The Rebel Poet
The stange saga of Donald Hall
By Dan Szczesny dszczesny@hippopress.com

It’s tempting to paint a picture of Donald Hall in the context of a “New England Poet.”

In fact, since the 77-year-old Wilmot resident was selected in June as the nation’s next poet laureate, that’s the image the press has most gleefully embraced. The next Frost. A rural wise man, living on a farm and commenting on the weather.

Not quite.

When he was 16, Hall did meet Frost. He does live on a beautiful white farm that once belonged to his grandparents. And the weather? You bet he’s written about that.

But Hall is an open wound, a fearless and opinionated poet who has reached a level of distinction and prosperity so out-of-sorts with the typical life of a poet that he’s nearly an institution in and of himself.

You want to think of Hall as a regional poet? That’s fine with him. He doesn’t care about that stuff anymore. All he wants to do is write poetry, then get up on a stage someplace and read it.

Since his beloved wife Jane Kenyon died in 1995, Hall has stripped all his work right down to the nerve endings. Raw and uninterested in looking back, Hall is no longer separate from his poetry, no longer an observer to his words. He’s barely a poet anymore. He’s poetry itself.

And now, as poet laureate, Hall has found himself moving into a world that’s so rare for a poet only a handful of them have achieved it. Hall is now a celebrity.

Forget Robert Frost. Hall is closer to Hunter Thompson.

And what, you might ask, will he do with this new status? Probably take a nap — that is once the phone stops ringing and he’s opened all his mail.

Hall’s willingness to talk personally, outside of the words he writes, makes him an excellent interview subject, but also unusual. Hall’s not reluctant to talk emotionally about anything, whether its relationships, aging or the power of celebrity. You just have to ask, which is what I did last month on a visit to Eagle Pond Farm.

On the celebrity of U.S. Poet Laureate

Thank you for sitting down with us again.
Your welcome, thank you for coming back.

You must have had a crazy past month. How are you handling the notoriety?
You know I love silence and solitude. That’s what I live in, with the exception of seeing my lady friend once a week. The phone doesn’t ring, people don’t come to the door, the mail is large but no more than 15 letters in a big day. But for a couple days the phone rang about 35 times a day. I did telephone interviews and lots of in-person interviews and photo shoots. New England Cable News came by. I turned down some things which would have had me going into Boston, but I did go into Concord to record a couple NPR shows. And it’s just been wild and I’m tired. And I’m so beset at the moment, that I can’t take my daily nap. I hope this passes because I need my health.

This is a two-year or one-year appointment?
It’s a one-year appointment but it’s often renewed for a second year. But at the moment I’m thinking that one year is going to be plenty for me.

So you’re not going to be running again?
I reserve the right to change my mind! I don’t have to be in Washington all that much. I can be here a lot of the time. But September and October are very busy. I have a couple readings in New York in September and maybe a church reading here or something. Then I’m going down to Washington where I’ll do Diane Rehm for a full hour, all this before I’m officially poet laureate.

When are you sworn in?
The beginning is a Library of Congress reading on October 3.... It’s been astonishing to feel the celebrity culture even descending on a poet. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about my work and sent somebody up and interviewed me. And the New York Times at first did a telephone interview, then sent somebody up to do an “at home with Donald Hall.” He was here for eight hours, then a photographer was here for two hours. It was an enormous piece. That box over there is full and it’s all clippings from papers. I mean in Time magazine I was in the people section with Angelina Jolie, who is prettier than I am, as anybody can tell. And in Newsweek they printed my picture and did a long thing on their internet site.

Before we go into talking a bit about your newfound celebrity status. I want to talk a little bit about the title and duties of the position. If you had to write a job description as to what you see your duties as poet laureate are, what would that be?
I’m reading a book about the position right now that the Library of Congress wrote so I’m learning more and more about it. I think it’s natural that I don’t know that much about it yet. People right from the start asked what will I do. Well, I don’t know what I will do. I talked about wanting to help to increase the radio presence of poetry and possibly television but I don’t really know how to do it. I came up with the notion off the top of my head of getting on satellite radio, then I discovered that a friend of mine who is a poet and entrepreneur for poetry had already been starting it on Sirus Radio, who is also going to do Howard Stern.

