Donald Hall and Andrew Motion Write Poetic Memoirs

I’m sure why I first started reading memoirs by major poetic figures, but I recently read two that struck me as particularly significant in the development and history of what we consider contemporary poetry. One was American; the other is a Brit who eventually landed in America. Both knew major figures in poetry in their respective countries and beyond. And both served as poet laureates of their respective countries. 

American Donald Hall (1928-2018) first published a memoir entitled Their Ancient Glittering Eyes in 1992. In 2022, four years after his death, a new updated version entitled Old Poets: Reminiscences & Opinions was produced. It’s not so much a chronological memoir as it is an account of his personal experiences with some of the major figures of 20^thcentury poetry. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“February,” poem by Helen Hunt Jackson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Masters of Pulp Fiction: The Lee Child Edition – Frank Theodat at Pulp, Pipe, & Poetry.

 

A Diner for David Lynch: Poems in Remembrance of a Master – Ethan McGuire at New Verse Review.

 

Poet Laura: A Concert in the General Store – Sandra Fox Murphy at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Jane Kenyon and “Best Poems”

Poet Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) met poet Donald Hall (1928-2018) at the University of Michigan. He was teaching; she was a student. They married in 1972, and in1975 moved to Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire, which had been his grandparents’ home. They were married until her death from leukemia in 1995.

Hall’s career loomed larger. By the time they met, he had already been the editor of Oxford Poetry, literary editor of Isis, editor of New Poems, the recipient of several literary prizes and recognitions, the author of several volumes of poetry, and first poetry editor of The Paris Review. He was a presence in the poetry world; she was just starting out. From all accounts, they were devoted to each other. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Poets and Poems: Donald Hall and “Selected Poems”

Donald Hall, 87, says he can’t write poems any more. But he can still write essays and articles, and he can still select his favorite poems and assemble them into a collection that illustrates a lifetime of poetry.

The collection is entitled, appropriately enough, The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. The poems are drawn from some 16 collections of poetry Hall has published since 1955. His poetry is what might be called “New England Plain Speak,” not unlike that of another New Englander, Robert Frost. Hall’s poetry comes from the land, the weather and the people of New England, specifically New Hampshire and Connecticut, a poetry that is often flint-like and always spare.

He’s had a distinguished career. He met Robert Frost at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. According to his biography at The Poetry Foundation, he studied at Harvard, with classmates like Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. He received a degree from Oxford.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Eagle Pond Farm, where Hall lives in New Hampshire.

Donald Hall’s “Christmas at Eagle Pond”

One of the best memories I have is of visiting my paternal grandmother in Shreveport, La. I called her Gram; everybody called her Gram except my father and his three sisters. To them she was “Mom.” Sixty-two when I was born, she lived in a two-bedroom frame house built by my grandfather with some help from my father. To visit her on my own, as I did from the time I was 7 or 8 until I was 14, was to experience the magic of a loving grandmother. My grandfather had died when I was nine months old, but his memory was part of the magic.

Donald Hall is a former poet laureate of the United States, recipient of all kinds of literary awards, and author of 16 books of poetry and 15 prose works. He had a Gram, too, and she lived with his grandfather in his favorite place in the world, a farm called Eagle Pond in rural New Hampshire. It’s where Hall himself, now 84, lives today. In Eagle Pond, published in 2007, Hall reflects on the farm, on change, on his family and on the nature of place.

The one thing Hall never did was to spend Christmas with his grandparents. And so he’s written himself a fictional memory that could easily be non-fictional. And he’s called it Christmas at Eagle Pond, and included beautifully simple illustrations by Mary Azarian.

It’s December, 1940. War is raging in Europe; even in rural New Hampshire they know London is undergoing a daily bombing blitz. Donnie, a 12-year-old boy and only child, is traveling to spend Christmas with his grandparents at their farm in New Hampshire. His mother is recuperating in the hospital from surgery (they did that back then), and Christmas is going to be spare and lonely if he stays in Connecticut. So he’s traveling by train to Boston, and then on to Gale, the closest station to Eagle Pond Farm.

