{"id":126914,"date":"2018-06-26T10:33:36","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T14:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126914"},"modified":"2018-06-27T15:28:10","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T19:28:10","slug":"donald-hall-1928-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/26\/donald-hall-1928-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Hall, 1928\u20132018"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Donald Hall, who served as The Paris Review<\/em>\u2019s first poetry editor, died Saturday at the age of eighty-nine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hall had an enormous influence on American poetry. A prolific writer, he published more than fifty books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited numerous anthologies, including the influential\u00a0New Poets of England and America<\/em> (1957; coedited with Robert Pack and\u00a0Louis Simpson). His biggest renown was for his poetry, where he explored mortality, baseball, and the distant past, and returned, again and again, to the subject of the death of his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Although Hall went on to have other lovers, including his longtime companion Linda Kunhardt, he arranged to be buried next to Jane, beneath a headstone inscribed with lines from one of her poems: \u201cI\u00a0BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART, BUT WHAT PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU BESIDE ME?<\/small>\u201d<\/p>\n

Hall served as poet laureate of the United States in 2006, and had, in his house in New Hampshire, a framed photo of himself standing between the Obamas. But before all that, he was an editor\u2014first at Harvard\u2019s literary magazine and then at The Paris<\/em>\u00a0Review<\/em>. In this magazine, he published some of the earliest work of Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Louise Simpson, and James Wright. \u201cI was trying to define a generation,\u201d Hall once said about his early days as an editor. \u201cI think it worked very well.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are few great poets with whom Hall was not in regular correspondence. \u201cMy letters are my society,\u201d he said in his Writers at Work interview<\/a>. \u201c\u200bI carry on a dense correspondence with poets of my generation and younger. Letters are my caf\u00e9, my club, my city.\u201d In an essay for the Library of Congress, Hall wrote, \u201cWay back we didn\u2019t call ourselves poets, because it would have been pretentious. Poets were rare, and poets were great or they were nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he often mourned the state of contemporary poetry, of technology and the proliferation of words, Hall measured himself and the poetry he loved against the greats. \u201cThe desire must be,\u201d he said, \u201cnot to write another dozen poems, but to write something as good as the poems that originally brought you to love the art. It\u2019s the only sensible reason for writing poems. You\u2019ve got to keep your eye on what you care about: to write a poem that stands up with Walt Whitman or Andrew Marvell.\u201d And Hall built poems that would last, poems for posterity, poems that could not be washed away.<\/p>\n

From his poem \u201cExile<\/a>,\u201d which appeared in\u00a0the first issue of\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Each of us waking to the window\u2019s light
\nHas found the curtains changed, our pictures gone;
\nOur furniture has vanished in the night
\nAnd left us to an unfamiliar dawn,
\nEven the contours of our room are strange
\nAnd everything is change.
\nWaking, our minds construct of memory
\nWhat figure stretched beside us, or what voice
\nShouted to call us from our luxury\u2014
\nAnd all the mornings leaning to our choice.<\/p>\n

To put away – both child and murderer –
\nThe toys we played with just a month ago,
\nThat wisdom come, and make our moving sure,
\nBegan our exile with our lust to grow.
\n(Remembering a train I tore apart,
\nBecause it knew my heart.)
\nWe move and move, but only love the lost,
\nPerversity our master to the bone;
\nWe search our minds for childhood, and are tossed
\nBy fevers to rebuild a child unknown.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Donald Hall, who served as The Paris Review\u2019s first poetry editor, died Saturday at the age of eighty-nine. Hall had an enormous influence on American poetry. A prolific writer, he published more than fifty books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited numerous anthologies, including the influential\u00a0New Poets of England and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1628,7434,11585,34496,7221,165,4278],"class_list":["post-126914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-donald-hall","tag-james-wright","tag-louise-simpson","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-robert-bly"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDonald Hall, 1928\u20132018<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Donald Hall, who served as The Paris Review\u2019s first poetry editor, died this Saturday at the age of 89.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/26\/donald-hall-1928-2018\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Donald Hall, 1928\u20132018 by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 26, 2018 \u2013   Donald Hall, who served as The Paris Review\u2019s first poetry editor, died Saturday at the age of eighty-nine. 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