DP: Formal love sequences have a certain operatic intensity and idealism 
that might seem out of place in today's cynical world. Your book has this 
kind of intensity and risk taking self exposure, viz.: "I entered the old 
world naked,/broken and battered, my life in pieces/and my heart in 
tatters" ("I followed a lonely road"). How hard is it to reveal yourself 
when the force of society pushes us to conceal? 

KN: Well, first of all, is it really a cynical world? It's maybe a cynical
time in North American society, but I tend to spend a lot of time in
other countries, and sometimes in other languages, where things
don't seem to be cynical at all. And love is certainly another country,
and the language they speak there is different from the language they
are speaking out at the mall.

Yes, the language of love is both operatic and idealistic. Everything 
is intense  and everything matters. A book that was very important 
to me early on was Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. Maybe the most 
important idea I took away from that book is that lovers really mean 
what they say when they say it. Whether they still mean it, or would say 
it, five years later is another matter altogether. What's said in the 
moment is absolutely true, in the moment. And there is great beauty 
and emotion in that. And we live for those moments far more than 
we live for an eventual  retirement in Florida. 

Now, what is it that the force of society pushes us to conceal?
Our vulnerabilities, our suffering, and our sense of the sacred, I would
say. The motivation for concealment would be to protect ourselves
in a hostile world, to pretend to be other than we are, and to keep
what we consider sacred from being trashed. So concealment
would somehow safeguard the private terrain. But you really
can't safeguard the private terrain anyway, and it probably isn't
really desirable to do so, unless one wants to live like Howard Hughes.
So I think it's better to just go out and celebrate our common
humanity and its diverse ways of manifesting. So it is relatively easy
for me to talk about my thoughts and emotions and feelings.
It would be much harder for me not to do so.

DP: What broke you free of that modernist/Eliot notion that poetry
is escape from self expression?

KN: I remember, with great shame, an argument I had with my 
friend Jim Mele thirty years ago. At that time I greatly admired Eliot, 
and he greatly admired William Carlos Williams. We were university 
students, and aspiring poets, and I really thought that Eliot was where 
it was at. And I was being highly critical of Williams, a poet I now 
greatly admire. And maybe we'll now get Pound in here, with his 
"only emotion endures." Although I still admire some of Eliot's poetry, 
I find that there is very little love in it. And there is a vast feeling of 
love for the world and all of its inhabitants in Williams' poetry.

For sixteen years I taught an Introduction to Creative Writing course
and, believe me, I got really sick of self expression, poorly expressed.
If you're emotionally repressed, learning to say how you feel is really
important, as emotional release, but it isn't poetry. That's obvious.
Learning how to say it with skill and precision is the prerequisite
for writing poetry. And really, that's just getting warmed up.

There's an inhuman element in Modernist art. I don't think what
they tried to replace self expression with really worked.
So when Frank O'Hara and the Abstract Expressionists come along,
art gets saved, and we are all free to be fully human again.