Sherry Chandler

Sherry Chandler » Donald Hall Named Poet Laureate

Donald Hall Named Poet Laureate

The head of the Library of Congress is to name Donald Hall, a writer whose deceptively simple language builds on images of the New England landscape, as the nation’s 14th poet laureate today.

Mr. Hall, a poet in the distinctive American tradition of Robert Frost, has also been a harsh critic of the religious right’s influence on government arts policy. And as a member of the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Arts during the administration of George H. W. Bush, he referred to those he thought were interfering with arts grants as “bullies and art bashers.”

…

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.

As it happens, I have just been reading Without, Hall’s grief journal in poetry for his wife, Jane Kenyon. Kenyon died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 1995. Houghton Mifflin published Without in 1998, so it was written while grief was very raw. This was my first extended experience with Hall’s work, so I can’t really speak to his being in the “tradition of Frost.” He is, I suppose, more in the tradition of poets laureate than was Ted Kooser, being from the northeast and widely recognized by the publishing establishment. But it might be refreshing to have a poet laureate who does not spurn politics.

Without is an affecting book, one of the few books of poetry that I have read through at a sitting. It is not pleasant reading, I don’t know whether it is always poetry, but it is always an honest look into the heart of grief, and as such a comfort in a way to those of us who see our own grief coming.

A small poem from the collection:

Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room

Distracting myself
on the recliner between
Jane’s hospital bed
and window, in this blue
room where we endure,
I set syllables
into prosy lines.
William Butler Yeats
denounced with passion
“the poetry of
passive suffering.”
Friends and strangers
write letters speaking
of courage or strength.
What else could we do
except what we do?
Should we weep lying
flat? We do. Sometimes,
driving the Honda
with its windows closed
in beginning autumn
from the low motel
to Jane’s bed, I scream
and keep on screaming.