Basil Bunting. Nov ’84. Side A

On 20 November 1984, Peter Quartermain conducted an interview with Basil Bunting. This forms part of a larger series of interviews, some of which are also available on the SoundBox Collection website. For the most part, this interview functions as a series of informational queries, requests for the identification of names, how Bunting met certain people, and where some obscure quotations are from in his writing. As Quartermain jokes, “I’m digging up all kinds of rubbish.” A lot of the time, Bunting does not know the answers himself, but occasionally he launches into literary anecdote when, in Quartermain’s words, “we’re still on books. Didn’t I say this would be painless.”—Klara du Plessis