But anyway, so, how many years was it, five? I was writing poems. And I was in New York and giving a reading. This was sometime in the late seventies. Dan said, I would like to publish your next book with Ecco Press, which he had just started. I said, Dan, I don’t have a book. And he said, I just heard you read an hour’s worth of poems I haven’t heard before. There must be a book there. I said, I’ve got lots of poems, but I’ve no idea for a book. And I was really stuck because I was dead sure that it had to be organized more or less chronologically in the order that I’d written the poems. And he said, Let’s take a look at them, and we went to his place. He had an apartment down on West Thirtieth. A penthouse in the middle of the Garment District. We started to lay out the poems on the floor. And he started moving them around, and I said, See, here’s the problem, you can’t do this, and you can’t do that, and those have to come near the end, and this has to be near the beginning. And he said, Just let me work on this, will you? He laid out all the poems on the floor and started moving them around. He put what I thought were some of the strongest, which I was sure had to come at the end, at the beginning. And he said, I think this is starting to work. And I went into the bathroom and threw up. And came back and looked and said, Actually this does kind of work.
hahaha