modern Canadian verse - Moving in Alone. KB: It affected me deeply, that book. When I was living across the street and down the block from John at the time, I didn't know him. He was certainly around a lot. I'd see him around. I would stand back from him. I got to know who he was, what he looked like and so on, but I'd sort of stand back. The book affected me really deeply and I wrote I think a lot like John for a long time. I was concerned about it then because I didn't really want to write like John, but I liked his subject matter and I liked the way he wrote so that's what I did, I think, for a few years. BM: What you might have picked up is a kind of seriousness from Newlove. KB: The spareness of the prairies. The sense that there was a great sky over everything that he wrote somehow. The sense also of an older man with a hammer beating on a rusty nail that wouldn't go into the wood. (laugh) BM: Great clear drama in his work: " do you remember the town you were ruined in" - lines like that. He writes with clarity and strength - a good model for a young poet to follow, with envy, to think that somebody could say that much in some of those short poems. KB: And usually there was stuff in his writing that would indicate where he was hanging out in the library, so I sort of learned from that a little bit and we, my friend Bob and I - we were the next, the next in line I guess after John in a way. We did what he did. BM: Ya, there is that sense of somebody ahead of you, who makes an easier way of it in some ways KB: Oh for me it was so - sure, because I felt that my family and my community had utterly failed me on virtually all levels, and so I didn't have a sense of belonging to anything and through other men who wrote verse I felt that I was part of a family and felt that I was really just in line, and so they became a kind of family. BM: I guess these people you've been talking about would have constituted the Vancouver poetry scene at the time: Newlove, Gilbert, and ... KB: For me it was more Jaimie Reid and Milton Acorn and Al Purdy and sort of a scene that was more like Hastings Street poetry. I think I learned more from Purdy and Acorn and watching Milton knowing where he went and what he did. Some of the other names, even now, are fading ... Joe Rosenblatt ... BM: He came west I think in 67, although those books from Coach House and Contact, were coming out from the east. You mention Layton and Cohen. Their books were available at the time. KB: Ya it was interesting. I liked the poems of Fred Cogswell, I remember, and of course Louis Dudek. Sometimes I liked - not too much - who was the man who was the banker? BM: Raymond Souster. KB: Raymond Souster was someone - I liked his poetry. It had a sense of being Canadian that I liked. Just those images of him raking leaves, and I think those were good times. BM: Standing at the bus stop, working at the bank - the feeling of botched humanity in those really short poems. There seemed to be so much energy during that period - great work, and as you say you seemed to became a part of the next generation from that. KB: I felt I had my place. It was like a feast hall, like the Gitsan feast hall. I had my place,each of us had our place and I really felt good and ok in those days. It doesn't feel that way now so much. BM: Jaimie was kind of a wild guy wasn't he? He got pretty heavily involved in politics.