The notion was to have one channel which was all poetry that anybody riding in his car could tune into and that you could repeat the same show, the same group of poems all day every day but change it from time to time. Well, it’s already being done, not actually being broadcast but arrangements are underway to do this. NPR has an interest in perhaps doing more and perhaps I can help with this.

Anything else?
I gather from talking to other laureates that there really isn’t much the Library does or offers you to do. You get a lot of letters. You get a lot of people sending in manuscripts and it’s impossible to read them. So one of my tasks will be writing notes saying I’m sorry I can’t read your manuscript.

Did you ever consciously aspire to becoming U.S. poet laureate?
No I didn’t. Back before it was called the poet laureate, it existed as a consultancy in poetry, as a poetry chair at the library and I was asked to do that way back in the early 1970s while Nixon was president. I told myself I turned it down because of Nixon, in which case I would have turned it down because of Bush now, but it has nothing to do with the executive branch. It’s just the Library of Congress. Really, though, at that time I was divorced, had not been divorced very long and I was living just a couple blocks from my kids whom I could see officially and casually and I did not want to have to be going to Washington. At the time I was assuming I’d have to live in Washington. Some of the early consultants did live in Washington. But as the poet laureateship has evolved, not all people live there or they just stay in a hotel when they are in Washington. They spend a lot of time on the road. I’m being asked to do all sorts of things, to go to grammar schools, to visit senior groups...I’ve been offered an honorary degree – I’ve got enough of them. I don’t need another one, but it’s all because of this celebrity business. But also there are places that legitimately want me to come and read poems as I’ve done all my life.

I’ve also signed on with a literary agent because there are so many requests I want her to handle all these things. I will be making more money for a poetry reading and doing fewer of them because I’m expensive.

Do you feel a pressure to perform, so to speak?
No, I’m working on poems, but I’m always working on poems. I’m not working on so many poems as I’m used to – for the first two weeks of this 15 minutes of fame I really didn’t do anything at all except answer the telephone and get interviewed, but I’ve been working today on a few poems, sort of active volcanoes still shifting around underneath forcing a change or a line break.

Are you intimidated by the company of past laureates you keep?
No, why should it?

I assume you are friends of some of them.
I know them or are friends with some of them. Pinsky is an old friend and I talked with him on the telephone.

Have they given you any advice?
Ted Kooser told me that he wrote 500 postcards saying “I cannot read your manuscript,” “I cannot write a blurb for your book.” I will do that to. Pinksy told me I was not to expect any help from the Library of Congress. You don’t have an assistant or a secretary there. You don’t have an office. You have certain duties which I’ve spoken to you about but they are very minimal. You are a stand-in for poetry.

This title has now increased your reading fees, made you more of a valuable entity.
Yes, I’m told that the normal fee for a poet laureate is $10,000 per reading. I’ve been getting $5,000 for a long time.

The most important question I guess is how will this title affect your social life?
It’s going to get me some! I don’t have any and I will be seeing more people than I ever have otherwise, which may be something good for me at this age.

Is that something your looking forward to?
Not particularly but it will be there and I’ll see what I can do with it.

On relationships and the shadow of Jane Kenyon
When we spoke last you were involved in a serious relationship with a woman, Linda. How is that going?
That’s going very well. She’s very excited about this. She’s going to go down to Washington some of the time anyway. That will be good, to have her there, help me out and be my steady companion.

Is she a poet?
She’s written poetry but she would not call herself a poet. She’s a teacher.

Jane Kenyon’s shadow in your work and life is huge. Has this ever hampered your attempts to develop relationships or intimidated other women who may have been in your life?
Yes it has. Not remotely with Linda, but one nice woman I dated for a couple years was not jealous of Jane or mean about Jane at all, but annoyed that Jane and Don kind of went together always. Don and Jane, Jane and Don. That annoyed her, she had a jealous temperament and it was understandable, but it was something unpleasant within the relationship. But Linda simply seems to feel as if she knew Jane and liked her and has no objection whatever to the fact that these two names are so closely associated and will be perpetually. There was an earlier time that I went with a woman who really was actively anti-Jane and that didn’t last very long, that came out of jealousy.

