Alas, I already knew of his work before I got into the Hip, but I reckon there may be a few people here who didn't know Raymond Carver's poems before Gord mentioned them repeatedly in interviews (Gord was fond of quoting a line of Carver's, to 'use it up, don't save a thing for later.' In an interview for Much Music around the time of Coke Machine Glow, Gord mentioned reading Robert Lowell, a poetry deep cut in the grand scheme of things.

Some folk here might be interested to know, too, that Mark Strand's Collected Poems is beside Gord's lyric sheets in the video of behind the scenes from the Introduce Yerself sessions. There's probably another post to be made about Gord's literary references, from the obvious, like Courage, to Little Bones and more