Donald Hall, 1928 -

The newly appointed poet laureate of the United States, Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut (1928). He's the author of many collections of poetry, including The Dark Houses (1958), Kicking the Leaves: Poems (1978), and Willow Temple: New and Selected Poems (2003).

As a boy, he spent summers on his grandfather's farm in New Hampshire, and he often listened to his grandfather recite long narrative poems like "Casey at the Bat." It was one of those summers at his grandfather's house that Donald Hall began writing his own first poems at a tiny desk in the room where he slept. His first literary hero was Edgar Allan Poe. Hall said, "I wanted to be mad, addicted, obsessed, haunted, and cursed; I wanted to have eyes that burned like coals, profoundly melancholy, profoundly attractive."

When he was 16, he met Robert Frost at a writers' conference, and while he was in college he met the elder poets T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas. He said that meeting professional poets gave him the idea that being a poet was something that you worked at steadily, for a long time.

His collection White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 came out this year. He was named the poet laureate this June.

Donald Hall said, "I try every day to write great poetry—as I tried when I was 14. ... What else is there to do?"



We Bring Democracy To The Fish

It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.

______

An old life

Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day's lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.