Even after all these years, Jane still plays a role in your life.
Yes, it’s very different from the way it was those first few years. I don’t cry about her anymore, but I’m aware of her. I see her picture, I see her handwriting on the spice bottles. She’s her, but I don’t mean that supernaturally. She’s with me. It was the most important thing in my entire life, married to Jane and here in this house for 20 years. Certainly the smartest thing I ever did was marrying her but a close second was coming to this house with her where we could both write poetry all day.

How did you and Linda meet?
She came to a poetry reading I gave. She had read Without and I was reading after a church supper. She came by herself and was wandering around looking for a place to sit down for dinner and sat down at an open chair that was opposite me, but she didn’t know it was me. We had a lively conversation right away, and started seeing each other about a month after that.

A certain rock star status seems to come attached to the U.S. poet laureate status? Do you expect groupies or do you already have those?
When I started writing poetry or getting serious about poetry when I was 14, certainly the notion of being attractive to women was part of it. I was a lousy athlete so I couldn’t take that means of dating cheerleaders. Poetry for me at any rate seemed like a romantic thing. I was interested in poetry because I loved poetry, but the fact that it might cast a romantic shadow on me was certainly there. But it doesn’t work very well in high school, it works very poorly indeed. But when you get older it works. All of the women I’ve met, I’ve met because of poetry. All the women I’ve met since Jane’s death, and I’ve dated a lot of women, without exception, poetry has been connected with it.

The typical notion of a poet is something of a nerdy academic type, but that’s not you at all. Have you ever actively groomed a certain “public persona” for yourself and your career?
Not that I’m aware of. I mean doing so many poetry readings, thousands of poetry readings, I’ve gone on to a campus or to a city where there was a festival and I have gone as Donald Hall the Poet, that was my reason for being. I’ve been aware of that, one has to be aware of it, it’s something that just comes with the territory if you are a poet and you publish and read your own poems a lot.

What’s the difference between the poet and the personal part of your life?
I’m up there to say my work and to try to give it voice as best I possibly can and I want people to love the poems and love the way I read them. These motives and ideas don’t have anything to do with marriage for example. Jane and I were together because of poetry to begin with all those years ago, but in the texture of the marriage, poetry was just what we had in common but it didn’t have much to do with what we had for breakfast or lunch or dinner.

But the poetry itself has a lot to do with what you had for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I don’t understand.

Your poetry is personal. You rarely hold back and it feels very much like even if I didn’t know you I’d know something of you and your lifestyle.
Yeah...this was not so true of my early poetry when I was younger. It’s become increasingly naked over the years. Surely I wrote of breakfast lunch and dinner with Jane when I wrote “Without,” but I meant to say during breakfast, lunch and dinner the fact that we were both poets didn’t seem part of the context. But when I write about our relationship, and her death and my grieving, everything is grist for that mill.

On aging
Your career has spanned half a century, giving you the opportunity to work with and be part of many different literary movements and trends. Instead of asking you what’s the secret to life, I’ll settle for what’s the secret to a good poem. Though if you have the secret to life, that would be good too.
[Laughs] I want the poem to be the receptacle and embodiment of a feeling or a series of feelings, feelings sometimes in contradiction to each other, and with that as my end I need to arrive right with the beauty of sound and the beauty of resolution of metaphor and all sorts of things I would call beauty, and that is the tool or the method for expressing and memorializing a particular feeling.

How successful do you think you have been at that over the years?
I’m not the one to talk about my successes or failures. Sometimes I think I’ve really done beautiful stuff, sometimes I think I’ve done crap ... all the time, even when I have those feelings, I know I don’t know.

