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Donald Hall ’47:
Life
Work
The new U.S. Poet Laureate reflects on his life in letters.
Interview by Maggie Dietz
AST JUNE, EXETER’S 1947 senior class poet became the
nation’s poet.That’s when Donald Hall ’47 was named the U.S. Poet Laureate. Hall’s appointment, at age 77, made official something long understood: his stature as “one of America’s most distinctive and respected
literary figures,” in the words of the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, who announced Hall’s selection. “For more than 50 years, he has
written beautiful poetry on a wide variety of subjects that are
often distinctly American and conveyed with passion.”
Hall’s Exeter classmates would add at least 10 years to that figure. Don Hall was already writing poetry when he arrived at
Exeter in 1944, and he soon became a fixture in, and then
managing editor of, The Review, the Academy’s literary magazine. He went on to Harvard and Oxford, where, in 1953
he received the prestigious Newdigate Prize for his poem
“Exile,” which would, two years later, become one of the title
poems in his first book, Exiles and Marriages. During this same
period, Hall served as poetry editor of The Paris Review.
After further graduate study at Stanford, Hall began teaching
at the University of Michigan, and his literary output grew to
include not only his own poetry, but also anthologies and criticism, short stories, textbooks, essays on baseball and art, and the
first of a half-dozen children’s books.Today, Hall’s collected works
fill three shelves in the Academy Library’s Alumni/ae Collection.
One of those books is String Too Short to Be Saved, Hall’s account
of childhood summers spent on his grandparents’ N.H. farm. In
1975, Hall and his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, left Ann Arbor
planning to “camp out for a year” at this same white farmhouse.They
never left, and Eagle Pond Farm, Hall’s “place of all places,” became
both their home and a wellspring for their work, including Hall’s books
Kicking the Leaves (1978) and Seasons at Eagle Pond (1987). In 1988, his
book-length poem The One Day won both the National Book Critics
Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Then, in 1995, Eagle Pond Farm became a place of mourning. Just a few
years after Hall survived a two-round bout with cancer, Kenyon died of
leukemia. She was 47. Hall poured his bereavement—and his gradual
rebirth—into three books of poetry and the memoir The Best Day The Worst Day.
With his appointment as poet laureate and the publication of White Apples and theTaste
of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006, the past year marked a significant new chapter in Hall’s
life.This spring, he will return to Exeter as part of the Academy’s 75th Harkness Anniversary celebration, and will give a public reading on Monday,April 9.
—Editor
L
Poet Maggie Dietz was the 2002–03
Bennett Fellow at Exeter. For more
about Dietz, see page 35.
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BOB LAPREE
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The Making of a Young Poet
There’s a moment you describe—in the poem “The Profession” and in other prose pieces and interviews—as the one in which you decided to become a poet.You’re 14, you’re in the Boy Scouts, and you
have a conversation with a kid a couple years older than you. Do you mind telling that story?
I went to Boy Scouts one day just to get out of the house—I was a desultory scout—and I took to
talking with a 16-year-old scout, a sophisticated elderly boy who was probably there for the same
reason.We were sort of bragging at each other, and I said that I had written a poem in study hall
that day—this was when I was in public high school, before I came to Exeter—and he said,“You
write poems?” I said,“Yes, do you?” And he said, amazingly,“It is my profession.” He had just quit
school in order to devote himself full time to writing poems.This was in New Haven, CT, so he at
16 knew some 18-year-oldYale freshmen, and as a result I spent some time withYale men—old, old
men—who knew modern poetry very well. Until then I had been writing pseudo-Romantic stuff.
Donald Hall on the
front porch of Eagle
Pond Farm (above),
his home since 1975,
and in the 1947
Exeter PEAN (below).
Right.You loved Poe.
I loved Poe, and then I loved Keats, and I wrote in their diction. Suddenly I found modern poetry through my 16year-old friend and his Yale companions.
So you were in high school for a couple years in Connecticut
and then came to Exeter.What was that like?
Exeter was a total shock, because my public high school
was very bad. I immediately started flunking everything—
everything, that is, except English.
I know you have some mixed memories from your time here, but that you had some support from particular faculty members, such as English instructor Leonard Stevens and his wife, Mary.
I was never in class with Leonard, but he was a dorm master in Hoyt Hall, where I had a single room.
