| Time | Annotation | Layer |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 - 0:39 | Well I don't know if it's a valid question to you [Roy Kiyooka], because you've put them [the letters in Transcanada Letters] out there and they're there, but I suspect, I don't know if I'm being fair to you people [the students] or not in asking you what, [after] hearing that, [are] your responses? I mean, you [the students] say you haven't read the books and that's fine, but you've heard Roy read some of his letters, and, were you bothered by a lot of things that you couldn't understand because they were private records or even the names of the people he was writing to? Did that cause trouble? I was intrigued for example that you [Roy Kiyooka] didn't bother explaining who Victor was or who any of those people [mentioned in the letters] were. That wasn't important to you in reading the poem so publicly. | Doug Barbour |
| 0:40 - 2:42 | I had the occasion a couple of years ago, just after I met Daphne, of saying to her "I'm sick of reading. I'm tired of hearing my own voice. I'm tired of having to work within structures in which discourse has a very precise limitation, and that [limitation] is time. And most universities are time-machines in that sense. A forty minute reading is nothing really. I mean what can't get said is . . . you know it's forty minutes [unitelligble], but no more than that. If you want more you have to [unintelligible] attend to it unconditionally. Being an artist teaches me that over and over again, and it sets me against aspects of institutional [lies?], which are time-machines, because I think what can therefore be learned within them is conditional, in ways that, I don't know, you have to undo after you've been schooled in order to regain time in a valuable way, essential way, necessary way. | Roy Kiyooka |
| 2:43 - 3:39 | What are you saying specifically about your diaries? Because I found them terribly uninteresting. And I didn't really . . . A few of the things that you were saying I understood, but I couldn't help saying to myself, "so what?" Could you tell me some kind of approach, new and different approach, I could take to writing like yours and your writing that might help me with it? Because I am certainly willing to learn what you want to say, but it's just not happening. | First Student |
| 3:40 - 3:48 | Laughter | Roy Kiyooka |
| 3:49 - 3:52 | Gosh, you got a problem you know. | Roy Kiyooka |
| 3:52 - 3:54 | Laughter | Audience |
| 3:55 - 4:00 | It's not only your writing, it's a lot of modernist writing. I don't understand it. | First Student |
| 4:01 - 5:19 | Well, I've been a teacher a long time and I know guys like you. I've got young kids in the university who, though some part of their consciousness has been shaped by the fact that they were born subsequent to the Second World War, that they have had television in their lives since their infancy, that they've had a large measure of life's comforts given a priori, but their heads nonetheless belong somewhere in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. And that is curious to me. I mean what don't you understand about the language of this moment in time, this moment that you are living in, and what are the impediments to it? | Roy Kiyooka |
| 5:20 - 5:27 | Well personally I think I understand this language in this time that I'm living in | First Student |
| 5:28 - 5:30 | You don't like it? | Roy Kiyooka |
| 5:31 - 5:47 | I didn't say, well, maybe I did. Maybe I shouldn't have said that I don't understand what you're saying. But I don't understand what kind of significance it should have for me. | First Student |
| 5:48 - 5:54 | Well I can't understand that either, of course. How can I understand that? | Roy Kiyooka |
| 5:55 - 6:03 | Right, and what I'm asking you is that -- is there anyway I could find some significance in your work? | First Student |
| 6:04 - 6:09 | Yah, sure. Find yourself. | Roy Kiyooka |
| 6:10 - 6:11 | Laughter | Roy Kiyooka |
| 6:12 - 6:58 | I'm being facetious. It's very hard to find the artefacts or the ideas or the concepts or the images in the world that one can feel an empathy for if they don't, at some deep part of themself, know what it means to be empathetic. Is that an answer? Or is that like my letters? | Roy Kiyooka |
| 6:59 - 7:06 | Your intent in writing it is not to make an intellectualized statement, it is more or less to relate an emotional experience. | Second Student |
| 7:07 - 7:12 | It is to relate an emotional and intellectual complex. | Roy Kiyooka |
| 7:14 - 7:22 | An emotional and intellectual complex? Can you explain that further? What do you mean? | Second Student |
| 7:23 - 7:33 | How much of yourself can you put into a work? A song? | Roy Kiyooka |
| 7:34 - 7:38 | It's the last word there, "complex," [unintelligible]. | Second Student |
| 7:39 - 8:04 | Oh I think everybody is complicated. I don't understand you and you don't understand me, I mean isn't that complicated? Goddamnit! Well okay but there is a difference here. What I'm trying to say is, I'm trying to articulate that complexity. That's what I'm trying to say. That's what I'm trying to do, at this moment. | Roy Kiyooka |
| 8:05 - 8:27 | I found in your letters some of them had some messages in them I could grasp but a lot of them were too personal for me or, you know, most other people to understand. Like when you write a letter you're talking to that person, you obviously have something to say to that person, and it is not necessarily applicable to everyone, or they can't grasp it because they don't know the circumstances that surround it. | Third Student |
| 8:28 - 9:12 | Oh well, if there's one letter in the book that you could get your head around and say, you know, "it speaks to me," then it's the letter I should have written to you, perhaps. I mean, you know, you don't put a big book together like that. [unintellgible], fifteen people are going to come and sing your praise and there would be an absolute consensus that they loved every word of it. Come on now. That's part of some dreadful simplistic notion of the experience of anything. | Roy Kiyooka |
| 9:13 - 9:22 | You're willing to sacrifice, or you're willing to have a reader miss a good portion of that book if something gets through to them, then? | Doug Barbour |
| 9:23 - 9:28 | Well I don't know what I meant for the reader when I put the work together, really. | Roy Kiyooka |
| 9:29 - 9:31 | You weren't worried about a reader then? | Doug Barbour |
| 9:32 - 10:31 | No, you don't put together a book without worrying about a reader, but you may not know who that reader is, in any partcular way. I mean, I didn't put the book together with you in mind or Stephen in mind or any of you in mind, and yet I must have held the notion of somebody in mind. I think the notion of being an artist implictly proposits another. For me it does. | Roy Kiyooka |
| 10:32 - 10:34 | So you do want to reach out? | Doug Barbour |
| 10:35 - 11:11 | Oh yes, of course. But on whose terms? On whose terms? The only ground that I have some certainty about, vis-à-vis whose terms, is my own. I mean I can't possibly have that for you. | Roy Kiyooka |
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