Way back, in the early '70s, when Jane and I were first married, I had had this onslaught of lines of... of poems which I thought of as being the start of a book length poem. And gradually here over the years I began to work on that. It was hard for me to look at it... a lot of the material was very painful in the original generation, and then I began to see how to put parts of it together. It... the book that eventually... eventually I wrote is in three parts, and the first part uses most of that material that... that came up when I was driving the car and pulling over to the side of the road in Ann Arbor. And at some point - I can't tell exactly when, it might have been 1980, 1982 - I had made that material into something like 30 sections of three pages each. And I worked on it hard, and one afternoon I read it all to Jane, and when I finished reading it, I felt an overwhelming sense of shame. Partly the material was shameful, but it was also that I knew it wasn't going... it wasn't working. I took it back, I couldn't look at it for six months, and then I went back to work on it, and I finished essentially the first part, and published it in The Happy Man, because at that time I didn't think I'd ever finish it. I had a vision of something much longer, but then came the operation and the access of energy, and I was able to write the whole book. I came up on schemes for the different parts - the three parts which were in balance. The... the book is modernist in its construction, in the sense that I think there is a lot of Ulysses... it's obviously not noticeable... Ulysses in it, and The Waste Land has it's structure essentially based on the modernism of Joyce and I grew up with Eliot and Joyce and so on. So I think that The One Day - the eventual name of the book - is a book in that tradition, a very late version of it obviously, that came out in, well I guess, maybe 1988, I'm not sure about my dates right now. But it won a bunch of prizes and a lot of people - it has probably sold less than any book of mine - it's difficult... it's a single, more or less sustained, book length poem, but it's... it continues to be praised and to be written about, and called my... my best work - certainly the most ambitious. I don't really know, of course, that it's the best. But that was a major work taking from the beginning to the end, it was about 17 years, but of course I didn't work on it all the time - I put it away - scared to look at it some of the time, but I'm so pleased with it - that one.
