SOURCE: “Keeping the World Going,” in Ohio Review, No. 46, Spring, 1990, pp. 116–28.

In the following excerpt, Looney offers a positive assessment of The One Day, complimenting the poem for its sense of wonder and beauty.

In “Toward a Changed Poetics,” the final chapter of Praises and Dispraises (1988), Terrence Des Pres wrote that “Writers must, it seems to me, vote to see the world keep going.” About this there can be no sane argument. What is arguable is how writers must go about casting that vote. If the imagination is, as Wallace Stevens suggested, “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without,” a “pressing back against the pressure of reality,” then Terrence Des Pres' call for a poetry of witness to the horrors, political and personal, of the twentieth century may be self-defeating. If, as Des Pres suggests it is, the horror of this century is primarily...