[In the following interview, Hall discusses the process he used to write The One Day and the events that inspired the poem.]

[Myers:] Your work on The One Day lasted more than a decade, I believe. How long exactly?

[Hall:] It was sixteen years from the time I started the poem—not knowing what I was starting—until I finished it. (I'm always tempted to put quotations around the word, when I say “finished,” because, when I have a chance to republish anything, I tinker.) I wasn't working on it all that time. After the initial onslaught of language, I worked on it very little for the next eight or nine years; I looked at it, every now and then, resolved to get back to it … and then I quailed, and closed the book. I was frightened of the material; I was also frightened by the magnitude of the task, but the first fear was greater.

Did you know at the start that you were working on a poem that would run fifty pages?

No, because I did not know what I was working on. It felt like something big, something long, but I did not know—I did not have any notion—what it would turn out to be, or if it would turn out to be anything. In my head, I called it Building the House of Dying, and this was before I used the phrase when I wrote “Kicking the Leaves.” As I was drafting that poem, in haste and excitement, that phrase popped into a line—and I knew where it came from. Maybe at the moment of composition, I thought that “Kicking the Leaves” might be a part of Building the House of Dying.” I'm not sure. At the beginning of anything, I'm not sure of what will happen or where I'm going.

In the explanatory note you've attached to The One Day, you say, “The poem began in the fall of 1971” (my emphasis), and referred to having written the poem as though you were taking dictation. Have there been other poems, long poems, that came at you like this?

A good many poems have started as if I were taking dictation. At some point in my mid-twenties, I demanded that I understand a poem before I write it—a brief aberration. Beginning with “The Long River” and possibly earlier, in 1957 or '58, I was willing to write down any language that came heavy-laden, whether I knew what it was about or not.

So you, personally, haven't needed to know what you've wanted to say?

Not at the beginning. Generally, by the time I finish a poem—often years after I start it—I have a good idea of what I've said. I don't know what I want to say until I say it; and then I cannot be sure that is what I “wanted to say” before the words came.

But, from time to time, I have something like paraphrasable content in my head before I begin to write. Poems begin any way they please. I am more interested in poems that begin mysteriously—or possibly in mania—as if they were dictated.

Right now I'm working on a long thing, which is at the moment sixty-six ten-line poems. These ten-line units do not resemble the bricks of The One Day in anything but number. The language is different, and unlike anything I have ever written. Certainly these came—over an extended period, however—like dictation. Maybe they are no good but they excite me. A working title is My Life and Times—because these poems seem to have absolutely nothing to do with my life and times.

I want to return to your word “dictation”—a word I believe Jack Spicer used in the same way. What is the source of dictation? From where do these works and poems come?

I don't know. “Dictation” is a dead metaphor that declares that you feel passive to the flow of words: I've also called it receiving messages from the mother ship—more passive receptivity. When you speak of “the unconscious mind,” you've said nothing. Freud's unconscious can't talk, so calling it the source of language says nothing.

But parts of the mind are always asleep, always dreaming; many sorts of mental activity continue, without alert awareness or with infrequent awareness. I observe things come into my brain, whole, and sometimes understand that they are made of parts that have combined somehow and somewhere. Sometimes I feel as if I can encourage a benign receptivity that stimulates combinations. Often when I look later at language that has come “as if dictated” I can identify bits and pieces—sources in experience, in things overheard, in ruminations, in reading. It is like looking at the new baby and saying the forehead comes from Uncle Charlie, the nose from Great-Grandmother Belle …

Did you begin “Kicking the Leaves” the same way?

It began almost automatically, or at least rapidly; I was at least partly aware, in that poem, of what I seemed to be talking about. “Eating the Pig” came in such a rush that I actually dictated a prose-rush of language onto a tape. Later I labored the paragraphs into lines at my leisure.

You speak of The One Day as something of a happy accident, “impulse validated by attention,” though we know an imposing talent was behind it. But The One Day does read as though it was written in the way the long modernists poems were written: by a piecemeal process of composition, and with no deliberate intention. It succeeds, for me, through allowance of subject matter: You've permitted what came into it to stay.

When I used that phrase, “impulse validated by attention,” I was not talking about a happy accident. I'm talking about working over the texture of its language. Impulsively, I set down a word or a phrase or even a series of lines; “impulsively” means I do it rapidly, in excitement, without malice aforethought, intuitively—in a manic state. By inspiration. But I don't just leave it there on the scattery page; I attend to it. I look at it every morning for one thousand mornings. After the eight-hundred-and-second morning, I find that I don't like this word, take it out and impulsively put in another. After the nine-hundred-and-sixty-second morning, I remove the new word and restore the old one. On the one-thousandth, two-hundred-and-thirty-second morning, I realize that two words here and two words there link up with seven words eight pages later in the manuscript … and I am pleased with myself.

Impulse is creation; attention is critical intelligence.

Would The One Day seem, to you, too discontinuous without those uniform units of ten lines?

Yes … finding that brick, after working on the poem steadily, over four or five years, was a major breakthrough. Before that, as I remember, it was a series of thirty-five free verse poems of several pages each. … You would recognize patches, in that old version, but it was no bloody good.

When I found my unit and my shape, the language improved. Finally everything in a poem has to happen at once, with an effect of joyous or possessed spontaneity. But in composition the lucky strikes accrue separately and bit by bit.

When Keats wrote the Odes, he invented that stanza by reference or maybe by association to the sonnet. I think the stanza sprung him loose. Not to compare myself to the glorious dead, I think that the shape of my stanza, and the sense of what it could contain—how it could live by itself or set a sequence—sprung me loose.

FROM MY LIFE AND TIMES

“A HISTORY OF SOLITUDE”

Before there was anything else, solitude
filled space in the form of gas—lavender,
thin, smelling like mouthwash. When solitude
studied itself in school, it turned into
a sphere the size of a ball bearing,
unbreakable, yet soft as beans soaked
to make soup. When it grew old, solitude
sprouted leaves like the winter oak's. Dead,
its molecules dispersed through space
emitting perfumes of rectitude and prospect.

“A THEORY OF WOE”

Harm soup simmers on each body's woodstove
where gelatin soaks from shinbones
and combines with effluence from cabbages
of loss to build gray froth. Nouns
of perpetual accumulation sip woe
three times a day from a wooden spoon
as machines doze in the separated hayfield.
There are no shadows in this blue country.
Woe's nutriment nourishes. Scum feathers
gather on harm soup in the dolce twilight.

“A HISTORY OF HISTORY”

Gibbon, Tacitus, and Thucydides fished
from a rowboat while it rained
oysters. “Look,” said Tacitus, “it's
pouring Rome's grief on my temple.” “No,”
said Gibbon: “Phyllis has emigrated.”
History takes correction from immaculate
leopards who remain alive—but history
retains nothing; it stuffs fact stew
into its face, vomits, and gorges again,
as the guitarist plays “mournful melodies.”