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
form verses free-verse
The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
baseball games lasts
Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.
writing sleep bird
I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
real wish want
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
sweet son decay
Sweet death, small son, our instrument Of immortality, Your cries and hungers document Our bodily decay.
baseball memories america
Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
grief loss house
Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
writing goal trying
If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
writing goal reason
I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
writing two goal
To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it
baseball football brother
Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
summer baseball father
Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.
writing light hands
Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.
powerful done denial
If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.