Donald Hall |
Published: March 6th, 2015
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Donald Hall is an American poet who served as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2006. Hall was also the first poetry editor of the acclaimed The Paris Review. He has taught at numerous universities. Some of his many accolades include two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Caldecott Medal, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Robert Frost Medal, and the National Medal of Arts.
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Howl: What is your advice to budding poets?
Hall: My advice to budding poets is to read everything they can, and don’t forget the seventeenth century, the best in the language. But maybe you ought to be more than budding, to try that? I think that most poets begin with the contemporary, and go back later. Don’t forget Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell - and twenty-five others. Then revise every poem. Never show anybody a poem when you first read it. Every day, you might think it was finished. Look at it the next day and look for trouble. In high school, maybe I did ten or twelve drafts. Later, it was eighty or a hundred. It’s fun! Howl: How do you get over writer’s block? Hall: I haven’t troubled over writer’s block. I like to work every day. Howl: Where do you see poetry heading in the twenty-first century? Hall: I don’t read so much poetry in the twenty-first century. I don’t think much of my judgement - which has to do with being eighty-six years old. I tend to feel a lack of sound. Dense images, diphthongs one after another. Keats told Shelley, “Load every rift with ore.” Howl: How do you know when you are finished with a poem? Hall: Almost always the form is implicit in the beginning of the draft. And I don’t think I have ever written a metrical poem when I was thinking about free verse, or the reverse. I remember changing the look or manner of the poem when it did not work. The sculptor, Henry Moore, said that if you were working on a clay maquette and it doesn’t work, don’t just keep jabbing at it. Drop it on the floor and see what it looks like then. Howl: Who inspired you to write? Hall: My mentors. At fourteen, it was Edgar Allan Poe. At eighteen it was probably Hart Crane. For a long time it was Yeats - together with the seventeenth century. More recently it has been the poetry of Thomas Hardy. His novels are okay but his lyric poems! |