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June 14, 2006

DONALD HALL, POET LAUREATE

We are as pleased as punch to learn that Donald Hall has been named Poet Laureate - an exponential improvement over his prairie predecessor.

Mr. Hall, 77, lives in a white clapboard farmhouse in Wilmot, N.H., that has been in his family for generations. He said in a telephone interview that he didn't see the poet laureateship as a bully pulpit. "But it's a pulpit anyway," he said. "If I see First Amendment violations, I will speak up."

As for the rest of the job, "I have a terrible miscellany of thoughts," he said.

A terrible miscellany of thoughts ... you gotta love that.

We attended a marvelous but sadly underattended Hall reading last year at Dutton's, and one of our prized possessions is a typed letter - that's on paper, folks - from Hall in response to an embarrassingly gushing note we sent him.  Bravo!

Here's his Academy of American Poets page.  And we leave you wiht a sample of his work:

Je Suis une table   

It has happened suddenly,

by surprise, in an arbor,

or while drinking good coffee,

after speaking, or before,

that I dumbly inhabit

a density; in language,

there is nothing to stop it,

for nothing retains an edge.

Simple ignorance presents,

later, words for a function,

but it is common pretense

of speech, by a convention,

and there is nothing at all

but inner silence, nothing

to relieve on principle

now this intense thickening.

Posted at 01:21 PM in Litlinks |

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Comments

Paul

I heard him on NPR tonight, he read some of his work. They discussed having him as a sort of regular contributor.

Posted by: Paul | June 14, 2006 at 05:53 PM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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