When he would come around to check us in, he’d take the time to talk with me about Gerard Manley
Hopkins or William Butler Yeats or T.S. Eliot, and it was amazing. It was a very conservative faculty at
winter 2007
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NAMES
OF
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HORSES
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with
oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the
mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same
acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, up hill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day, hanging wide from the hayrack.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the window sill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending
to graze,
one October the man who fed you and kept you, and harnessed
you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your
skin,
and laid the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your
ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above
you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your
monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground—old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
From White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946–2006
(Houghton Mifflin Company). Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall.
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The Exeter Bulletin
winter 2007
that time.The general agreement was
that Robert Frost was the only living
poet and that modernists like Eliot
and Pound and so on were all fakes.
So it was wonderful to know
Leonard, who not only loved their
work, but had actually met both Eliot
and Pound—he’d played tennis with
Pound in Rapallo.We could talk about literature together, and
gradually I became almost part of the Stevens’ household.
Hall published his first
book of poems in 1955
(center and right); as
an editor of The Paris
Review, he interviewed
such poets as T.S. Eliot.
Probably one of those teachers who thought Frost was the
only living poet was one who was less supportive, who in fact
subjected you to some ridicule…
Absolutely. This was a man named Chilson Hathaway
Leonard, who had a Ph.D. from Yale and knew a great deal
about literature.When I arrived at Exeter, I was put in a slow
English section as a new boy, but I got bumped up to an
advanced class. Then I heard about the “Three Special”
course that Mr. Leonard was teaching. I was an upper-middler, and getting into his course became a challenge to me. I
brought some examples of my themes to Mr. Leonard and he
allowed that they were sufficient. But he also told me that he
had read my poems in the Phillips Exeter Review [a studentrun creative writing magazine] and he thought they were all
garbage, and did I still want to be in his class. It was a challenge, and I took it. I entered his class, with by and large the
brightest kids at the school, all of whom were probably in
special classes in Latin, which I was flunking. They were
good in class, not because they were especially literary, but
because they were so smart. It was a good class.
At the end of the first term, I pulled my E’s up to D-minuses
so I could continue and come back, but in the middle of the
winter term I flunked a couple of classes, including Latin. I
was cut from the track team because of my grades and put in
mandatory study hall. It was a very depressing time.
Just before this happened, Mr. Leonard had assigned a
free theme; you could do anything you wanted. And I was
challenged, of course, and foolish, and I told him I wanted
to submit my poems. He said, “You know what I think of
your poems.” I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, go ahead if
you want.”Then the grades came out, and at our next meeting he spent the entire class reading my poems aloud and
ridiculing them in front of the brightest boys in school.
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WITHOUT
FROM THE BEST DAY THE WORST DAY / PHOTO BY THE BOSTON GLOBE
Also, he told them that I was flunking out—and
at Exeter at that time we did not know each
other’s grades.
Unbelievable. It seems like particular cruelty.
Incredible cruelty.
Hall and his second wife,
writer Jane Kenyon, had
“a marriage of poetry”
until her untimely death
in 1995.
It’s not the way it is around here now.
No, I’m sure it’s not! Fifty minutes of nothing but my poems, one after
another. At first the other boys laughed with the natural cruelty of adolescence—males stuck in the wilderness—but then they became quiet, too. It
was just an extraordinary scene.We did no literature that day at all; we just
did my childish poems.As we left the class, several of the students patted me
on the shoulder; that was amazing, given the atmosphere of Exeter at the
time, which was not generally supportive.
I went back to my room and wept in rage and fury. I decided then that
I would spend all of my time on poetry. It added the motive of revenge to
my other ambitions.
And years later, you had some revenge, right?
Right—really there are two stories.Ten years after Exeter, I had published a
book that was well-reviewed and my poems were in The New Yorker and so
on.And it turned out that while I was his student, Mr. Leonard had frequently complained about me in the English department room.When I came back
to read my poems at Exeter, his colleagues thought it would be funny to get
him to introduce me. So he did, and I thought briefly of telling the story and
getting revenge—but that was obviously tawdry. So I didn’t do it.
It was much more subtle, the way the revenge came.
It was unintentional. Later I wrote a piece in The New York Times Book
Review about Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils, in which I came up with
a theory of an underlying meaning in the poem, an unconscious meaning.