You and Jane took a big risk when you came here from Michigan. Was there a specific event that took place that finally convinced you that you could be a financially successful man of letters?
No, when I quit tenure I wasn’t convinced I could do it but I worked very hard...I always wanted to live in this house, in this place. When Jane and I came here in 1975 with the notion of just spending a year in the house while my grandmother was in the old folks home, then my grandmother died and we were in a position to buy the place from her, Jane was saying she’d rather chain herself into the root cellar rather than go back to Ann Arbor. And I wanted to do it but I was scared to do it. I had two kids, one of whom was in college, one of whom was not yet in college. I was taking on a mortgage. She was brave about it partly because her family were free lancers, they never knew where the money was coming in six months from now. In the beginning I would get into a panic every month or two and then gradually it became obvious I didn’t know how the money would be coming in but I knew it would.

Was there any specific turning point?
It was a gradual thing. It was October when she really decided. In December before I wrote a letter resigning my position, the English Department back in Michigan tried to spoil it all by refusing my resignation and giving me another year’s leave without pay. But I had made up my mind by that time. I wrestled with it, but there was no book or incident connected with it. It was just Jane’s continual exhortation. She wanted to live here, she wanted to live away from the academic community and in this relative solitude of the country life. And I did too.

It’s rare for a writer to have the ability to look back and consider the impact and consequences of such a long career. Have you ever regretted something you wrote?
I’ve regretted things I’ve written if they were no good. I thought at one time they were good, but I was mistaken. There’s lots and lots of poems I’ve published in books that I’ve left out of White Apple. But there are also lots of poems I’ve published in magazines that I never put into books. I’ve really done a lot of work and whether my judgment is good or not, who knows? I do listen to other people. When I put together this collected poems, I sent it out to, oh, four or five friends who could be counted on to drop their work and read 400-odd pages of poetry. And I listened to them and I took advice from some of them, but there is much that I regret because of its lack of quality.

Your newest collection is a massive and thorough collection of 50 years of writing.
It was daunting and it was not very pleasant. Every poem I like I can always find something wrong with it. There were some I obviously had to publish because they had been there a long time and people like them.

Do you feel the weight of all those years and all that work in a positive way or did the whole thing just make your head hurt?
It made my head whirl. I’m proud of the book as it is so I look back with some satisfaction, but without knowledge.

On Hall's "Vein of pain."
A critic once wrote that Jane’s death opened a “vein of pain” in your writing. Was the writing that followed her death an out-of-control spiral, or more controlled?
Very controlled. When I wrote the poems even shortly after her death it was the only time of day I was happy, writing miserable poems with happiness.

It kept you grounded?
Yeah, it was what I’d always loved. I couldn’t not do it. But I did enjoy writing Without. It seems like an odd thing to say. I didn’t enjoy her death but I did enjoy the writing of Without. I had been gradually more and more naked in my work so in Without I just continued that process.

Do you consider, when you writing, the weight or impact the words may have on someone else, the people you are writing about?
Yes, I would but I would do that mostly in the process of revision. I can’t think of a specific moment but I know that I think of other people’s feelings, but none-the-less I have sometimes upset people.

Have you ever pulled your punches, held back?
No, but the one thing I’m thinking of I had not anticipated causing any trouble for anybody but then I did get into trouble. I don’t want to get more specific than that.

You had mentioned the Nixon and Bush administrations earlier. Some of your poetry is political. Do you believe writers have a responsibility to be political?
No I don’t. If they have strong feelings I hope they come out, but my politics, it seems to me, are not very sophisticated politics. I mean I have strong feelings and I curse and rage, but I don’t think I’m a real political thinker. I have one poem toward the end of this volume that’s political, but it’s not one of my better poems. Now I often end a reading with it. It’s called “We Bring Democracy to the Fish.” And of course the fish are protected from predators, but in the end what do we do, we eat the fish. I don’t think an artist has a duty to be political, which is not to say I dislike political poetry. A lot of it is shrill and loses the poetry for the sake of the politics. But that’s not always true.

And yet you would not have accepted a —
No, I would not have accepted something that required me to shake George Bush’s hand for instance. I think I’m safe.

What’s next for Donald Hall?
Well, I’m working on a memoir of parts of my life I haven’t written about before. I’m working on poems. I have about 10 poems toward a new book, but whether I’ll live long enough to write a whole other book I don’t know.