About Donald Hall: A Profile

Hall as Young Artist

Approaching his mid-seventies, Donald Hall is -- as he frequently reminds people -- an old man now. Yet the term
old can encompass a long shelf life, and no American writer has done more to honor the reality of time and generation than has Donald Hall. He's given detail, definition, and dignity to the reality of old: old like his grandparents, whom he so poignantly evoked in his memoir
String Too Short to Be Saved; old like many of the poets he met in his relative youth, whom he characterized so vividly in
Their Ancient Glittering Eyes; old like the aging widower who contemplates the premature death of his forty-seven-year-old wife in books of poems such as
Without. Old with real sentiment. Old without sentimentality. I don't think Donald Hall has physically enjoyed getting older (who the hell does?), but he has looked at aging with a cold, bloody eye, made animate and real by sympathy, and he has lyrically, in many forms, told it like it is. This is sublimely useful in a culture hellbent and insipidly based on some version of Forever Young.

Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. By the age of twelve he was writing under the spell of Edgar Allan Poe. "I wanted to be mad, addicted, obsessed, haunted, and cursed," Hall remembers. "I wanted to have deep eyes that burned like coals -- profoundly melancholic, profoundly
attractive." He wrote poems and stories throughout prep school at Exeter, and at the tender age of sixteen attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where he met Robert Frost.

Hall went to university at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. At Harvard, Archibald MacLeish was his teacher for a year, and his classmates included Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Hall and Bly worked together editing
The Harvard Advocate, and angered T. S. Eliot when they published some of his juvenilia with a few typos.

While a student at Oxford, Hall was awarded the Newdigate Prize in poetry, and his photograph appeared in
Time magazine -- honors that suddenly made things at home easier. After a year in Palo Alto and a three-year stint as a fellow at Harvard, Hall went to the University of Michigan to teach, and stayed in Ann Arbor for the next seventeen years. As lore now has it, Hall made his decision to abandon full-time work at the university after a campus visit by Robert Graves, who suggested Hall attempt to live by his wits. Abandoning tenure, with children in college, Hall and his second wife, Jane Kenyon, headed for the house in New Hampshire where he had spent summers with his grandparents. "It was Jane who gave me the nerve to make the move," he says.

Ever since, Hall has indeed lived by his wits, simply and handsomely, centering his life on writing. At his home in Danbury, he goes from desk to desk, pile to pile, starting with poetry first in the early morning and then heading on to essays, magazine pieces, short stories, memoirs, children's books, textbooks, editing tasks, letters, and the like. He has kept his overhead low, and he has been prolific, readily and gamely taking on many protean forms and shapes. He has lived deeply within the New England ethos of plain living and high thinking, and he has done so with a sense of humor and eros.

Hall as Teacher

The man who in his seminal 1980's essay "Poetry and Ambition" called for the abolishment of the M.F.A. degree in creative writing is today being honored by the Associated Writing Programs with a poetry publication award given in his name. Many of Hall's criticisms of writing programs in that essay still stand, and some have led to reform, particularly where more emphasis  is now put upon reading.

Hall has taught as a visiting poet-in-residence at the low-residency graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College for over seven years now, joined in the last few years by his friend and co-conspirator, Robert Bly. Part of their living by their wits has been keeping ties with colleges where they find rapport, audiences, and some money, helping them cobble together a freelance livelihood. Hall is often on the road doing readings, and his travels recently have involved flights to Pakistan, India, Ireland, the Czech Republic, and other ports far from New Hampshire.

Having Hall and Bly at Bennington is a bit like having Freud and Jung. Hall is the relentless monotheist who loves Freud because Freud's thinking and writing are as nasty as life itself is, and Bly is a whirling dervish of polytheistic and polyglot pandemonium, a one-man American Fourth of July parade of many gods and many voices. The friendship and argument of Donald Hall and Robert Bly is old, contrary, affectionate, and ferocious. The students and faculty love to see them going at it.

Jane Kenyon was also there at Bennington with Hall at the outset of the Writing Seminars, and gave the last public reading of her life in January of 1994, during the first residency of the program. Kenyon lectured on Keats, Akhmatova, and Bishop, and extolled the Keatsian "Fuck and Die School of Poetry," of which she counted herself a member.

Hall as Editor and Player

Hall was the first poetry editor of
The Paris Review, and he's been an editor of something or other most of his adult life. He was on the editorial board at the beginning of the Wesleyan University Press poetry series, which delivered early books by James Wright, John Ashbery, James Dickey, Barbara Howes, Louis Simpson, Robert Bly, Robert Francis, Richard Howard, and Donald Justice. In addition, Hall brought Sylvia Plath and many others to Harper & Row, and his editing of the University of Michigan's "Poets on Poetry" series gave us a record of his generation and their poetics we might have missed otherwise.

In the 1950's, Hall, Louis Simpson, and Robert Pack edited an anthology called
New Poets of England and America, which inspired Donald Allen's countervailent
The New American Poetry and created what was then known as "the anthology wars." It's difficult to imagine the same thing happening now, when most anthologies appear and are not even reviewed, much less debated, few creating anything even vaguely resembling a stir.

A moment of synthesis soon set when Hall was the sole editor of
Contemporary American Poetry, and in my judgment it remains one of the last anthologies of American poetry -- alongside Mark Strand's and Al Poulin's -- with any real intelligence, nerve, discernment, depth, history, and knowledge.

Behind and in front of the scenes, Hall has been acting to bring poetry to readers and readers to poetry, and in the 1990's was active on the National Council for the Arts, the group that oversees the National Endowment for the Arts. There, he was sometimes the sole voice that resisted censorship in public funding of the arts, and to his amusement he became something of a smut-meister in the process.

Hall as Writer

The One Day, to my mind, is Hall's masterwork so far, among the fourteen books of poems he's published, including
Exiles and Marriages, Kicking the Leaves, The Happy Man, Old and New Poems, The Museum of Clear Ideas,
The Old Life, and the forthcoming
The Painted Bed. In the latter part of the twentieth century,
The One Day took its place also among books such as Anne Carson's
Glass, Irony, and God as an eloquent consummation of Modernism, marked by doing the polis in many voices through the phenomenology of montage form. Hall's most recent book,
Without, rivals Hardy's poems to his wife as one of the finest, even practical enactments of elegy in English-speaking poetry. The fact that Hall is producing some of his best writing in his later years makes him a patron saint to all poets. Where there's this kind of long life in the art, there's hope.

Liam Rector's books of poems are American Prodigal
and The Sorrow of Architecture.
He edited The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall.
He directs and teaches in the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College.