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Donald Hall was born in New Haven and raised in Hamden, Connecticut, but spent summers, holidays, and school vacations on a farm owned by his maternal grandparents in Wilmot, New Hampshire. He took his bachelor’s degree at Harvard, then studied at Oxford for two years, earning an additional bachelor’s in 1953. After holding fellowships at Stanford and at Harvard, Hall moved to Ann Arbor, where he was professor of English at the University of Michigan for seventeen years. His first book of poems, Exiles and Marriages (1955), was followed by The Dark Houses (1958), A Roof of Tiger Lilies (1964), The Alligator Bride: New and Selected Poems (1969), The Yellow Room (1971), The Town of Hill (1975), Kicking the Leaves (1978), The Happy Man (1986), The One Day (1988), and Old and New Poems (1990).

He is also the author of several books of prose, some written for students, some for children, and some for sports fans. They include biographies of Henry Moore and Dock Ellis, a reminiscence called Remembering Poets (about Frost, Pound, Thomas, and Eliot), and four collections of literary essays: Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird (1978), To Keep Moving (1980), The Weather for Poetry (1982), and Poetry and Ambition (1988). Two of the anthologies he has compiled have become classics: New Poets of England and America (with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson) and Contemporary American Poetry. Among other honors, he has received the Lamont Poetry Selection Award (for Exiles and Marriages) and two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships (1963, 1972). His children’s book, Ox-Cart Man (1980), illustrated by Barbara Cooney, won the Caldecott Award. He was the first poetry editor of The Paris Review, from 1953 to 1961, as well as the first person to interview a poet for this magazine.

In 1975, after the death of his grandmother, Hall gave up his tenured professorship at Michigan and moved with his wife Jane Kenyon to the old family farm in New Hampshire. Since then he has supported himself through freelance writing. Sixteen years later, he continues to feel that he never made a better decision. It was at Eagle Pond Farm that the first two sittings of this interview were conducted in the summers of 1983 and 1988. A third session was held on the stage of the YM-YWHA in New York.

Donald Hall likes to get to work early, and so both interview sessions at the farm began at about six a.m. Interviewer and interviewee sat in easy chairs with the tape recorder on a coffee table between them.

 

INTERVIEWER

I would like to begin by asking how you started. How did you become a writer? What was the first thing that you ever wrote and when?

DONALD HALL

Everything important always begins from something trivial. When I was about twelve I loved horror movies. I used to go down to New Haven from my suburb and watch films like Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Wolf Man Meets Abbott and Costello. So the boy next door said, Well, if you like that stuff, you’ve got to read Edgar Allan Poe. I had never heard of Edgar Allan Poe, but when I read him I fell in love. I wanted to grow up and be Edgar Allan Poe. The first poem that I wrote doesn’t really sound like Poe, but it’s morbid enough. Of course I have friends who say it’s the best thing I ever did: “Have you ever thought / Of the nearness of death to you? / It reeks through each corner, / It shrieks through the night, / It follows you through the day / Until that moment when, / In monotones loud, / Death calls your name. / Then, then, comes the end of all.” The end of Hall, maybe. That started me writing poems and stories. For a couple of years I wrote them in a desultory fashion because I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a great actor or a great poet.

Then when I was fourteen I had a conversation at a Boy Scout meeting with a fellow who seemed ancient to me; he was sixteen. I was bragging and told him that I had written a poem during study hall at high school that day. He asked—I can see him standing there—You write poems? and I said, Yes, do you? and he said, in the most solemn voice imaginable, It is my profession. He had just quit high school to devote himself to writing poetry full time! I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. It was like that scene in Bonnie and Clyde where Clyde says, We rob banks. Poetry is like robbing banks. It turned out that my friend knew some eighteen-year-old Yale freshmen, sophisticated about literature, and so at the age of fourteen I hung around Yale students who talked about T. S. Eliot. I saved up my allowance and bought the little blue, cloth-covered collected Eliot for two dollars and fifty cents and I was off. I decided that I would be a poet for the rest of my life and started by working at poems for an hour or two every day after school. I never stopped.

