DM: I'm interested in the way you tend in your poetry to stay
terribly close to the surface of the page. In books like Allophanes and His Life, while being very different in many ways, the contrasting or comparing of the textures of the different sentences or thoughts seems to be one of the keys to the poetic.

GB: That is for certain. I come from logic and experience. From
close-reading the world. All my childhood I was told in lots of
subtle and overt ways that the deeper you dig the more truth you will find. The word "profound" is prejudicial. The Freudians love the notion of getting below the surface. The word "superficial" is a cheat. I have for years seen that people try to read literature and people and the world by distrusting the surface and digging for the more important. They miss so much with that kind of dismissal. Olson was right when he wrote in a poem that "one loves only form." How could it be elsewise?
DM: You have passages in many of your poems that carry information, but no so called “concrete” content, no mention of objects wherein ideas are supposed to reside. In His Life that tendency is especially strong, but it’s visible much earlier as well. To me it is a marvellously lucid use of words. A poet skilful enough seems to be able to carry verse by voice alone.

GB: That was a progression and a hope, I think. Over the years I
became more and more persuaded of the materiality of words
themselves. Yet I never wanted to fall into the use of abstract
words, the ones we were so long ago warned off, and I have never wanted to go as far into their space as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets would go. I am still a sucker for the image, but I am not satisfied with a poetry that just returns us to the world.

DM: It runs the danger of becoming merely documentary, or a kind of featherweight philosophy set into a narrative. Other mediums exist that perform documentary and speculative/explicative functions far better than poetry can.