he's written great poems about these experiences. Gary: I used to think somewhat whimsically and cynically of Purdy going off in search of blighted moral landscapes as raw material for his poems, and wondered in the end if that's exactly what I was doing as well. It's just that at home here I was involved in all of the political activities: demonstrations against the Vietnam war and all sorts of things in Toronto when I was there. So it just seemed to me an extension of that. I would be wanting to see it as close as I could. What was going on in Chile, and what was happening in China and the Mid East and so on, so I've continued to do that although my Middle Eastern poems Flying Blind, a sequence that I didn't get to read today, is as much a preoccupation with blindness as it is a preoccupation with Israeli-Palestinian politics. I went with John Asfour who is blind. We were like the typical Biblical couple--the lame leading the blind, and the blind leading the lame (laugh). We must have looked like an odd pair with me hobbling along with a back injury and John with a white cane. But it's not surprising that sort of meditating on the notions of blindness that blindness would become a metaphor for the whole political process as well. It was interesting to diversify that whole process a bit deconstructively. Barry: Do you find when you're on these trips that you're taking notes or are you just registering the events for later when you come back? I'm wondering what the writing process is for you? Gary: I'm such a neurotic traveller that when I'm travelling I write almost nothing. When I travelled with my wife and kids, I worried about their safety and looking for the right food and hotels. When I took that group of Canadian writers to China in 1980--Kroetsch and Munro and others--I had to be called the "responsible leader" of this group, and I had to do all the stupid speeches, nonsensical little epic speeches about our hosts, because the Chinese like to have a person in authority. So I got back with nothing, almost nothing (laugh). I could just see all these other six writers soaking it all up, but nothing left for me (laugh); however, a couple of years later I did find that the Teracota Army resurfaced and I wrote those poems. Don: You mention meeting people and travelling abroad and all that. One of the other poems that struck me when I was reading was your poem about Philip Larkin. Was he one of your heroes? Gary: He was not one of my heroes, but someone I admired immensely when I started writing. I don't know that he had any influence on my work, except the influence as an example of somebody who could write a very tight short narrative. I got tired very quickly of the quiet desperation of modern British poetry but Larkin was the greatest of that group. And so I admired him. That poem came as a result not so much of my admiration of Larkin as just the coincidence of my arriving with a group of writers in Hull just three days after he died. I was on this Commonwealth poetry junket and we were to be doing readings