Well we came here and we published books in the same year - 1978 - her first book of poems and my book, called, Kicking the Leaves, and our second books came out the same year. We always swore we wouldn't come out the same year, so we wouldn't be reviewed together but we always did, more or less. It was... it was '86 maybe... I think it was '86 when her second book, which was a kind of breakthrough - The Boat of Quiet Hours - came out, at the same time as a book of mine, called The Happy Man. And The Happy Man, the title of it, I took from some note by Tolstoy, in which he talked about the happy man, and all happiness and he's full of thoughts of suicide, and it's a book with a lot of depressing poems in, but not entirely. When I told Jane, 'I've found a title, I've found a title - I'm going to call it, The Happy Man''. Typical of Jane, she said, 'It sounds too depressed'. And... but anyway I did call it The Happy Man. But at... there was... at this time in my life, as a writer, there was a sort of physical and psychological element than the writing that I... I have talked about in print, and that is that, when I was about 50, something like that, I became an adult onset diabetic, and my diabetes is still with me, and it's very much under control and so on, but it had the effect, gradually, in my 50s of making it impossible for me to sustain an erection. And this was depressing, it was depressing for both of us, of course, and my poems suddenly turned kind of old and resigned, and... it was not... I was not in any deep depression, but it was difficult for both of us, and my poetry became sort of more passive, or old and so on. And I think some of the poems are good that are in this mode, but... I finally solved the problem by having a penile implant surgery, and potency came back. I was always... always orgasmic, but I just couldn't have an erection but I got a permanent one, and it was wonderful, and Jane adored it, and said... kept saying, 'Perkins, what you did for me', and I would point out it wasn't just for her, but, at that same time, my poems got back their liveliness and energy, just because of a bit of surgery, but it's very noticeable. And it was noticeable in what a lot of people think is the best thing I ever did, which was the book length poem.
