around England and we went to Hull just 3 days after Larkin had died, so it was like coals to Newcastle bringing us to that place, and I picked up a few anecdotes about Larkin that sort of fed into my own memories of my first reading of his work. That's how that poem came to be. Barry: He was very cheap I heard. Gary: Well there is a great story of Douglas Dunn who was writer in residence at Hull, and he wanted to meet Larkin and Larkin was a curmudgeon. He hated poets! Douglas Dunn was told if you want to meet Larkin, make sure you don't ever talk about poetry. You can talk about jazz and anything else. So they arranged this meeting and left the two of them in the pub. Finally after a few beers, Larkin leans across the table and says, "there are too many poets in this university. Your job as writer in residence is to get rid of them." (Laugh). Barry: My problem with Larkin was with his jazz writing and jazz criticism. His jazz book was a compilation of all of the reviews that he wrote. When he got to the bebop era, he wrote that he hated Charlie Parker; he thought his playing was noise. Larkin was really conservative. At that point Parker was the new world in music, so Larkin was not understanding or sympathetic to the form or the sound that was coming out of America in the forties. Gary: Larkin's emotional range is so narrow. But within that he does wonderful work. But I got tired in the end. I wished that he'd learned to use personae and write other kinds of work and try to do broader things but, he just seemed so narrow in the end, that I lost a lot of interest in his work. Don: Have you been influenced by British poetry very much? Gary: I think I was influenced quite a lot by Auden and by--well, Pound was an American, but I suppose by Pound, sure--his Chinese translations. If you read Letter of the Master of Horse--in some of those poems you can hear his Chinese translations in the back of there. The prosody is similar and the voice is not entirely remote from "Musee des Beaux Art" and some of Auden's more political pieces. A bit of Yeats. Oddly enough, in the last five or six years I've been back in the U.K. quite a bit and I've actually been feeling out metrics and syllabics again and playing with a bit more formal stuff than I would have earlier. I think I just felt the need of pulling things together a little bit more in my work. Barry: Although the Orkney piece that stuck out for me today contradicts that in a sense. Gary: Well that's true. The Flying Blind book that's about to come out has some experiments in metrics and in syllabics and