Written is a simple, declarative style, the story is a very straightforward account of four days at Christmastime. Events unfold in a straight narrative fashion, one sentence after another. We are seeing Christmas celebrated in a way of life that was vanishing even then, with roads being paved, indoor plumbing being installed, and the old sleigh resting unused in the barn.

Donnie is a serious boy. He reads. He reads poetry and listens closely as his grandfather recites it from memory. He absorbs the stories about local characters and family members. He watches and notes everything, and little escapes his gaze. And he adores his grandparents; there is no place he’d rather be than Eagle Pond.

There is no mystery or tension in Christmas at Eagle Pond. But then, there shouldn’t be. This is a memory, or what would have been a memory had it actually happened. And it did happen, in imagination and desire if not in time. This is the story of four days spent by a boy with his beloved grandparents, at a farm called Eagle Pond.

Memories don’t get better than this. I know.

Related:

My post on Hall’s Eagle Pond.

Donald Hall's "The Back Chamber: Poems"

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall has a new volume of poetry published today, The Back Chamber: Poems. And I was transported back half a century to spending time with my grandmother in Shreveport. Please see my review posted at TweetSpeak Poetry and let me know what you think.

Place: Almost a Century Apart

I attended elementary school in a New Orleans suburb. Because we only had three seasons (summer, July and August), events like leaves turning colors in the fall or snow were theoretical concepts unless one traveled north. My only familiarity with fall and winter was a series of coloring books distributed at school, one for each month. The October one always included fall leaves, and either the December or January one would have pictures that included snow. I was always fascinated.

The changing of the leaves is one of the events that former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall describes in Eagle Pond, a collection of essays (and one longish poem) about New England in general and New Hampshire in particular, which I just finished reading. His mother’s family came from New Hampshire and it’s where Hall now lives, in a family farmhouse somewhat modernized but still close to what his ancestors knew.

As I read about the farm, the community and the state where he lives, I learned how important the sense of “place” is to him, and how it informs his poetry and writing. Place is as real to Hall’s writing as Port William is to Wendell Berry and Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner.

As I read Eagle Pond, I was strongly reminded of a children’s book I read almost 50 years ago, and which I’ve learned is still in print today.

First published in 1916, Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher is still – remarkably – in print today, the latest edition published just last year. It’s the story of a 9-year-old girl from the Midwest who is sent to live with cousins in Vermont, the “terrible Putney cousins.” I was given the Scholastic Books paperback by my next-door neighbor, who had read it and wasn’t interested in keeping it. At the time, I knew it was a “girl’s book,” but it was about New England, with illustrations similar to those coloring books I worked on each month at school, so I read it. I didn’t tell anyone, but I enjoyed it.

That copy disappeared years ago during one of my mother’s garage sales. A few years back, I found a hard back edition from the 1940s at a used book sale and bought it, entirely for sentimental reasons (it was all of $1).

After reading Eagle Pond, I found my copy of Understood Betsy and read it. It’s charming, a product of its time that somewhat romanticized farm life and the one-room schoolhouse. (Little did I know, but the author is credited with introducing the Montessori Method into the United States and the schoolhouse scenes in the book are based entirely upon that approach.)

As I read it, the story came back, and vividly back. I began to remember and then anticipate the events of the narrative – how Betsy had been raised by fussy aunts and then sent to Vermont; how she got a kitten; her first day in school (“I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading!”); the wolf pit; and the county fair. I was surprised at how well I remembered the story, and its rather breathless prose.

I wasn’t surprised that it had made such an impression on a young boy living in a New Orleans suburb. It’s about a place, a specific place, and about the idea of place, in exactly the same way that Hall’s Eagle Pond is about place. Even when Canfield Fisher wrote Understood Betsy, the place she was writing about had changed forever (and to hear Hall describe neighboring Vermont, it’s now entirely inhabited by weekenders from New York and Boston who wear L.L. Bean plaid flannel shirts).

Hall says that it’s likely only native New Englanders and Southerners who truly understand this notion of place. Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but I do know that when people ask me where I’m from, I always say “I was born and raised in New Orleans but now live in St. Louis,” even though I’ve lived far longer in St. Louis than I did in New Orleans.

But that’s what place does to you. That's what it does to Donald Hall, and what it did to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, writing almost a century apart.