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.
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