INTERVIEWER

What about at your high school? I believe you attended Exeter—was anyone there helpful to you?

HALL

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. There was support from the faculty—I dedicated A Roof of Tiger Lilies to one teacher and his wife, Leonard and Mary Stevens—but of course there was also discouragement. One English teacher made it his announced purpose to rid me of the habit of writing poetry. This was in an English Special, for the brightest students, and he spent a fifty minute class reading aloud some poetry I’d handed him, making sarcastic comments. For the first ten minutes, the other students laughed—but then they shut up. They may not have liked poetry but they were shocked by what he did. When I came back to Exeter ten years later to read my poems, after publishing my first book, the other teachers asked my old teacher-enemy to introduce me and my mind filled up with possibilities for revenge. I did nothing of course, but another ten years after that apparently my unconscious mind did exact its revenge—and because I didn’t intend it, I could enjoy revenge without guilt. I wrote an essay for The New York Times Book Review that offered a bizarre interpretation of Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils. At the end, I said that if anyone felt that my interpretation hurt their enjoyment of the poem, they’d never really admired the poem anyway, but just some picture postcard of Wordsworth’s countryside that a teacher handed around in a classroom. When I wrote it, I thought I made the teacher and his classroom up, but a few days after the piece appeared, I received the postcard in an envelope from my enemy-teacher at Exeter together with a note: I suppose your fingerprints are still on it.

INTERVIEWER

Was there anyone else when you were young who encouraged you to be a writer?

HALL

Not really. My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books. When I was sixteen years old I published in some little magazines and my parents paid for me to go to Bread Loaf.

I remember the first time I saw Robert Frost. It was opening night and Theodore Morrison, the director, was giving an introductory talk. I felt excited and exalted. Nobody was anywhere near me in age; the next youngest contributor was probably in her mid-twenties. As I was sitting there, I looked out the big French windows and saw Frost approaching. He was coming up a hill and as he walked toward the windows first his head appeared and then his shoulders as if he were rising out of the ground. Later, I talked with him a couple of times and I heard him read. He ran the poetry workshop in the afternoon on a couple of occasions, though not when my poems were read, thank God; he could be nasty. I sat with him one time on the porch as he talked with two women and me. He delivered his characteristic monologue—witty, sharp, acerb on the subject of his friends. He wasn’t hideously unkind, the way he looks in Thomson’s biography, but also he was not Mortimer Snerd; he was not the farmer miraculously gifted with rhyme, the way he seemed if you read about him in Time or Life. He was a sophisticated fellow, you might say.

We played softball. This was in 1945, and Frost was born in 1874, so he was seventy-one years old. He played a vigorous game of softball but he was also something of a spoiled brat. His team had to win and it was well known that the pitcher should serve Frost a fat pitch. I remember him hitting a double. He fought hard for his team to win and he was willing to change the rules. He had to win at everything. Including poetry.

INTERVIEWER

What was the last occasion on which you saw him?

HALL

The last time I saw him was in Vermont, within seven or eight months of his death. He visited Ann Arbor that spring and invited me to call on him in the summer. We talked about writing, about literature—though of course mostly he monologued. He was deaf, but even when he was younger he tended to make long speeches. Anyway, after we had been talking for hours, my daughter Philippa, who was three years old, asked him if he had a TV. He looked down at her and smiled and said, You’ve seen me on TV?

Also we talked about a man—another poet I knew—who was writing a book about Frost. Frost hadn’t read his poetry and he asked me, Is he any good? I told him what I thought. Then, as we were driving away, I looked into the rearview mirror and saw the old man, eighty-eight, running after the car—literally running. I stopped and he came up to the window and asked me please, when I saw my friend again, not to mention that Frost had asked me if his poetry was any good, because he didn’t want my friend to know that he had not read his poetry. Frost was a political animal in the literary world. So are many of the best poets I run into and it doesn’t seem to hurt their poetry.

INTERVIEWER

Our meeting is an occasion of sorts since you are the original interviewer of poets for The Paris Review. Whom did you interview?