Toward the end of the piece, I said, “Anybody who thinks my reading has
spoiled the pleasure of the poem never really liked Wordsworth in the first
place, but just a postcard that some English teacher handed around of daffodils blooming in the Lake Country.” I had no recollection of anybody
doing that, much less Mr. Leonard, but a few days later he sent me that very
postcard with a note saying,“Your fingerprints are still on it.” Because I had
not intended the revenge, it was acceptable.
we lived in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation
or animal life only barnacles and lead
colored moss that darkened when months did
hours days weeks months weeks days hours
the year endured without punctuation
february without ice winter sleet
snow melted recovered but nothing
without thaw although cold streams hurtled
no snowdrop or crocus rose no yellow
no red leaves of maple without october
no spring no summer no autumn no winter
no rain no peony thunder no woodthrush
the book was a thousand pages without commas
without mice oak leaves windstorms
no castles no plazas no flags no parrots
without carnival or the procession of relics
intolerable without brackets or colons
silence without color sound without smell
without apples without pork to rupture gnash
unpunctuated without churches uninterrupted
no orioles ginger noses no opera no
without fingers daffodils cheekbones
the body was a nation a tribe dug into stone
assaulted white blood broken to shards
provinces invaded bombed shot shelled
artillery sniper fire helicopter gunship
grenade burning murder landmine starvation
the ceasefire lasted forty-eight hours
then a shell exploded in a market
pain vomit neuropathy morphine nightmare
confusion the rack terror the vise
vincristine ara-c cytoxan vp-16
loss of memory loss of language losses
pneumocystis carinii pneumonia bactrim
foamless unmitigated sea without sea
delirium whipmarks of petechiae
multiple blisters of herpes zoster
and how are you doing today I am doing
one afternoon say the sun came out
moss took on greenishness leaves fell
the market opened a loaf of bread a sparrow
a bony dog wandered back sniffing a lath
it might be possible to take up a pencil
unwritten stanzas taken up and touched
beautiful terrible sentences unuttered
the sea unrelenting wave gray the sea
flotsam without islands broken crates
block after block the same house the mall
no cathedral no hobo jungle the same women
and men they longed to drink hayfields no
without dog or semicolon or village square
without monkey or lily without garlic
From White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected
Poems, 1946–2006 (Houghton Mifflin Company).
Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall.
winter 2007
The Exeter Bulletin
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I’m looking right now at a dashing photograph of young Donald Hall from
the 1947 yearbook, and it says that one of your nicknames was “Itchy”—
do you remember what that was all about?
No, I don’t remember. (Laughs.)
CONVERSATION’S AFTERPLAY
At dinner our first night
I looked at you, your bright green eyes,
In candlelight.
We laughed and told the hundred stories,
Kissed, and caressed, and went to bed.
“Shh, shh,” you said,
“I want to put my legs around your head.”
Green eyes, green.
At dawn we sat with coffee
And smoked another cigarette
As quietly
Companionship and eros met
In conversation’s afterplay,
On our first day.
Late for the work you love, you drove away.
Green eyes, green.
From White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946–2006
(Houghton Mifflin Company). Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall.
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The Exeter Bulletin
winter 2007
It also says you had High Honors, so I guess those failing grades came up.
They did. In fact, at the end of the first year, I shared a prize for
improvement in Latin, and I only had a C—but that was coming up
from an E. So, Exeter gave me a prize for improvement in Latin
when I was only a C student. Eventually, I brought it up to a B.
It sounds like the grades work differently now.
Yes. One English teacher I had later told me that he had taught there
for something like 18 years and in that time he had given three A’s. He
was taking me aside to tell me that if I worked with a special diligence,
I might get an A. I didn’t get an A, I got a B—but I was enormously
flattered by his consideration.A’s were very rare.
The ‘Cellar Hole’ Poets
At 16, you attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury,
which really is extraordinary—you were the youngest poet there, by
many years.
I was the youngest ever there, as I believe.
I love the way you talk about the first time you ever saw Robert Frost.
On the first night there, I was attending a talk at the main assembly hall,
and Frost wasn’t there. But during the speech, I looked out the window
to the right—and this building was on
(continued on page 114)
LAMONT POET PORTRAIT: STEVE LEWIS
Hall’s range as a writer
extends well beyond poetry,
to criticism, fiction, essays
on baseball and art, and
children’s books. In 1991,
he returned to Exeter as
part of the Lamont Poetry
Series (right).
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Donald Hall ’47: Life Work
(continued from page 32)
the top of a hill—and Frost was approaching it. First his head came out of the
ground, and then the rest of his body. It was
as if he were emerging from the ground.
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No. I think probably Collins is talking
about something that has to do with tone—
a straightforwardness—and the thing that
I see is that often the straightforwardness is
a boldness: rage or bawdiness or impatience. When I think of your book-length
poem “The One Day,” I certainly don’t
think “simplicity.”
