Donald Hall's keynote reading last night was one of the best poetry readings I've ever attended. Hall, who turns 81 in September, seemed frail at dinner but became surprisingly vigorous when he sat down to read. He looks and sounds like a bard of yore and has a knack for reading his poems in a way that makes you aware of the rhymes without ever letting the poems sound sing-songy. You get the feeling that this how speech ought to be, and start wondering why the rhymes have dropped out of conversation.
What Hall had to say about the poems was almost as interesting as the poems themselves. He said he frequently revisited his poems and sometimes changed them even after they had been published. Take, for instance, "The Man in the Dead Machine." The version I just linked to is entirely in the third person. Years later Hall changed that and in the version he read last night, the final stanza is in the first person singular, because, as Hall observed, the image of the man in the plane is an image of himself during a time in his life that was bleak. That image came to him, he said, while he was on the road driving from Michigan to Connecticut, and when it did he pulled over to the side of the road - "because this was an emergency," he said.
Perhaps stanger is that the key line in "White Apples", "white apples and the taste of stone," came to him after he had written the poem and, I believe, after he had published it, came to him suddenly and he knew it belonged there.
For Hall, evidently, poetry is not just the making of literary artifacts, but a process of living and self-examination, an awareness of continuing change. His poems are the genuine article precisely because the man who wrote them is.
What Hall had to say about the poems was almost as interesting as the poems themselves. He said he frequently revisited his poems and sometimes changed them even after they had been published. Take, for instance, "The Man in the Dead Machine." The version I just linked to is entirely in the third person. Years later Hall changed that and in the version he read last night, the final stanza is in the first person singular, because, as Hall observed, the image of the man in the plane is an image of himself during a time in his life that was bleak. That image came to him, he said, while he was on the road driving from Michigan to Connecticut, and when it did he pulled over to the side of the road - "because this was an emergency," he said.
Perhaps stanger is that the key line in "White Apples", "white apples and the taste of stone," came to him after he had written the poem and, I believe, after he had published it, came to him suddenly and he knew it belonged there.
For Hall, evidently, poetry is not just the making of literary artifacts, but a process of living and self-examination, an awareness of continuing change. His poems are the genuine article precisely because the man who wrote them is.
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