In an interview today, Donald Hall spoke about ideas of using public radio, public tv, and cable to promote poetry in his new job as Poet Laureate.
Speaking from a long perspective as a professional poet (he's nearing eighty years), he opined that poetry today is flourishing beyond any time in his life, judging by sales, number of poets, number of books. He attributes this in part to the "engine of the poetry reading," a fad from late 50s that's persisted, increased.
Here's my opportunity to wonder at one poem of Hall's that I've kept bedside for months, "The Night of the Day," an eight-page blank verse account of a homely incident that interrupted a quiet night of watching tv. Nothing earth-shaking, it's as funny as any event that involves cows.
I enjoy reading it, and I've appropriated his experience; yet I wonder, if he'd written it as an anecdote for READER'S DIGEST, would it be any different? Frankly, it wouldn't fly as a story, because there's just not much to it.
So, a so-so story that can't survive as prose can still make a sale as a poem if you just add a couple of inches to the margins? Easygoing regular meter slowly unfolds a situation, interruptions in the lines signal a shift in time (from incident to memory and back), language is conversational but precise. Is that enough to make it a poem, not just a well-made anecdote?
The thing is, our expectations of a poem are different. This one does many of the things that I expect a poem to do. We expect a poem to put us inside an experience, to suggest more than the experience itself. Ted Kooser's recent book The Poetry Home Repair Manual uses a saying from an ancient Chinese poet, that the verse should "lift the eyes" by the end. In his poem, Hall uses this two-or-three hours' incident as the scaffold for telling us about his whole community, his outsider status there, and yet his deep love for it. He doesn't say any of that directly; we share in it.
During the interview with Hall, I hoped we'd get through it without mentioning his late wife Jane Kenyon. But the interviewer made an allusion to how poetry might deal, perhaps, with the loss of a beloved wife, so Hall obliged with a poem about her. I once heard Hall tell how, soon after their marriage, Kenyon used to mind being patronized at academic parties as the wife of the great poet, until not many years later, he was being described as "the husband of Jane Kenyon." I can't help but think of the story of how she nursed him through cancer, only to fall herself to an acute leukemia -- beginning at a restaurant where they were celebrating his first year in remission. That backstory helps to make her name memorable, but I would prize her posthumous collection Otherwise anyway.
By the way, I'm reminded this afternoon of an interview with Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon both that I heard sometime in the mid-80s on a public radio station on the road somewhere between New York and Georgia. I've recently credited Billy Collins with interesting me in reading poetry for daily enjoyment; but I remember now that it was Hall, surrendering his professoriship and moving with Jane to his family's old farm to garden and write poetry, who made me first think that poetry offered something day to day that I was missing. [Photo: Hall and Kenyon and house in Wilmot, NH]Mr. Hall, if you happen to be reading this, will you please remember that most of us don't live on farms, don't garden, and cannot picture all those plants that you're naming? And please, consider this complaint from Cole Porter: Good authors, too, who once knew better words / now only use four letter words....
Night of the Cows: New Poet Laureate Donald Hall | Category: Poetry
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