Zitat des Tages von Donald Hall:
When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.
By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press.
I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.
After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.
In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it.
I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed.
When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.
When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.
I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.
I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.
Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.
Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.
When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.
New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working.
On September twentieth every year, I got to choose my menu - meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream.
Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.
For better or worse, poetry is my life.
Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat.
Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70.
I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.
Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.
In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.
I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.
I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it.
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.
I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly.
As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago.
