how to never ask more of the tool than what it can easily slice - that the chip that it makes is - if our work is jumping up and down and we have to tie it down while we're working on it then something is really wrong here because it should be easy and the tool should be sliding and there should be kind of a nice hissing noise as the tool slices through the stock and ... BM: No power. KB: Well yeah, that's one of the immediate things that brings forth then is no power, which means production work, which means making the same thing over and over, but it is known in good carpentry that a skilled workman with sharp tools that knows his work and knows his tools is competitive and always has been competitive and always will be competitive - that if you're making something only once, the hand tool is faster than the power tool. BM: Although you'd think the opposite, if you didn't think about it. It takes a long time to plug something in. (laugh) KB: To set it up. - the set up and making test cuts all the time. (laughter) BM: And having the thing go out of control while you're cutting. KB: Sure. You've got to use 3 times the stock just to make one piece. BM: And hurting yourself in the process. KB: Watch out for your fingers! It's a different kind of work and it's a kind of work that very few people understand. BM: This comes back to the whole idea of poetry - the act of making and in our time I don't know if people creatively make much for themselves. I think we miss the pleasure of that whether it be writing a poem or ... KB: Growing a tomato in tin can. BM There was the occasion of the Storm Warning Anthology edited by Al Purdy which brought a lot of younger poets together in 1971. Your books would have been at that time, Fireweed and The Post Electric Caveman . KB: Ya, that was 71. Fireweed was 67. BM: And then for the group of writers we knew at least in the west, Purdy more or less somehow saw our work and put us in the Storm Warning Anthology. Not too long after that Margaret Atwood showed some interest in publishing a book of your work with Oxford, - but it seemed to me that you had already decided, if not to be as public, not concerned with publication at all. Did that have something to do with being in the north? KB: Even in my teens I was already then leaving the city for periods of time and they gradually became longer and longer and longer until finally I didn't return really for some time, so I think that's sort of where it went and where it is - just longer steps or longer pacing between the times. The moving away from the city was already well in place by that time and there was a choice to not write or publish so much for a few years - a conscious choice, for a period of about 10 years I think. I didn't feel I had any problem with writing versus not writing or anything like that. I just chose not to, mostly because I didn't feel comfortable with a lot of the writing that was being written, I suppose, and I felt conflicted in that in my mind some of the people that I liked to have in mind when I wrote something, were not the same people that some of my colleagues might have in mind and I think that double bind eventually evolved into consciously knowing that I really didn't care very much what some of my rural colleagues might think of my writing. I saw that writing was, in Canada, was geographical as much as anything else and that if you didn't live in the city, you simply didn't publish. You're too far away to go to readings or to be invited to go to readings or to give a reading, and that figured a great deal in publishing and writing.