rob: Referencing the world doesn't necessarily mean regret, & as Dave McGimpsey says, his poems on Ted Danson will probably live a life longer than mine, with the literary references. I write of the world I live in, which includes plane crashes & trees, phone calls from my mother, cows & Hiroshima, history books & television sitcoms. Ginsberg had a book called 'tv baby poems' that included, among other things, a post-death tribute to Frank O'Hara. Poems about poems & about writing poems get dull real fast, unless you're doing something radically new there, as do the 'I did this, I did that' stuff. Brautigan had this underground stream of hurt that was real, running through his work, & hidden, that I really enjoy reading; a sense of wonder. The kind of work that touches your head & rips your heart out all at once, really lives. Like good writing should - Elizabeth Smart, Roy Kiyooka, Ian Stephens. Find me one without that regret in there, somewhere, & that joy. It's there, in the heart of everything. Even Newlove smiles once in a while.

donato: Crossing currents, of emotion, of syntax, of tone, of alphabet & anecdote, is a key element inyour poetic thought. The effects of sudden & subtle shifts register in my brain as kaleidescop(f)ic, because you accomplish so much of these shifts in short poems. It reminds me irresistably of experiemental film techiniques, that are now commonplace in tv commercials: short films. What kind of impact do you think tv had/has on your writing?

rob: Television has had great effect on what it is I do, aware of the visual as a technique, how the poem or fiction looks on the page. There was an Ian McCulloch poetry book a few years ago I was reviewing, & really liked, but it drove me mad that all the pieces looked almost identical. Where's the fun in that?
I grew up watching television, as an indoor farm boy. Thousands of hours, & a comic book collection now five thousand large. It wasn't until I was in my late teens writing, in our little disassociative group that included writer Clare Latremouille & franco-ontarien playwrite/director Patrick Leroux, that my eventual ex-wife said, if you're gonna write, you gotta read. She spent months throwing books at me, all canlit. Now shethrows different things at me for different reasons. The crossing currents, as you call it, is great fun, since it somehowstill all makes sense in my head as I write. Barry McKinnon suggested to me when we read together in Prince George a few weeks back, that poetry is the closest form to brain function - non-linear leaps around tangentical flips. Yet it still all connects. I wrote a piece about a month ago (since put up at www.greenboathouse.com) called "milk" that mentions both my grandparents & his death, & pornography, mixed in to the same short piece. Figure that one out.

donato: "Milk" is great for that reason: you accomplish all these
associations in a few lines, whereas a lot of poets writing now would take three times as long to move half as far, as if they think the readers aren't willing to dream along with them. Swiftness is, to me, an essential quality in good poetry.