Essays After Eighty

by Donald Hall

  In Greece every moment brimmed with ruins and history. Our joy in the ancient world was dogged by one shadow. Maybe this time our route back through Yugoslavia would be truly impassable. Would we take the wrong track and spend Oxford’s winter term starving on the margin of a fourth-class road? Then we heard at American Express of an alternative that was amazingly cheap and took only half a day. In Piraeus, Athens’s port city, we hoisted the Morris onto a boat and crossed the Adriatic to Brindisi, at the heel of Italy’s boot. Early in 1953, we replaced Yugoslavia’s one road with Ravenna’s mosaics, and continued north through Italy, at first with the convertible’s top down. We stopped a few days in Paris, with George Plimpton and other Paris Review companions. We crossed the Channel in clear air to Banbury Road.

  The marriage lasted fifteen years, ending in 1967. Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry. I grew up in a comfortable 1920s suburb. Kirby’s family raised sugar cane on a plantation in Jamaica. Our tastes in daily life diverged as much as our backgrounds. My literary ambition did not fit with Kirby’s reserve. These differences, at first exotic, turned noxious and destructive. Years later I remarried, and in 1975 moved with Jane to my old family farm in New Hampshire. Kirby never remarried. After her own psychoanalysis, she became a psychotherapist, highly regarded in Ann Arbor, where I had taught. She became independent, active, and political. We kept in touch until our two children grew up. Kirby left Michigan in 1991 and settled in the East, to be near our son and daughter, who had come to New England for college and work, and near our grandchildren. Although we lived not far apart, over a dozen years we never saw each other. When a child or a grandchild had a birthday, there were two parties.

  Then Kirby became sick, and sicker—misery for children and grandchildren, melancholy and regret for me. Yet to my surprise and gratitude, it brought us together again, and it was a comfort to sit beside her and reminisce. We talked about a journey from Oxford to Athens. But there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended. Kirby died of cancer in 2008 when she was seventy-six. I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone. There is only one road.

  Thank You Thank You

  APRIL IS POETRY MONTH, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April of 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost.

  So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.

  Whenever a poet comes to the end of a poetry reading, she pauses a moment, then, as a signal for applause, says “Thank you” and nods her head. Hands clap, and she says “Thank you” again, to more applause. Sometimes she says it one more time, or he does. How else does the audience know that the reading might not go on for six hours?

  For better or worse, poetry is my life. After a reading, I enjoy the question period. On a tour in Nebraska I read poems to high school kids, a big auditorium. When I finished, someone wanted to know how I got started. I said how at twelve I loved horror movies, then read Edgar Allan Poe, then . . . A young man up front waved his hand. I paused in my story. He asked, “Didn’t you do it to pick up chicks?”

  I remembered cheerleaders at Hamden High School. “It works better,” I told him, “when you get older.”

  It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road. He spoke well, his meter accommodating his natural sentences, and in between poems he made people laugh. At times onstage he played the chicken farmer, cute and countrified, eliciting coos of delight from an adoring audience. Once, after I heard him do this routine, I attended the post-reading cocktail party, where he ate deviled eggs, sipped martinis, and slaughtered the reputations of Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Moore . . .

  Back then, other famous poets read aloud only two or three times a year. If they were alive now, probably they could make a better living saying their poems than they did as an editor at Faber and Faber, or an obstetrician, or an insurance company executive, or a Brooklyn librarian.

  In 1952 I recited aloud the first time, booming in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. The London Times remarked on my “appropriately lugubrious voice.” When I first did a full-length poetry reading, three years later, my arms plunged stiff from my shoulders, my voice was changeless in pitch and volume, my face rigid, expressionless, pale—as if I were a collaborator facing a firing squad.

  A question period for undergraduates at a Florida college began with the usual stuff: what is the difference between poetry and prose? Then I heard a question I had never heard before: “How do you reconcile being a poet with being president of Hallmark cards?” This inquisitive student had looked on the Internet and learned that the man who runs the sentiment factory is indeed Donald Hall.

  It’s a common name. Once before a reading a man asked me, “Are you Donald Hall?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So am I,” he said.

  At the end of the airport’s titanium tube a man carried a sign with the poet’s name. The assistant professor drove her an hour to his campus, talking nervously all the way about whether he’d get tenure from his English department. When he drove her back for her flight the next day, he asked her to write a letter of recommendation.

  When my first book came out in 1955, it was praised, I did a second book, my poems appeared in magazines—but nobody asked me to speak them out loud. I taught at the University of Michigan, which sponsored no readings. To my students I recited great poems with gusto and growing confidence—Wyatt, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Hardy—and worked on performance without knowing it. It was a shock when a lecture agent telephoned to offer a fee for reading my poems at a college. It happened again, and I flew off on days when I didn’t teach. Michigan paid minimal salaries, and most teachers amplified their incomes by plodding to summer school. I stayed home and wrote instead of employing the Socratic method in a suffocating classroom.

  As the phone kept ringing, I supposed that poetry readings were some sort of fad, like cramming into phone booths; I would enjoy it as long as it lasted.

