Donald Hall Quotes
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I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
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For better or worse, poetry is my life.
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Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
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When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.
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Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad.
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In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
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But the form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning.
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When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being.
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In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.
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I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
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My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down.
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It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.'
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New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
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I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.
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After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.
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One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
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It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
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However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.
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Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.
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Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.
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Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.
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I would work until I got stuck, and I would put it down and pick up something else. I might be able to take a 20-minute nap and get to work again. That way, I was able to work about 10 hours a day... It was important to me to work every day. I managed to work on Christmas day, just to be able to say I worked 365 days a year.
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In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.