Donald Hall Reading

In the course of listening to Donald Hall’s reading, I was struck by two things in particular.  I was first introduced as an undergraduate to Hall’s writing.  The simple lyricism and narration, the careful attention to detail and naming seemed simple and deceptively effortless. The ease came from work, from an apprenticeship with poets long dead as well as poets living and an attention to the life at hand. My interest in Hall’s work piqued again after I read the poems of Jane Kenyon, Hall’s late wife.

 

Kenyon, a wonderful poet in her own right, authored Otherwise, a wonderful volume of poems which in part chronicled her life with leukemia.  Being mindful of Susan Sontag’s ‘Aids as Metaphor’, I am careful not to write that she fought.  She was not in a battle agaist her body; she lived within that house, she did not declare war against it.  Instead her poems, and those of her husband, seemed a celebration of life, a conscious attempt to praise the beauty that made days bearable even in the midst of chemotherapy, radiation, and the final moments of the body fulfilling its last duty.

 

Hall read poems for his wife.  Though the poems chronicled grief, they also celebrated budding flowers, growing gardens, and the bittersweet memory of a beloved wife in a tattered coat.  In one of Hall’s poems, he relates a simple day—his wife making sauce, the chatter and wine of dinner, then two people sleeping close in their bed.  In his final line, Hall writes, “It is a miracle.” How difficult it is to remember this simple truth.  

Hall's poetry explores emotion via the visceral character of the natural world.  Flowers are simultaneously hope, sorrow, and remembrance as well as stamen and pistol.  That ability to take life, and death, seriously without bleeding it of joy is part of what makes poetry necessary.  Art gives people to opportunity to take their own lives seriously, and that introspection seems vital not only for the poet but for the seeking reader. 

--Camille-Yvette Welsch