GB: I guess that started in the early sixties. Must have, because the magazine I ran said that it was interested in long poems and sequences. When I was in my early twenties, I was a lyric poet. My model was the short poems of William Carlos Williams. But you can write only so many lyric poems, unless you are Raymond Souster. I noticed, for example, that my great models wrote marvelous giant poems, books: Walt Whitman, Shelley, Pound, Williams, HD, Charles Olson, etc. There must have been a sense that one had to get away from the self that was so much caught up in the lyric, and get toward some other implication of living life. Some pluralism, maybe.Some sense that, as Robin Blaser would remind us, the world,including the world of language, is a lot older than we are, a lot larger, a lot more interesting. In writing a long poem you have to offer your skill, what you might have learned while writing a thousand lyrics.

DM: What do you think of really extreme examples of process-writing, writing against strict rules of play that may even force the suspension of normal notions of ‘skill’? I’m thinking of work like bpNichol’s homolinguistic translations of Apollinaire, or Tom Phillips’ paint-over text A Humument.