HALL

T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore. I had already known Eliot for a number of years. At the time of the interview, he was returning from a winter vacation in someplace like the Bahamas and we did the interview in New York. He looked tan and lean and wonderful, which surprised me. I had not seen him then for two or three years, and in the meantime he had married Valerie Fletcher. What a change in the man! When I first met him in 1950, he looked like a corpse. He was pale and bent over; he moved stiffly and slowly and coughed a continual, hacking cough. This ancient character was full of kindness and generosity, but he looked ready for the grave, as he did the next several times I saw him. Then, when I met him for the interview after his happy second marriage, he looked twenty years younger. He was happy; he giggled; he held hands with his young wife whenever they were together. Oh, he was an entirely different person, lighter and more forthcoming. Pound I interviewed in the spring of 1960. I was apprehensive, driving to see him in Rome, because I was afraid of what I’d run into. I had loved his poetry from early on but his politics revolted me, as they did everybody. The Paris Review had scheduled an interview with him once before when he was at St. Elizabeth’s, but he canceled at the last minute because he determined that The Paris Reviewwas part of the “pinko usury fringe.” That’s the sort of thing I expected, but that’s not what I found. He was staying with a friend in Rome and I drove down from England with my family. After I had knocked on the door and he swung it open and made sure it was me, he said, Mr. Hall, you’ve come all the way from England—and you find me in fragments! He spoke with a melody that made him sound like W. C. Fields. There’s the famous story—this didn’t happen to me but I love it—of a young American poet who was wandering around in Venice, not long before Pound died, and recognized the house where Pound was living with Olga Rudge. Impulsively, he knocked on the door. Maybe he expected the butler to answer, but the door swung open and it was Ezra Pound. In surprise and confusion the young poet said, How are you, Mr. Pound? Pound looked at him and, as he swung the door shut, said, Senile.

The Pound I interviewed in 1960 had not yet entered the silence, but the silence was beginning to enter him. There were enormous pauses in the middle of his sentences, times when he lost his thread; he would begin to answer, then qualify it, then qualify the qualification, as though he were composing a Henry James sentence. Often he could not find his way back out again and he would be overcome with despair. He had depended all his life on quickness of wit and sharpness of mind. It was his pride. Now he was talking with me for a Paris Review interview, which he took seriously indeed, and he found himself almost incapable. Sometimes after ten minutes of pause, fatigue, and despair, he would heave a sigh, sit up, and continue the sentence where he had broken it off. He was already depressed, the depression that later deepened and opened that chasm of silence. But then and there in 1960 I had a wonderful time with him. He was mild, soft, affectionate, sane. One time he and I went across the street to have a cup of coffee at a café where I had had coffee earlier. The waiter recognized us both, though he had never before seen us together, and thought he made a connection. He spoke a sentence in Italian that I didn’t understand, but the last word was figlio. Pound looked at me and looked at the waiter and said, Si.

INTERVIEWER

In the interview with him, your questions are challenging yet he seems, not evasive exactly, but as though he just did not quite understand what he had done.

HALL

Oh, no, he never really understood. He insisted that there could be no treason without treasonable intent. I’m certain that he had no treasonable intent, but if treason is giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war, well . . . he broadcast from Rome to American troops suggesting that they stop fighting. Of course he thought he was aiding and comforting the real America. He wasn’t in touch with contemporary America, not for decades. All the time he was at St. Elizabeth’s he was in an asylum for the insane, and his visitors were mostly cranks of the right wing. The news he heard was filtered. I think you can chart his political changes right from the end of the First World War and find that they correlate with the growth of paranoia and monomania that connected economics—finally, Jewish bankers—with a plot to control the world. He started out cranky and moved from cranky to crazy.

INTERVIEWER

In Remembering Poets, just as now, the one poet you interviewed that you don’t talk about is Marianne Moore.

HALL

Back then, I thought I didn’t have enough to say—or enough that other writers hadn’t already said. Lately, I’ve come up with some notions about her that I may write up for a new edition of that book. I had lunch with her twice in Brooklyn. The first time she took me up the hill to the little Viennese restaurant where she took everybody. Like everybody else I fought with her for the check and lost. She was tiny and frail and modest, but oh so powerful. I think she must have been a weight lifter in another life—or maybe a middle linebacker. Whenever you’re in the presence of extreme modesty or diffidence, always look for great degrees of reticent power or a hugely strong ego. Marianne Moore as editor of the Dial was made of steel. To wrestle with her over a check was to be pinned to the mat.

