SOURCE: “An Interview with Donald Hall about The One Day,” in Ploughshares, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 71–75.

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...