I'm able now to... to work. I worked very hard for 17 months in a row on a book that is about to come out as I speak, which is a prose book about Jane, our marriage and her death. I think virtually the last time I will write about her... she will doubtless turn up in poems, but I think I'm through it finally. I gave myself to this prose, and I think it's a good book... I worked on it very hard and with great, oh, enthusiasm, excitement. At some point, early in the composition of it, I realized I had the structure and the tone - I knew I could do it - and then it was just a matter of re-writing, and re-writing endlessly so that every page had 25 versions or something... just a prose book. But it... during that time I stopped writing poems. Almost all my life I had worked on poems and children's books and articles and book reviews, you know, all in the same day, but at this point I was just tinkering with some old poems that I was trying to improve... I got out of the habit. And when that book was finished I started very few poems for a year or so, and just lately, some poems have been beginning. I'm working on a Selected Poems now and still tinkering with... with old ones, trying to improve them, but I've also... beginning new poems... some which may finish in time to be in a new Selected Poems, maybe some not. I'm also working on other prose. I do not work nearly so many hours a day as I did when I was younger, and when Jane was alive. When we went freelance and I came here, I worked all the time, obviously, and published four books a year, and six books a year, and I said... thought... first thought was... I'm doing this to support us, so that we can live here together, and Jane can write too. And then my second thought was... don't be silly, it's just an excuse, you just want to write all day long, you like it. And after Jane's death, I stopped writing so much. I no longer write children's books... I've tried but they just don't happen, and I've stopped writing most of my magazine writing, so maybe I was right the first time. But it's also true of course that I'm 76 years old now and, oh, when I stand up from a chair, I know it, and when I walk any further than the mailbox, my leg hurts, and so on. I'm an old man, told that... and probably a decrease in energy there. But I continue to write - old poets never stop, they just get worse and worse. I know that, but I'm trying to not get worse and worse, but I am writing less and less, well... it goes up and down a bit... but I‘m... I'm not writing in great quantity now, and I don't expect to. But then it was just... just two years ago I was working so day and night on the book that is about to come out, The Best Day, The Worst Day - the prose book about Jane - so maybe something like that will take me over again. I can hope so.
