produce on a regular basis. It was around the time I took the U of O course, in 1991, that I started writing a few hours every day. But to find people who knew what I was doing, to be able to cricitize, usefully, that's taken years, & is ongoing. (Remember, I'm in a city who's poetry is defined by ARC magazine.) It wasn't until I started corresponding with Ken Norris in 1993 & Judith Fitzgerald in 1995 that anything useful started coming back to me; people who knew what I was attempting, & then able to tell me how to improve, or at least tell me that, yes, it is good, worthwhile, & useful.

donato: One development I've noticed over the course of your books is an evloving relationship of the poet-narrator to his personal pain. In 'Notes on drowning', as you said yourself, the poet is struggling with the forces that overwhelm us. The title tells us that the struggle isn't always successful. The next book, 'bury me deep in the green wood', although an image of the poet's death is again evoked in the title, a greater calm has descended over the words. At times, the poet seems at peace. These changes, do they reflect an evolution of your relationship to writing? Has writing proved more useful to you as a probe into the meaning/sources of pain, or as a shelter, a safe space for the embattled consciousness?

rob: I think all writing has an edge of personal therapy, no
matter how peripheral, even just a poem on a disturbing street scene, or something on tv. It's the equivalent of saying that all writing, or all relationships, are political, which they are, under certain light. I do my best thinking on paper. I've written about a number of subjects to get them out of my system, but it's getting them to work as poems that become the tricky part. 'bury me deep in the green wood' was me working through to figure out what it meant to be from my particular stretch of the planet, the green earth that started & will probably finish me. I've currently got an unpublished ms, 'some breaths' that sequels, going back & touching certain themes of the home & bone in a more mature way, writing-wise, years later.

donato: When you can feel the currents of history (capital "T" Time) flow into your personal life you can feel part of the unfolding of things, and not really alone. It makes me wonder how you feel when poets use white-hot materials lifted from other peoples' lives, such as stories of sexual abuse, to adorn their own work. It often seems to me unnecessary, & much like psychic robbery.

rob: Well, "lifting" (as you call it) only works if there's an element of the personal inside, or something there to draw the reader in. Patrick Lane's poem "IF", about the woman in Tijuana who fucks a burro on stage to feed her starving family, how he writes "you are naked / and I no longer want you", how the narrator with his (about to be former) lover feels like the audience who laughed, as the burro dropped the (other) woman to the floor. Brutal, but an outside point brought in because he made it relate to the personal point of view of the narrator, & what he was feeling. Everything has the potential of being done badly, & usually is. It ain't robbery if its absorbed, properly.