MPR’s Tom Crann interviews poet Donald Hall on the campus of St. John's University. Hall is in Minnesota for a reading at the College of Saint Benedict.
Donald Hall has been writing poetry since his boyhood in the 1930's and was chosen as the poet laureate by the Library of Congress in 2006. On his appointment, he was praised for his "distinctly American" voice. Over the years, he's published 15 volumes of poetry, as well as countless essays. Since 1975, he's lived on his New Hampshire farm, Eagle Pond. He does all his writing there in his ancestral home.
Transcripts
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DONALD HALL: Every now and then in my life as a poet, I have been aware of poetic notions coalescing around a scene or a kind of activity, and I have collected phrases knowing what I was trying to write about.
But that's really been the exception. Almost always, poems have begun for me with a phrase or a sentence or a line or two coming into my head, and I don't know where they're going. I write them down, I follow my commands, but I feel passive to the poem in many ways.
TOM CRANN: I think what I hear you saying is that the poem has to find you, and that it doesn't grow out of some official event or it can't grow out of. And it reminds me of a poem you've written called "The Master," if you could read that for us, please.
DONALD HALL: Happy to. "The Master." Where the poet stops, the poem begins. The poem asks only that the poet get out of the way. The poem empties itself in order to fill itself up.
The poem is nearest the poet when the poet laments that it has vanished forever. When the poet disappears, the poem becomes visible. What may the poem choose best for the poet? It will choose that the poet not choose for himself.
TOM CRANN: In the last week, we have seen with the shootings at Virginia Tech, the name of the poet, Nikki Giovanni, who is on the faculty there-- and almost immediately, even in newscasts, I heard that she was going to be a part of the public, the convocation and all. And what can poetry do in the wake of such horror and tragedy that other disciplines can't?
DONALD HALL: It gives a voice to grief, and it allows the companionship of grief. I have written a great many poems after a death, most particularly the death of my much younger wife 12 years ago, Jane Kenyon, who died of Leukemia at the age of 47.
I wrote a whole book about it, and I wrote it for myself because I needed to write it, because I needed to express my grief as I had been expressing my feelings since I was a child in the medium of poetry.
But I also knew that if the poetry were any good or were good enough, it would serve other people as well. It would provide an embodiment to the feelings of grief and mourning that all of us, alas, must feel from time to time until we become the subject of it.
TOM CRANN: Can we conclude with another poem, please, if you could?
DONALD HALL: Thank you. What would you like?
TOM CRANN: "Revisions."
DONALD HALL: OK, "Revisions." I awoke to a bluish mounded softness where the Honda was. I broomed off the windshield and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart before Amy opened to yank my globe out of a bundle.
Back, I set a cup of coffee beside Jane, still half asleep, murmuring stuporous, thanks, in the aquamarine morning. Then I sat in my blue chair with blueberry bagels and strong Black coffee reading news, the obits, comics, and the sports. Carrying my cup 20 feet, I sat myself at the desk for this day's engagement with the revisions of a whole life.
TOM CRANN: Is that what you have been doing there in New Hampshire at the desk, revising your whole life?
DONALD HALL: Yes, that's what I've been doing for many decades of my life and happily doing it.
TOM CRANN: Donald Hall, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for this insight into your life and work.
DONALD HALL: Thank you.