You spent time with him then, and at other
times. Did Frost, in person, meet your
expectations?
He really did for me. He was
very kind to me; he did not
have that reputation always, but
he was kind and he encouraged
me. He read a prose book of
mine called String Too Short to Be
Saved (this was in Michigan years
later), and he told me that
because I had written that book I
could do anything in poetry I
wanted to do. Part of that remark
was certainly that I wasn’t already
doing it.
Frost had—and at times still has—the
popular reputation of being “simple.”
He was very sophisticated and witty—
and very competitive. One time when
he was visiting Ann Arbor, where I was
teaching at the University of Michigan,I
pointed to a classroom and said it was the
room where I taught.
And Robert Frost, so many decades
older than me, had to compete with
me. He said, “They didn’t make me
teach when I was here.” It was hardly a
heavy remark; I just was amused.
Billy Collins, one of your predecessors as
poet laureate, said in his review of your new
selected poems, White Apples and the
Taste of Stone, that you write in a Frostian tradition. He cites “simple, concrete diction,” “no-nonsense sequence of declarative
sentence,” and “simplicity.” I don’t really
think these characteristics are part—or certainly not all—of a Frostian tradition. I
don’t mean to take Mr. Collins’ words out of
context, but I don’t think those characteristics define your work either.
Not all of it.There are some poems that it
could describe. For me, the miraculous
style of Robert Frost had to do with the
way in which he fitted the English sentence across the English line, his use of
meter. When I use meter, which is fairly
rarely, I don’t resemble Frost.
114 The Exeter Bulletin
winter 2007
Yes. It would be.
It’s a remarkable poem, and I think that
maybe it reflects some of those qualities
that Collins points to.
Yes, I think so, too—I thought of it when
you quoted him.
I want to talk a little bit about what it was
like to cull 60 years of poems into
White Apples and the Taste of
Stone.
Very difficult. I made a sample manuscript and sent it out to three friends
who could be counted on to read
through so many pages. Several of them
suggested poems that I had omitted; I
added some poems from my friends’
recommendations.
The poems are under different section
titles; you didn’t arrange the poems by
book, as they were originally published,
but they’re roughly chronological. How did
you decide on that arrangement?
With the sections I could begin and end
with a poem I found exemplary of the period and call attention to those poems. Also,
there were so many revisions, poems that
were published at one point but revised
later, which fouled up the sequence.
Hall’s Eagle Pond Farm has inspired poems,
essays and even the front cover of one of his
children’s books.
No. By no means.
When I think of a poem like “Without,”
I don’t think of sequences of declarative
sentences...
No…A lot of people have made the comparison with Frost, and mostly it seems to
come down to subject matter—writing
about the abandoned farms of New England.
Cellar holes.
Cellar holes—yes! At Harvard, Robert Bly
called me “the cellar hole poet.”
When I was working with Robert Pinsky
on the Favorite Poem Project, we received
many letters about different poems you’ve
written, but the most common beloved
poem was “Names of Horses.”
You’re a famous reviser; you even revise
sometimes as you’re giving readings.You’ve
said your poems sometimes go through
hundreds of revisions. Revision for you
seems more important to the writing
process than the initial laying down of lines
or words.
Yes, the first drafts are uniformly horrible.
Did you find yourself revising or wanting to
revise poems for this collection?
I did. Some of them were old ones, where
I just took out the word “then” or the
word “the,” tightening up a line when I’d
had some word that didn’t really need to
be there. There weren’t major revisions,
but there were little ones here and there
all the way through.
With, and Without
I hope we can talk a little bit about your
marriage to Jane Kenyon. People are so
curious about it. It’s probably the most
famous marriage of poets since Sylvia Plath
and Ted Hughes…
Yes, and very different.We had our solitude
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in the country, for instance, for 20 years of
that marriage. The two of us lived very
separate lives during the day when we
were working in our separate rooms, and
then got together midday. I would read to
her in the afternoon, and we would sometimes play Ping-Pong, but then get back to
work again late in the afternoon. It was a
marriage of poetry; at night, we often
talked about poets—things we were reading. That’s not all we talked about; we had
a normal life, we had friends and we had
our nap times. But it was a life of double
solitude, as I’ve often called it. We both
liked to be alone, and we were alone a
great deal of the time. Sometimes in the
morning we would meet getting another
cup of coffee, and we wouldn’t even speak,
we’d just sort of pat each other and go
back to our work.
It’s no wonder that people romanticize the
marriage—it is romantic.Your lives were
so integrated and close, and yet artistically
distinct.You talk about the silence between
you during times when you were working.