  When my generation learned to read aloud, publishing from platforms more often than in print, we heard our poems change. Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning sound was imagined through the eye. Gradually the out-loud mouth-juice of vowels, or mouth-chunk of consonants, gave body to poems in performance. Dylan Thomas showed the way. Charles Olson said that “form is never more than an extension of content.” Really, content is only an excuse for oral sex. The most erotic poem in English is Paradise Lost.

  In concentrating on sound, as in anything else, there are things to beware of. Revising a poem one morning, I found myself knowing that a new phrase was a cliché or a dead metaphor, but realizing that I could intone it aloud so that it would pass. Watch out. A poem must work from the platform but it must also work on the page. My generation started when poetry was print, before it became sound. We were lucky to practice both modes at once.

  A chairman of English warned a friend of mine about her approaching audience. “They’re required to attend,” he said. “They don’t listen to anything. Sometimes in class I ask them to open a window, or to close it, just to see if they’re alive.” He sighed a deep sigh, as ponderous as tenure. “I don’t know what I’d do if the New Yorker didn’t come on Thursdays.”

  It’s alleged that Homer said his poems aloud. Somewhat later, we hear that Tennyson read his poems to Queen Victoria, but we don’t hear much more. In the 1930s William Butler Yeats traveled by train across America, from East Coast to West, but the master of mellifluous stanzas didn’t speak his verses. At universities, to butter his bread, he read the typescript
of a lecture called “Three Great Irishmen.” Maybe poets used to be paid not to say their poems?

  By chance, I had been an undergraduate at the one college in America with an endowed series of poetry readings. Eliot was good, but most performances were insufferable—superb poems spoken as if they were lines from the telephone book. William Carlos Williams read too quickly in a high-pitched voice, but seemed to enjoy himself. Wallace Stevens appeared to loathe his beautiful work, making it flat and half audible. (Maybe he thought the boys in the office would tease him.) Marianne Moore’s tuneless drone was as eccentric as her inimitable art. When she spoke between poems, Moore mumbled in an identical monotone. Since she frequently revised or cut her things, a listener had to concentrate, to distinguish poems from talk. After twenty minutes she looked distressed, and said “Thank you.” When Dylan Thomas read, I hovered above the auditorium seat as I heard him say Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” He read his own poems afterward, fabricated for his rich and succulent Welsh organ. I found myself floating again. In four American visits, from 1950 to 1953, when he died in New York, Thomas read his poems many times at many places, from New York’s Poetry Center through dozens of western colleges. Frost’s eminence among poetry readers disappeared for a time.

  In a question period I launched into my familiar rant about dead metaphors, asserting that when “I am glued to the chair” equals “I am anchored to the spot,” we claim that a tugboat is Elmer’s Glue. This afternoon I was obsessed with clichés using disability metaphors: the crippled economy, blind ambition, deaf to entreaties, the paralysis of industry, and . . .

  At the end I summed up my argument. Guileless, I said, “All these metaphors are lame.”

  Why was everyone laughing?

  Dylan Thomas’s popularity was not only on account of his voice or his verse. Thomas was a star, and most people came to his readings because of the Tales of Master Dylan—vast drunkenness, creative obscenity at parties, botched seductions, nightly comas—but if people attended because of his celebrity, at least they were going to a poetry reading. Maybe the explosion of recitation was also because of a cultural change. Songs were no longer Tin Pan Alley, and the lyrics were worth heeding. When everyone listened to Bob Dylan, they heard lines that resembled poetry. When people heard memorable language sung from platforms, they became able to hear poems recited in auditoriums. The University of Michigan began to schedule poetry readings every Tuesday at four p.m. A gathering of students, sometimes three hundred, attended each week and absorbed what they listened to. A few days after one reading I met Sarah, a friend of my daughter’s. She recited a stanza from Tuesday’s poet. “You’ve been reading her books!” I said. Oh, no, she said. Sarah remembered what the poet recited.

  Once after a circuit reading, my driver left me at a house for a party. I would spend the night there, while he went to a motel to get some sleep, and he would pick me up the next morning at six. The party was good; the party was long. These were the days when people drank liquor. Our host drooped asleep on the sofa at four a.m., which was apparently his daily wont. I didn’t notice because I was flirting with a pretty woman, whose husband stood dazed beside her, until he emerged into consciousness to attack me. His fist aimed at my jaw but moved so slowly that I was able to duck. Three minutes later, we became friends forever, and at six a.m. I stood on the sidewalk waiting for my escort to drive me to the next reading, the next party.

  After a poet friend performed in Mississippi one winter, a man handed her a heavy box of typewriter paper, saying, “I want to share my poems with you.” When she glanced through “Verses of a Sergeant Major, Ret.,” she found it unreadable. Telling me about it, she asserted that “share” has become a verb of assault disguised as magnanimity. “Unless you read my poems, I will gouge your eyeballs out.”