Another time when I came to visit, her teeth were being repaired so she made lunch at her apartment. She thought she looked dreadful and wouldn’t go outside the house without a complete set of teeth. Lunch was extraordinary! On a tray she placed three tiny paper cups and a plate. One of the cups contained about two teaspoons of V-8 juice. Another had about eight raisins in it, and the other five and a half Spanish peanuts. On the plate was a mound of Fritos, and when she passed them to me she said, I like Fritos. They’re so good for you, you know. She was eating health foods at the time, and I’m quite sure she wasn’t being ironic. She entertained some notion that Fritos were a health food. What else did she serve? Half a cupcake for dessert, maybe? She prepared a magnificent small cafeteria for birds.

INTERVIEWER

Marianne Moore went to school and she wrote poetry, but she did not study creative writing in school. Do you think the institution of the creative writing program has helped the cause of poetry?

HALL

Well, not really, no. I’ve said some nasty things about these programs. The Creative Writing Industry invites us to use poetry to achieve other ends—a job, a promotion, a bibliography, money, notoriety. I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it. Workshops make workshop-poems. Also, workshops encourage a kind of local competition, being better than the poet who sits next to you—in place of the useful competition of trying to be better than Dante. Also, they encourage a groupishness, an old-boy and -girl network that often endures for decades.

The good thing about workshops is that they provide a place where young poets can gather and argue—the artificial café. We’re a big country without a literary capital. Young poets from different isolated areas all over the country can gather with others of their kind.

And I suppose that workshops have contributed to all the attention that poetry’s been getting in the last decades. Newspaper people and essayists always whine about how we don’t read poetry the way we used to—in the twenties, for example. Bullshit! Just compare the numbers of books of poems sold then and now. Even in the fifties, a book of poems published by some eminent poet was printed in an edition of a thousand hardback copies. If it sold out everyone was cheerful. In 1923 Harmonium didn’t sell out—Stevens was remaindered, for heaven’s sake! A book of poetry today by a poet who’s been around will be published in an edition of five to seven thousand copies and often reprinted.

But it’s not the Creative Writing Industry itself that sells books; it’s the poetry readings. Practically nobody in the twenties and thirties and forties did readings. Vachel Lindsay, early, then Carl Sandburg, then Robert Frost—nobody else. If you look at biographies of Stevens and Williams and Moore, you see that they read their poems once every two years if they were lucky. Poetry readings started to grow when Dylan Thomas came over in the late forties and fifties. By this time there are three million poetry readings a year in the United States. Oh, no one knows how many there are. Sometimes I think I do three million a year.

In the sixties when the poetry reading boom got going people went to their state universities and heard poets read. When they went back to their towns they got the community college to bring poets in or they set up their own series through an arts group. Readings have proliferated enormously and spread sideways from universities to community colleges, prep schools, and arts associations. I used to think, Well, this is nice while it lasts but it’ll go away. It hasn’t gone away. There are more than ever.

INTERVIEWER

We were talking about your Paris Review interviews. You also edited poetry for the Paris Review for nine years at the beginning of the magazine. Why did you want to edit?

HALL

At that time I was a fierce advocate of the contemporary, with huge dislikes and admirations, and I wanted to impose my taste. That’s why I did the Advocate at Harvard, why I did The Paris Review, why I did anthologies. When I was at Oxford, besides choosing poetry for The Paris Review, I edited a mimeographed sheet for the Poetry Society; another magazine called New Poems; the poetry in the weekly, Isis; and Fantasy Poets, a pamphlet series that was started by a surrealist painter who did printing on the side. Michael Shanks edited the first four Fantasy pamphlets—including mine—and when Shanks went down to London, I chose the second bunch, which included Geoffrey Hill and Thom Gunn.