Do you feel silences differently now at
Eagle Pond Farm?
They’re more pervasive. I have my ladyfriend with me right now, as a matter of
fact, but she’s not here normally. She has
children, and lives an hour away. Most of
the time I am totally alone.
What is your writing time like these days?
I’m not writing much right now. Old age
seems to have crept up on me.
And people are constantly hounding you
for interviews…
Yes, yes…well not so much lately, but last
summer it was every day.
Do you still have a dog?
No, no longer. Gus lived another five years
after Jane did but then he had the usual
problems with hindquarters and couldn’t
get around anymore. I scattered his ashes
on Jane’s grave, as I told her I would do.
Many of the more recent poems in White
Apples bubble with humor and new love;
the tone is so changed from some of the
more raw, really excruciating poems about
grief in the collections Without and The
Painted Bed.
It’s been 12 years now almost [since Kenyon
died].
1:17 PM
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The poems are fun…the old poet finally
gets the girl!
“Olives.”
And“Conversation’sAfterplay”—I remember seeing it in The New Yorker a while
back and being delighted by the delight in it.
There’s even love—young people making
love—at the grave in “Tennis Ball.” So, it’s
quite a turn. How does it feel to you to have
that as the conclusion of the book?
It’s more of an affirmation of life and life
continuing despite the grief and the horror of Jane’s death. But I didn’t plan it that
way, my life took me that way and then I
expressed it. I realized that it would be
offensive to some people, but so be it.
Eagle Pond Farm remains a joyful place
for you.
Yes.
And you’re not going anywhere?
I’m not going anywhere.
The Writing Life
When you originally arrived there in 1975
it was supposed to be for a year’s visit; you
took a break from your tenured job at the
University of Michigan, and then what
happened?
My grandmother died,at 97.When we were
first moving into her house, she was in an
old folks’ home with Alzheimer’s. We had
been planning for a couple of years to take
out a mortgage and buy the house after she
died. At that time, we were just coming to
camp out for a year, and then go back to
teaching. But now the place was free to us.
On about September,Jane started to say that
she didn’t want to go back to Ann Arbor at
all. She said that she would chain herself in
the root cellar rather than go back,and I was
moved. But I also had one child in college
and one not yet in college and I was terrified about money. So I hesitated. But, in
December, finally I made up my mind and
wrote a letter to the University of Michigan
resigning my position.They tried to spoil it
by rejecting my resignation and giving me
another year’s leave instead, but my mind
was really made up.We had to go back to
Ann Arbor to move out the following summer. The bookcases were built while we
were gone, and we moved in.
At first, I worried about money quite a
bit. Every now and then the payments
would be coming up and I wouldn’t have
made any money.… But I worked very
hard. I worked on children’s books and
textbooks and anthologies and all sorts of
things; I worked on magazine pieces,
which I could then collect into books later.
There were many years in which I published four books—maybe one was a revision of a textbook, maybe one a book of
poems, another one a children’s book,
whatever, all sorts of things, collections of
essays. I worked all day, and I loved doing it.
I told myself at the time that I was
doing it to support Jane and me so that she
wouldn’t have to get a job, and I could just
write all day and cash in on it. I worked on
poems first thing in the day, but after that I
moved to other things that made money.
Of course, I departed the farm from time
to time to do poetry readings, which contributed to the family income. I was very
busy, and I loved it. I loved the work.
Quite a different life from the teaching life.
Right. I could get sort of chilled out with
working on poems, working an hour or two
in the morning, but then I would pick up
something very different, like an article for a
magazine,and I would come alive again with
a new task. I think that writing so many
things helped me write so many things.
You’ve had some milestones lately.The big
book, and the laureateship, which feels like
it was long in coming.
It was kind of late in coming. (Laughs.) I’m
feeling my old age.
There are many misconceptions about the
U.S. Poet Laureateship: that the poet is
chosen by the President; that the position’s
honorarium is funded by tax dollars; that
the laureate writes poems for particular
American occasions.
All misconceptions.
And the biggest one perhaps is that the poet
laureate must have some project. But that
isn’t true. It’s an honorary position, and
the only duties of the laureate are to plan a
reading series at the Library of Congress
and to give a couple readings there.
And choose a couple of fellowships.
You’ve certainly done a great deal throughout your life.
I’ll also be doing a series of poetry readings for the Bob Edwards show, which is
on XM satellite radio. GIG
winter 2007
The Exeter Bulletin 115