see what happens out in the colonies, but of course Conrad reveals what happens up river, amazingly finding out and ironically describing how systems really work. Do you think in terms of this kind of writing, as Brian Fawcett once said, the poem should open up all the burners to include the political and to go beyond the surfaces into how the system works, to reveal how we're capable under that surface of pretty cruel behaviours. I don't see a lot of writing that tries to get to our condition. Gary: I think that's true. When I was a grad student in Toronto I saw an article in the Toronto Star by Nathan Cohen in which he was talking about a Swiss playwright, Durenmatt, who has written a play about the fire bombing of Dresden in which he lays the blame squarely on the Allied Command and Churchill and so on, and he said:"how is it that Canadians are not capable of writing, or getting into the politics of this country?" I think I felt at that moment that it was one of those messages that had been written only for me, and I'd be the only one that would ever notice that question. In response to it, my whole life's work has been an attempt to answer, or to do something about that. It's not been a popular thing to do. It's not been an easy thing to do, and in a way it's doomed to begin with. When a writer is