Donald Hall
Donald Hall
Donald Andrew Hall, Jr., known as Donald Hall is an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 September 1928
CityHamden, CT
baseball heart thinking
You know how, when you fly from coast to coast on a really clear day, looking down from many miles up, you can see the little baseball diamonds everywhere? And every time I see a baseball diamond my heart goes out to it. And I think somewhere down there- I don't see any houses, I can hardly see any roads- but I know that people down there are playing the game we all love.
thinking dying worst
You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.
men years shining
We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.
together nouns adjectives
When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.
water streams seems
Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.
character opposites anxious
Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
writing paper terrible
Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
cheer greatness things-will-get-better
Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!"
hurt addiction important
Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
moving home years
Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
grows loses
To grow old is to lose everything.
integrity reading pleasure
The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
voice revision blake
But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.
writing today engines
Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.