PAUL SMITH
The Corsair
“Now I am 80 years old, content to sit in my chair, watching unpainted boards of the barn turn gold when late autumn sun rubs against them,” read Donald Hall, as he opened with his new poem, “Pieces,” during his presentation at the Ashmore Auditorium to a packed audience Friday night, Sept. 18.
Hall, who was named the 14th Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006, visited PJC’s Pensacola campus for a poetry reading on Sept. 18 and also sat down with students and faculty for an informal question-and-answer session on Sept. 17, marking the first time PJC has hosted a former national Poet Laureate.
“Donald Hall is a monumental figure in American poetry,” said Bill Fisher, assistant professor with the English Department, who was instrumental in bringing Hall to PJC and introduced him at Friday night’s event.
Hall has published 15 books of poetry. His earliest book, “Exiles and Marriages,” was released in 1955; and most recently, he published the book “White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946 -2006,” from which he read several poems during his visit.
He received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Books Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1988 for the book-length poem, “The One Day;” as well as received the Lily Prize for Poetry in 1994; and he has also been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships.
In addition to his own celebrated work as a poet, Hall personally knew and wrote about some of the world’s most legendary poets, including Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.
“He’s been in on the founding of modern American poetry,” said Fisher. “[Hall] is perhaps our only living link to the older generation of poets who were greatly responsible for the creation of modern poetry. [He] actually knew, visited, and created sparks with them.”
Hall’s visit was part of a continuing series by the Lyceum Committee to bring renowned poets to PJC which began with poet Mark Doty’s visit in 2006.
“It’s a treat for us to have contact with someone who is as fine a poet as [Hall] is,” said Marian Wernicke, a professor with the English Department and member of the Lyceum Committee.
“I really think reading a poem aloud brings it alive, because the poet works on sound; he works on rhythm,” Wernicke said, expressing her excitement about Hall’s reading at the Ashmore Auditorium. “It just doesn’t come alive to me as it does when the poet himself reads it.”
“For most students poetry is this dreadful thing,” Fisher said. “This a good opportunity for people to put a face and a personality with poetry and see that it’s something other than how it’s been presented to them throughout the school experience.”
A handful of students and faculty got the rare up-close opportunity to match personality with poetry during the informal Q-and-A session with Hall held in the Board Room in Building 7 on the Thursday morning before the event at the Ashmore Auditorium.
Hall answered the attendees’ questions, sharing some of his personal history while also displaying his extensive knowledge on the craft and history of poetry.
At one point during the session, Hall, while discussing the early influences on the Modernist poetry movement, quoted from the beginning of Homer’s “The Iliad” – only he did so speaking in the original Greek.
But, perhaps the most moving moments were when he spoke about the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995 of leukemia when she was 47 years old.
Kenyon has been the subject of numerous poems by Hall, including the entire book “Without,” released in 1998.
“There was a time when I couldn’t write about anything else,” said Hall, who described writing about his wife’s death as a cathartic experience. “I wondered how people without writing poetry could go through this.”
At the close of his reading at the Ashmore Auditorium, Hall left some departing advice for aspiring poets. He suggested reading the notable poets of the 17th century, which he characterized as “the greatest century for poetry in English,” and he also recommended revising poems as many times as necessary, saying that some of his own poems have gone through hundreds of revisions.
“I’ve been around so many young poets that don’t want to change what they wrote,” Hall said, “because that’s what they meant when they wrote it. [For them,] sincerity is the issue, but I think poetry is the issue.”
Hall left Pensacola on Saturday morning, Sept. 19, to fly back to his home in New Hampshire. He returned to his grandfather’s farm in Mount Kearsarge, where he once worked as a boy and has lived as an adult since 1975, and where he presumably sits waiting for that late autumn sun to turn those unpainted boards of the barn gold.