Oxford was a good time, though I felt rather elderly at Oxford. At Harvard I was a year younger than John Ashbery even, but at Oxford I was older than everybody. I’d been through college, while most of them were just out of boarding school. I had fun being dogmatic and bossy. Over at Cambridge, where there hadn’t been any poets for years, Thom Gunn turned up writing those wonderful early poems. When we heard him on the BBC, we invited him over to Oxford. My greatest time as an editor was with Geoffrey Hill. Just before the end of my first year at Oxford, he published a poem in Isis—a poem he’s never reprinted. Meeting him, I asked him casually if he’d submit a manuscript to the Fantasy series. Then I came back to the States for the summer; I was here in New Hampshire when Geoffrey’s manuscript arrived. I couldn’t believe my eyes: “Genesis,” “God’s Little Mountain,” “Holy Thursday.” Extraordinary! In the middle of the night I woke up dreaming about it; I turned on the light and read it again.

I accepted the manuscript for the pamphlet series. Later I put “Genesis” in the second issue of The Paris Review. Geoffrey was twenty years old.

INTERVIEWER

I believe you were known for a period in the sixties as James Dickey’s editor or even as his discoverer.

HALL

Oh, I was not his discoverer, but I did publish him early. When I was editing for The Paris Review I got poems from an address in Atlanta—long, garrulous poems with good touches. After a while I started writing notes, maybe “sorry” on a printed slip, then “thank you,” then a letter saying “I don’t like the middle part.” Finally he sent a poem I liked and I took it. We began to correspond and I discovered that he was in advertising. He sent me a fifteen-second radio ad for Coca-Cola, saying, This is my latest work.

When I was on the poetry board at Wesleyan, he sent us a book, I think at Robert Bly’s urging. But we took two other books ahead of him—we could only do two every season—and one of them was going to be James Wright’s third book, which he was calling “Amenities of Stone.” These two books crowded James Dickey out, which was a pity because it was Drowning with Others—his best work, I still think. Maybe two months later, my phone rang one morning at about seven a.m. It was Willard Lockwood, director of the Wesleyan University Press, saying that Jim Wright had withdrawn his book. Wesleyan was about to go to press; there was no time for the committee to meet again. Would it be all right to substitute the runner-up book, which was James Dickey’s? I called Dickey in Atlanta, then and there, seven-thirty in the morning, and asked, Has your book been taken by another publisher? Can we still have it? He said to go right ahead. So Wesleyan published James Dickey because James Wright withdrew his book.

INTERVIEWER

Did you get to know James Dickey?

HALL

I think I first met him out at Reed College when he was teaching there for a semester. Poetry got him out of advertising and for a while he traveled from school to school, one year here and another year there. I’m not sure which year he spent at Reed—early sixties—but we had a good visit out there. Carolyn Kizer came down from Seattle. Jim and I drove around in his MG, talking. He was friendly, and flattering about my work, but I began to notice—because of things he said about other people—that loyalty might not be his strong point. So I asked him straight out, Don’t you think loyalty’s a great quality? He knew what I was up to; he said, No, I think it’s a terrible quality. I think it’s the worst quality there is.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s move away from editing other people to editing yourself. Could you talk about how you work? I gather that you revise a lot.

HALL

First drafts of anything are difficult for me. I prefer revising, rewriting. I’m not the kind of writer like Richard Wilbur or Thomas Mann who finishes one segment before going on to another. Wilbur finishes the first line before he starts the second. I lack the ability to judge myself except over many drafts and usually over years. Revising, I go through a whole manuscript over and over and over. Some short prose pieces I’ve rewritten fifteen or twenty times; poems get up to two hundred fifty or three hundred drafts. I don’t recommend it, but for me it seems necessary. And I do more drafts as I get older.

Or maybe I just like it. Even with prose, I love the late stage in rewriting. I play with sentences, revise their organization, work with the rhythms, work with punctuation as though I were handling line breaks in poetry. In poetry I play with punctuation, line breaks, internal sounds, interconnections among images. I tinker with little things, and it’s my greatest pleasure in writing.

INTERVIEWER

Do you generally have several things going at once?

