Donald HallInterview by David McDonald
David McDonald: Early in your career, you conducted a number of interviews with famous poets--T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore come to mind. What did you learn from these interviews? Do any of them, in particular, stand out? Interviews have become such a popular literary genre, are they losing their value or utility?Donald Hall: Interviews got started with The Paris Review. (There are a few scattered earlier examples.) Sometimes they are a substitute for poets writing literary criticism. The generation before us seemed to be as proud of its critical essays as it did of its poems. We did not want to be like that. But all poets think about poetry and they need to let their thinking out. The interview provides an avenue of discourse.
It is also true that as the interview has grown in popularity, the culture has grown more and more attentive to celebrity, with more and more attention to the personality and habits of the writer. Not good.
As you know, I am bored by being interviewed! I don't mean that you are boring, but the form is boring . . . I say no to many requests. But . . . probably I have said things in interviews that I would not have thought of saying, in my own essays.
I don't think I learned anything about poetry, in any of those interviews with the great ones. I learned about the perils of being a poet, of surviving, enduring--examples of failure and of relative success. Of course aging is always failing, onward to the ultimate failing. The Pound interview stands out for me. It was the most difficult to do, and it was the most touching--because of Pound's frailty and pride. I write about it in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes.DM: Recently you have been reading and publishing some rather frank and explicit sex-love poems. The poems published in this issue of The American Poetry Review are in that vein. What has led you to write such erotic poems at this point in your life? Are these poems another stage in your passing out of the grief over the death of Jane Kenyon?
DH: My poems of mourning and grief have also been frank and direct. As I get older, I think I become more and more naked. It is not a program. It has happened.
One poem I wrote claims that these erotic poems are a stage in mourning. "Ardor" ends: "Lust is grief / that has turned over in bed / to look the other way." It seems so--but these lines can also sound like an excuse for something that needs excusing. Of course eros is life against death. It astonishes me that at my age I feel more desire than I felt when I was young.
Everything in my life after Jane's death comes, one way or another, out of Jane's death.DM: The poems in Without are all about your grief over the death of Jane Kenyon. You've said elsewhere that they sprang out of the screaming. You've also said that each page in the book has had a hundred versions or so and that you took a great deal of help from your friends, more than you usually do. Has that made for better poems? Or was it just necessary for you to do in order to get some distance from the material?
DH: Because Without was constructed out of wild loss and screaming, and because I knew it had to be made into art if it were to reach anyone else, I felt more than ever that I needed the help of others. I was systematic about it. I sent it first (when I had first assembled it) to ten readers. When their comments came back, I revised it. Then I sent it to ten different readers, so that their eyes could see the poems as they were now, without remembering earlier versions. After they responded I worked on it a hell of a lot again and sent it again to many of the twenty, those who had been most helpful.
DM: How, specifically, do your friends help you with your poems? How do they help you edit your work?
DH: My friends help me by showing me some of the idiocies that I have permitted to remain in my poems. Cliches, dead metaphors, redundancies. Or they show me implications or suggestions that I did not know that I had made. Often I learn things about the poem, even good things, that I did not know I had done.
DM: I know you admire Thomas Hardy and he has written some wonderful poems about the grief over the death of his first wife. And you've told me that you have written maybe a dozen poems about Jane Kenyon using his kind of stanza. Will those poems be coming out in a book soon?
DH: I have loved Hardy since I was about thirty, and the poems that I have loved most are the grief poems out of the death of his first wife. Hardy's marriage scarcely resembled Jane's and mine, and his poems of grief, with one exception, go back to their early life together. I loved these poems when I was thirty years old, not waiting until I had a dead wife.
But it had never occurred to me to try to follow his example until four years ago--writing in improvised and repeated stanza forms, sometimes with a Hardy-like awkwardness. There's a section of them in my next book, The Painted Bed, with an epigraph from Hardy--just so that people will know I damn well know what I am doing. I use refrain, sometimes, but the diction is not Hardy's. Hardy does not use the word "fucking."DM: I have heard you say that the 17th-century poem "An Exequy to His Matchless, Never-to-Be-Forgotten Friend" by Henry King is the best poem of grief in the English language. What makes it so wonderful?
DH: "The Exequy," despite King's belief in paradise, despite (because of?) its wit, seems to me one of the greatest poems of mourning. . . .It's the strength of the feeling of loss.
DM: In the opening story of your collection String Too Short to Be Saved, "The Wild Heifers," you recount how your grandfather hesitated to acknowledge a fellow farmer's comment about getting old. Because he didn't want you to know about his sense or fear of aging and death. Yet all his stories were, according to you, his way of giving his life to you, a passing of the baton. Are you doing that now with your son or daughter? Or are you doing that through your public writing?
DH: One of the major goals of my writing--look at the children's books like Ox-Cart Man, Lucy's Christmas, and The Milkman's Boy--has been to preserve the past and pass it on. Yes, I want to hand on a sense of old times, not only in my writing, but to my children and grandchildren.
DM: In the Epilogue to the reissue of String Too Short to Be Saved, written in 1979, you said that for the first time you were living in the present. That you no longer required a wished-for future to cancel the present and that you were in daily touch with the past without living there. I think your way of putting it was that you were living both horizontally and vertically in the enduring present. Are you still living in that enduring present? Has the death of your wife Jane Kenyon changed the place in which you are living?
DH: After Jane's death, I live in past and present. I have dear children and grandchildren, but I feel peripheral to their present. I look ahead to my associations with women. Otherwise, my present is largely empty.
DM: You also said in the Epilogue to String Too Short to Be Saved that time elongates as you watch old Mount Kearsarge from the porch of Eagle Pond Farm. That you were looking into fir and granite that four generations of your family have looked at. And that such gazing has braided together ribbons of sight, invisible strands holding generations together--living, dead, and unborn. Does this braiding remain for you?
DH: I think that the braiding has taken place so firmly after twenty-five years that I am no longer continually aware of it.
It is difficult in the United States to find people who live in a place that brings the generations together. I am fortunate.
Donald Hall lives on a farm in New Hampshire. He has published a dozen books of poetry, of which the most recent is Without.
David McDonald practices law in St. Paul, Minnesota, and recently received an MFA in poetry from Bennington College, in Vermont. He is a board member of Graywolf Press.
