Donald Hall Quotes
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I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.
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Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
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As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago.
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I don't have a computer. I never have had one.
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Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.
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Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
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Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.
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By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press.
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Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry.
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I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.
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On September twentieth every year, I got to choose my menu - meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream.
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Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.
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Everything important always begins from something trivial.
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I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer.
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We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture.
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Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
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Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat.
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There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.
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In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it.
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A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.
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When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.
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There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.
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In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.
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When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.