DONALD HALL: Sketching New Hampshire, shaping poets far away
In a New York Times op-ed piece, Donald Hall, U.S. poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, sketches snowy New Hampshire, where the first-in-the-nation primary takes place today. A good read, it’s headlined “Snow Falling on Voters.”
Not so long ago in West Virginia, we used to get Sunday New York Times on Thursday. These days I get the print edition on my front porch the same day it’s published. If I miss something in the print edition, there’s nytimes.com. As the late Gazette Editor Don Marsh used to say, “But I digress….”
What’s this have to do with poetry in W.Va.? Well, the literary heavyweight’s op-ed piece touched off many thoughts, not many of them about politics. I hear what seems like too much about politics, mostly sound bites, not enough in depth, face to face the way so many people have the privilege of doing in the “Live Free or Die” state of New Hampshire.
I think of Hall’s poem “To a Waterfowl,” which I first read years ago about the same time I was reading William Cullen Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl.”
A snippet of Bryant’s poem:
“Whither, ‘midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, … “
And of Hall’s poem:
“Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks applauded you, my poems. These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes, …”
Hence, I’ve always thought Donald Hall is way hip, plainspoken, nobody’s fool, a poetic genius with some solid grounding in history. I remember him wearing a ball cap in the photo that appeared in the American Poetry Review, so candid.
A Hall APR column back in the 1970s warned young poets not to fall for the idea of being gifted but doomed, self-destructive but talented, sensitive but drunk, living that cliche. He encouraged poets to hang onto the idea of health, or so it seemed to me, to be themselves most of all, to make the poem itself more important than staying inside “the circle of peers.” This is something all good artists strive for, I find. If as Emerson says, “every occupation is a correlative for every other,” we learn from every artist — and we all aspire to live artfully, don’t we? — from the banjo musician, the potter, the priest, the counselor, the photographer, the teacher, the rock climber, the listener, we learn the single phrase: “Be yourself.” It’s what all those people on American Idol strive for, what eludes them so, comically sometimes.
In a completely different context, Hall once said in an interview: “Never, never, never show a poem to anybody until you have worked on it in solitude for at least six months.”
That’s a pretty high standard that few seem to follow. Many of my poet friends here in West Virginia and elsewhere take time to revise and revise, and pretty soon our hair’s gray, it’s time for the kids to go to college and not enough poems have been written. We are often worn down by work, without the luxury of an arts grant. We feel the reality of Aristotle’s remark: “All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” Or the reality of Louis Zukofsky’s hoping, “Surely, the tide comes in twice a day.” I think for the working poet who has to keep his day job, and that’s most of us, better to harmonize or at least find balance with Allen Ginsberg’s practice of “first thought, best thought.”
What do you think? I think of the grace of friends trading poems, poems given as gifts, carried in wallets sometimes for years, lines that really mean something to us, not just the constructive critiques, not mere sentiment or worn-out language, but careful images of the only lives we have.
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MORE SCATTERED THOUGHTS, after a day at the day job: A few years ago I loaned “Old and New Poems: Donald Hall” to a writer friend. I considered the book a “must read”….
When Hall was appointed poet laureate back in the summer of 2006, The New York Times noted he had been “a poet in the distinctive American tradition of Robert Frost,” and that he “has also been a harsh critic of the religious right’s influence on government arts policy. And as a member of the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Arts during the administration of George H. W. Bush, he referred to those he thought were interfering with arts grants as ‘bullies and art bashers.’ “
It’s getting late, and I hear that tonight it’s McCain and Clinton. I wonder if anything will ever change on Pennsylvania Avenue. I think I’ll go home and get some rest, wake up in the morning, eat a bowl of oatmeal and work on a new poem, redo some lines, take a walk in our neighborhood. I hold fast to the life “close to the nose,” as William Carlos Williams said. Donald Hall would like it here in West Virginia.
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