HALL

I’m not good at working on one thing straight through. When I work more than an hour on one project, I get irritated. Or sometimes I get too high. I spend my day working on many different things, never so long as an hour. When I get stuck, I put it down. Maybe I go haul some wood or have a drink of water; then I come back and pick up something else—an essay I’m working on, a book that’s due in six months . . . I work on poems usually in one block of time for an hour or two hours—recently sometimes three hours; things have been hotting up—almost always on several poems.

It isn’t just alternating projects; I switch around among genres and I work in many: children’s books, magazine pieces, short stories, textbooks. Obviously I care about poetry the most. But I love working with various kinds of prose also, even something as mundane as headnotes for an anthology. After all, I am working with the same material—language, syntax, rhythms and vowels—as if I were a sculptor who worked at carving in stone all morning and then in the afternoon built drywalls or fieldstone houses.

There’s pleasure in doing the same thing in different forms. When I heard the story of the oxcart man from my cousin Paul Fenton, I started work on a poem. It’s a wonderful story, passed on orally for generations until I stole it out of the air: A farmer fills up his oxcart in October with everything that the farm has produced in a year that he doesn’t need—honey, wool, deerskin—and walks by his ox to Portsmouth market where he sells everything in the cart. Then he sells the cart, then the ox, and walks home to start everything over again.

The best stories come out of the air. I worked on that oxcart man poem, brief as it is, for about two years. Just as I was finishing it, I suddenly thought that I could make a children’s book out of the same story. The children’s book took me a couple of hours to write—hours not years—and the wage was somewhat better. When the book won the Caldecott, we were able to tear off the dingy old bathroom and put a new bathroom into an old bedroom and add a new bedroom; over the new bathroom I have a plaque: Caldecott Room.

Later I used the same oxcart story as part of an essay and as a song that Bill Bolcom set for Joan Morris to sing. Now I’ve used it again, here in an interview! Every time I tell the story it’s different. The form makes it different, also the audience, and therefore the tone, therefore the diction—which makes the whole process fascinating. In working on a play I used material from all over the place: from one prose book in particular, from other essays, from fiction, from poems. When I put these things into bodily action and into dialogue on a stage—material that I had already used up, you might have thought—they take on new life, thanks to the collision with a different genre.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned sculpture a few minutes ago. What is it about Henry Moore that so fascinates you?

HALL

I had admired his work for a long time before I had the chance to interview him for Horizon. When I was an undergraduate I pinned a Penguin Print of Henry Moore’s sculpture on my wall. When I first got to England in 1951 I saw his sculpture at the Festival of Britain. It was 1959 when I met him and interviewed him; three years later I came back and hung around him for a whole year—watching, listening—to do a New Yorker profile, which later became a book. Of all the older artists I’ve known, he’s made the most difference for my own writing. He helped me get past a childish form of ambition: the mere striving to be foremost. He wasn’t interested in being the best sculptor in England or even the best sculptor of his generation. He wanted to be as good as Michelangelo or Donatello. He was in his early sixties when I met him first—my age now—and oh, he loved to work! At the same time he was a gentle, humorous, gregarious man. He got up early every morning—and he got on with it. I think of a story from the time when he and Irina were first married. They were going off into the country for a holiday, and Irina tried to lift one of the suitcases that Henry had brought but she couldn’t get it off the ground. He’d packed a piece of alabaster. I am sure that they paid lots of attention to each other, but from time to time Henry went outside and tap-tapped with chisel and mallet.

I loved hearing him talk about sculpture, and everything he said about sculpture I turned to poetry. He quoted Rodin quoting a craftsman: never think of a surface except as the extension of a volume. I did a lot with that one.

INTERVIEWER

Did you envy him for the physicality of his materials?

HALL

The physical activity of the painter and the sculptor keeps them in touch with the natureof their art more than writing does for writers. Handwriting or typing or word processing—they’re not like sticking your hands into clay.

Yet a poem has a body, just as sculpture and painting have bodies. When you write a poem, you’re not hammering out the sounds with a chisel or spreading them with a brush, but you’ve got to feel them in your mouth. The act of writing a poem is a bodily act as well as a mental and imaginative act, and the act of reading a poem—even silently—must be bodily before it’s intellectual. In talking or writing about poetry, too often people never get to the work of art. Instead they talk about some statement they abstract from the work of art, a paraphrase of it. Everybody derides paraphrase and everybody does it. It’s the fallacy of content—the philosophical heresy.

