GB: Another term, one I like, is Recombinative Literature. This is funny; years ago, when I was brash and uncompromising, I said that the artist cannot create; the artist can only rearrange what is here already. So where is the writer located? Well, I like to replace the grade 6 image i remember, with the writer looking at the world and dishing it to the reader. I like the image, corny as it has become, of the writer and reader being so close that they might be the same person. Years ago at a Capilano College reading a student asked me what reader I imagined whilst writing. I said that I always thought of myself as the reader, that that was my activity while writing.

DM: I hope this doesn’t sound naïve, but is the fundamental skill of poetry a skill of observation, i.e. learning to “read” the world?

GB: Not naive, no. But I dont know what the fundamental task is. I think it has more to do with the things you use-syllables and consonants and the like. But reading the world is certainly right, though a bit of an abstract thing to say. Ed Sanders calls it
investigating the world, and he is into investigative poetry. I have said that I am trying to understand the world.