were not contentious, I mostly used invented names--mixed up names of people. When I was in China I had to do the same thing. Don: I had a friend who was raised in Chile and he told me when he was a child the school wall had pictures of children burning in hell as a reminder that this would happen to you if you disobeyed the authorities--and it must have been very difficult for people raised in that culture to stand up to this kind authority. That takes a particular kind of courage Gary: Was this pre coup? Don: Yes. Gary: Well Chile also has one of the greatest or strongest democratic traditions in all of Latin America. It's an extremely sophisticated society. Voting Allende in, with that left-wing coalition government, was a major breakthrough in its own right. So I would say that the Catholic hell-fire tradition is balanced in a way by something moving towards a democratic system. I don't know what happened. I think the Americans fiddled with the whole thing. The CIA was deeply involved in the coup in Chile. We know that from the movie Missing and from reports that have come out in freedom of information and through the releasing of documents. We know things that were said by Reagan and by Nixon at that time, and by the U.S. ambassador of Chile who said, "we'll do everything to bring this regime to its knees as soon as Allende is elected". And Peter Dale Scott wrote a book of poems called Waiting for Jukarta. He's the son of F.R. Scott and teaches English in California. The great massacre in Jukarta was engineered, in part, by the CIA in Chile when the word was out that there was going to be a major military coup. The password that moved around amongst the officers in the Chilean airforce and army was, "Jukarta is coming, Jukarta is coming". In other words, they were hyping the fear that there was going to be a slaughter of the officers to get the officers to go and do the same to other people. Barry: Atwood in that poem writes that every time she hits the key of a typewriter another bomb goes off, and another village explodes--an interesting metaphor that expresses the guilt that we have to be reminded of all the time. I was also thinking of the tradition of Canadian poets travelling and writing about their experiences. Did it start with Birney and Purdy? Gary: Birney was certainly the first big traveller. Barry: And Purdy admitted pretty clearly that if he hadn't travelled he wouldn't have written very much. He felt that he had to go further out in the world and experience these places;