pleased with what I was learning and what I was being reminded of by that kind of work, but the ... It's not natural and easy for me . Barry: When the forms start to break, that's when I get interested. Gary: I think what happened to me was that the Middle Eastern stuff, the politics, the blindness and the whole experiential side of that text was so pressing that the poems that came out felt really information-laden to me, and so I shifted rather abruptly from that to some really tight syllabics in the manuscript. And through doing those two things--the sort of journalistic and the almost metrical, syllabic kind of work, I recovered a bit of my old energy, and I think it shows up in some of the Orkney pieces. Don: You spent a lot of time in Montreal. Have you had any Montreal influences, say from the Preview or First Statement era? Gary. No. I mean I knew all of these people by reputation and a few of them personally, Frank Scott and others, but I think I couldn't help but be influenced by some work by Scott, who was also quite influenced by Auden. But I had to read all of these people as an editor. I'd read them long before I ever met them, or before I ever went to Montreal. So by the time I was in Montreal, the scene had pretty much shifted. There was Dudek in retirement, Frank Scott just about dying, and Layton was off doing other things; he's now back in Montreal. So the scene had really shifted and what was most apparent at that point when I arrived in 1978 was a group of writers around Vehicule --Andre Farkas and Ken Norris, and most notably David Solway, I think the best poet of that group, and Michael Harris, who is also quite good. They were the group that was in prominence in Montreal at that point. And they spawned a lot of magazines and presses and activity and anthologies. I was not a part of that scene. They came to see me once or twice. But I seemed to have managed, sometimes with considerable cost to myself, to be absolutely on the outside of everything that's been going on in literary terms in this country. I became a publisher, and I met a lot of writers. I was at UBC while Tish happened, but I wasn't writing at that time,and so I missed all the different schools and fashions and so on. I just chugged away at my own speed and have felt in some ways that that was--I wish that I'd been involved with some groups but I never was. Don: How is Montreal right now? Is Anglophone poetry still doing ok? Gary: There's a huge amount of activity in Montreal. The performance poets are going to beat the band, and every night of the week there's something happening in Montreal. A lot of students come to Montreal because it's a romantic place to be. It's cheap. You can live there. And they stay on after they've finished their degrees at Concordia and McGill. I don't know whether they get work. I don't know how they survive, but there's a huge contingent of them there. I think there's more