  Bert Hornback ran the Tuesday readings in Ann Arbor, supplementing the English department’s pittance by appealing to university administrators for discretionary funds. After ten years of weekly readings he burned out, and watched as the feckless department dropped to holding one reading a year. He decided to see what he could do by himself. On a January day in the eighties he rented the university’s Rackham Auditorium, sold tickets for a joint poetry reading—$5.50 each, 50 cents to Ticketmaster—and invited some friends to read: Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Seamus Heaney—long before Seamus went to Stockholm. On a Friday night—against a home basketball game, against the Chicago Symphony—Bert filled eleven hundred seats with paying poetry fans. The fire department permitted a hundred standing-room-only tickets, which sold out, and Bert added further SROs when the fire department wasn’t looking. Unexpected vanloads arrived from Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Each poet read for forty minutes, and after a break did ten minutes more. Outside, the crowd without tickets sulked and grumbled. It was said that scalpers charged as much as $50.

  A Dodge Festival in New Jersey was massive with poets, schoolteachers, and schoolkids. Each poet did panels, question periods, and readings. The first night all twenty-five poets read, a few minutes each, to a crowd of three thousand. Nobody sitting at the back of the tent could have seen a poet’s face if the festival had not enlarged each visage on a screen like the Dallas Cowboys’. For close-ups the Dodge employed a black-jointed steel arm, a foot thick and fifty feet long, which curled and lurched its camera back and forth, grabbing each facial detail in its metallic tentacles. It looked as if it were searching for a source of protein.

  A week after the readings and lectures of the festival, last year’s Pulitzer poet received a thick letter from a woman in South Carolina who had fallen in love. The envelope was heavy with amorous poems, and she told him that there were ninety-seven more, but she didn’t have the stamps. She attached a photograph of a mature woman in front of a ranch house, and implored him to fly down immediately. She enclosed an airline ticket with blank dates.

  It’s okay to be pleased when an audience loves you, or treats you as deathless, but you must not believe it. Someone says that my reading is the best she has ever heard; a man tells me that he has read me for thirty years and that I am a giant in American letters. I know I’m not. Doubtless many praisers believe such extravagance when they say it, and it does no good to argue. I could tell them nasty things people have said about me in print. I could list the prizes I have not won and the anthologies from which I have been omitted. It is best to believe the praiser and dismiss the praise. Nine-tenths of the contemporary poets who win prizes and praises, who are applauded the most, who are treated everywhere like emperors—or like statues of emperors—will go unread in thirty years. If a poet is any good, how would the listeners know? Poets have no notion of their own durability or distinction. When poets announce that their poems are immortal, they are depressed or lying or psychotic. Interviewing T. S. Eliot, I saved my cheekiest question for last. “Do you know you’re any good?” His revised and printed response was formal, but in person he was abrupt: “Heavens no! Do you? Nobody intelligent knows if he’s any good.”

  Look at the sad parade of Poets Laureate.

  Sometimes an audience is not three thousand. A friend of mine arrived at a hall to find that his listener was singular. They went out for a beer. I heard of another poet who showed up for a crowd of two. Gamely, she did a full reading from the podium, and afterward descended to shake the hands of her crowd. One was dead.

  When I was young I could project, and now without a microphone I can’t be heard in the tenth row. It’s not only the debility of age. One’s range is diminished by habitual use of microphones. (When stage actors spend twenty years making movies, they are inaudible when they return to Broadway or the West End.) But there are advantages to artificial enhancement. There’s a poem in which I moo like a cow. Cows’ lungs are bigger than ours. I approach the microphone intimately, and softly but audibly moo as long as a cow moos. Proximity to the microphone saves my wind as I croon, “Mm-mmm-mmmmm-mmmmmmmm-uggh wanchhh.” My friends say it’s
the best line I’ve ever written.

  After the group-talk of the question period comes the poet-and-one. People line up for signatures. Sometimes the seeker dictates a dedication, “Say, ‘With love to Billy and his adorable wife Sheila who makes a great pound cake.’” The signer should demur, or at least edit. Everyone in line must spell a name, or “Felicia” turns out to be “Phylysha.” (Once at a prep school a boy asked me to write, “For Mom and Dad.” I said that my parents were dead. We worked things out.) If there are just a few in line, the poet can speak with them as if they were people. If the line is long, it becomes impossible to distinguish one petitioner from another. At the end stands the host—the man who invited the poet to the campus, who picked her up at the airport, with whom she had a lengthy conversation, who will give her the check, who hands her a book to sign—and she has no idea of his name.

  Once I read at a college in Minnesota. As the dean led me up the platform, he told me something he had forgotten: I should read for only twenty-five minutes, instead of the contracted fifty, because after my presentation the students would elect this year’s Homecoming Queen. The auditorium was packed. (At lunch afterward, English professors told me that they had entered the auditorium astonished: so many students for a poetry reading!) After I read, the applause was long. An audience applauds longest when it knows it has not been paying attention. A young woman wearing a ball gown and a gold crown ascended the platform and stood at the rostrum where I had stood. She was last year’s Homecoming Queen, who would preside over this year’s vote and coronation. Six girls in ball gowns hovered in the wings. “Now,” said the retiring Queen, “now comes the moment you’ve all been waiting for!”