Arts Café presents Donald Hall, 14th poet laureate

Arguably America's greatest living poet, Donald Hall, 83, will be reading at the Arts Café~Mystic Friday, Nov. 11. Born and raised in Hamden, Hall was the nation's 14th poet laureate and has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts last spring.

Hall is the author of more than a score of collections of poetry, the latest of which, published in September, is titled "The Back Chamber."

His poems are profoundly evocative of the ancestral farm on which he's lived since 1975 in Danbury, N.H., and their roots reach deep into his family's and the land's past. Hall has been recognized as a gifted poet since his teens, but it is in his most recent work that he has transcended himself.

The spark for that transcendence was the loss of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, to leukemia after 23 years of marriage. Out of her death came "Without" and "The Painted Bed," two wrenchingly beautiful accounts of a deep and passionate love lost.

We asked Hall five questions about his poetry.

1. You are a master at making poetry feel like natural speech, and your work is all the more powerful for being so plainspoken. Who were your greatest influences, and how did you come to this style?

I don't think that my early poetry sounded like natural speech. I think I came to it by way of Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder and further attention to the poems of William Carlos Williams. Of course there was Whitman!

2. In the long poem "Daylilies on the Hill, 1975-1989," you seem to lament what is lost and yet find a kind of consolation in what remains. How does the past inform the present?

One of the tasks of poetry is to preserve the past so that the future can read about it. There's a paradox: You lament the past and by lamenting you preserve it, which is joy.

3. In the wake of your wife's death, you wrote, "Will Hall ever write / lines that do anything / but whine and complain?" Your grief seems immovable. And yet, the last section of the same book is titled "Ardor" and rich in erotic poetry. Can you tell us how you rediscovered life?

It has happened to others, male and female. My grief was so intense I could think about practically nothing else. But I could think about one thing, not in terms of a new marriage but in terms of the erotic life. It is true that in my dreams early after Jane's death I found that she had left me for another man!

4. As one who has lived a writing life, what advice would you give a would-be poet starting out?

Advice to the beginning poet: Revise, revise, revise, revise! Also, read English literature, especially poetry, from Chaucer to your contemporaries. Concentrate on the best a century of all, the 17th.

5. This past March, you were quoted in the Concord Monitor, saying your newest book of poems will be your last, as your inspiration has left you. How can a man whose entire life has been dedicated to poetry give up on it now?

I have left poetry, or poetry has left me, but I am enjoying writing prose. (The New Yorker just took a piece.) After 70 years, maybe it is all right? What has left me is the meteor showers of lines splendid with metaphor and assonance, deeply moving - but at first perfectly mysterious to me. What am I writing about? Revising, I would find out.