INTERVIEWER

You were talking about writing prose. Tell us more about the relationship between your poetry and your prose.

HALL

When I was young I wrote prose but I didn’t take it seriously; it was terrible. I began to write real prose when I wrote String Too Short to Be Saved, mostly in 1959 and 1960; with that book I learned how to write descriptive and narrative reminiscence. Over the years, I’ve learned how to write other prose—to write for five-year-olds, stories for picture books; to write articles or reviews about poetry; to write prose for popular magazines, some of it objective or biographical, like my profile of Henry Moore; and to write about sports. Also I’ve written short stories, combining narrative prose with some of the shapeliness of poems. Writing prose for a living—freelance writing—does another thing I like: it opens doors. Sir Kenneth Clark had me to lunch at his castle in Kent—because I was writing about Moore for The New Yorker. By sports writing, I made the major leagues, talking with Pete Rose and sitting up half the night with Willie Crawford. I’ve listened to the free association of Kevin McHale of the Boston Celtics.

INTERVIEWER

How did the baseball players accept you? As I remember, when you tried out for the Pirates you were bearded and, shall we say, a touch overweight?

HALL

I was bearded and weighed about two hundred fifty pounds when I tried out for second base with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Willie Randolph and Rennie Stennett both beat me out. (I was cut for not being able to bend over, which wasn’t fair; Richie Hebner made the team at third base and he couldn’t bend over either.) The players had nicknames for me, like Abraham and Poet, and they treated me like a mascot. When I took batting practice, the whole team stopped whatever it was doing to watch—the comedy act of the decade. The players looked at me as some sort of respite from their ordinary chores; they were curious, and they were kind enough as they teased me. Mostly, athletes are quick-witted and funny, with maybe a ten-second attention span.

Back to the question: there are several relationships between my prose and my poetry. Prose is mostly the breadwinner. Poetry supplies bread through the poetry reading, but prose makes the steady income. I get paid for an essay once when it comes out in a magazine, then again when I collect it in a book. But also, I think that prose takes some of the pressure off my poetry. Maybe I am able to be more patient with my poetry—taking years and years to finish poems—because I continue to finish and publish short prose pieces.

Prose is tentative and exploratory and not so intense; in prose I can dwell on something longer, not just pick out the one thing to notice or say. Poetry is the top of the mountain. I like the foothills just fine—as long as I keep access to the top of the mountain.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever learned from critics?

HALL

Sure. When I was young, critics helped teach me to read poems. Then critics or poets-being-critics have—in person and by letter—led me to discard poems or to rip them up and start over again. I seek their abrasiveness out. I’ve even been helped by book reviews, mostly by some general dissatisfaction with my work. But if a book review is a personal attack—someone obviously hates you—it doesn’t do any good. You just walk up and down feeling the burden of this death ray aimed at you. The critics who help have been annoyed with my work and make it clear why without actually wanting to kill me. They give me new occasions for scrutiny, for crossing out.

INTERVIEWER

Another subject. You’re notorious for answering letters. Is your heavy correspondence related to your art? Doesn’t it get in the way?

HALL

Sometimes I wonder, Do I write a letter because it’s easier than writing a poem? I don’t think so. Letters take less time than parties or lunches. How do people in New York get anything done? My letters are my society. I carry on a dense correspondence with poets of my generation and younger. Letters are my café, my club, my city. I am fond of my neighbors up here, but for the most part they keep as busy as I do. We meet in church, we meet at the store, we gossip a little. We don’t stand around in a living room and chat—like the parties I used to go to in Ann Arbor. I write letters instead, and mostly I write about the work of writing. There are poets with whom I regularly exchange poems, soliciting criticism. I don’t think that either Robert Bly or I has ever published a poem without talking it over with the other. Also, I work out ideas in letters, things that will later be parts of essays. I dictate; it takes too much time to type and no one can read my handwriting.