The Back Chamber By Donald Hall

Former US Poet Laureate's First Book of Poetry In A Decade

By: George Abbott White - Nov 11, 2011

Astonishingly good November weather and the publication of a new book of poems, The Back Chamber, seemed good reasons to drive two hours north of Boston to converse with America’s former Poet Laureate, Donald Hall. It is his first book of poetry in a decade.

Hall’s classic white frame family farmhouse in Wilmot, New Hampshire, fronts a huge brown unpainted barn near to Eagle Pond. This is the Eagle Pond of short stories and other poems. Its bright blue still waters framed by sparkles here and there of late autumn foliage.

At 83, my old University of Michigan tutor looked as seemingly casual but purposefully definite in moves and gestures as ever. He is resplendent with full gray-white beard, ruddy face and twinkling eyes-a little like the MFA’s wonderful small oil of Walt Whitman by Thomas Eakins.

Flanked by floor to ceiling bookcases, Hall carefully lowered his large frame into a comfortable sunny window chair, dusty calico cat George at his feet, playing with the latest New Yorker galleys of prose, Presidential medallion hanging from an outlying Oxford English Dictionary volume.

Behind the great black potbellied stove on a top shelf, propped perilously, a picture of a laughing National Medal of Arts Hall and President Obama—the two clearly having a good time.

We haven’t seen one another for at least a dozen years, and without formality, we agree to cover as much ground as light will allow us.

George Abbott White You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2006, and you hung out as the kids say at the Library of Congress. What was it like?

Donald Hall Well, I went to Washington, you could say I did the minimum. That is, I was interviewed 50 times or so about poetry and writing. I had a general notion of what some do, had plenty of friends who had the honor, held the post. You find projects to promote that advance poetry.

So that was what I started with, but nothing worked out. As an example, PBS and Bob Edwards had a good idea, but it didn’t go. So I did the required things, a reading at beginning and end, talks to eager Congressional pages, picked interesting poets to come and read at the Library. I chose judges for contests, and named people to get minor awards.

I went around the country doing a lot of reading. That also turned out other than planned. The traveling was a difficult time, along the way I lost 60 pounds without knowing why. It was the delayed reaction to a mistaken medication, but that’s another story.

GAW Any good points?

DH There were bright moments, and a few comic ones—one was a time in London where it was like the man kicking over the glass of water, again and again. The London reading wasn’t publicized, about 18 people were the audience. Evensong was being sung at the same time, sort of a background. But I love London, so it worked out.

Usually the appointment is for two years, but I was very dissatisfied with what I could do and closed out my tenure in one. Others have had better luck with this fine public office. Charlie Simic for example, and Robert Pinsky at Boston University. Pinsky made a lot of it for poetry, I don’t know anyone else who has done as well.

It’s a platform, you know, and it’s in Washington. On the other hand, I have my own questions about platforms and programs. To me public things are hard to handle, so many to satisfy. As an institution, it dates back to the 1930s, has grown quite accidentally, and, pays very little, given the expectations.

GAW Speaking of public, you attended Phillips Exeter, then Harvard, Oxford and then Harvard’s Society of Fellows. all of these were private institutions, yet your first and significant teaching position was the very public University of Michigan, and you helped the University of Michigan Press for years. Can you explain?

DH Let me talk about the University of Michigan experience, the excitement of teaching and the students as well as the Sixties later. The Press relationship was a special one. It started at the time I left my tenured position there to return to the farm and New Hampshire.

It was actually a poetry “project,” ending up to be some 40/50 books which collected the prose of poets and important prose about them, like this interview. I was overall editor of the project in the sense not of close reading, penciling every line of every book—though I did go over every one of them—so much identifying the poets and the editors for each, overseeing those two elements. It was a sort of recruitment, because after all, everything had already been printed.

GAW How did it go?

DH The series did very well. It was good for the poets, and it was good work for me because you have to realize when I first came here to Eagle Pond Farm, it was a financial leap. I lived by freelancing. So I did a zillion things. That Michigan Press was small time but good. It was, however, only a part of what I was doing, and so when I look back at it, someone else might say I edited too much poetry for too many things and for too small sums. I didn’t do it for the dough. I liked doing it.

At another point, I had to be more selective with my time. Back when I had my cancers, I gave up things, expecting not to live long, so I had to concentrate on fewer things. But then Jane died, instead of me.

GAW We had an old friend visit us from Prague a month ago. I took him and his wife to see the Henry Moores sculptures at Harvard and MIT, and they made me think about your book and why you did it?

DH I could say like everything else, for poetry. Honestly, I had read all the great poets, and you know I wrote about my experience with some great moderns like T.S. Eliot. My contemporaries are wonderful writers, too.

But I learned more about poetry hanging around Henry Moore, watching him work and being in his studio, than from any of them. Everything about sculpture went back to verse. Moore once said to me, "Never think of a surface as anything but the extension of a volume." Marvelous.

Moore was a wonderful man, and it was a powerful experience watching him work. He was monumental in his perseverance. What he said about the art of sculpture was wonderful to hear. But he was a whole person. I mean, we played ping pong, it wasn’t all aesthetics.

The book? When I wrote it first, it was a New Yorker profile. They had published stories of mine. The magazine’s editor, William Shawn had liked my prose. So I said to him, "What about a piece on Henry Moore?"

I had met Moore a year or two earlier for an American Horizon piece. I liked him. Shawn said, "Just a moment," stepped outside and looked through his little card file. "OK, no one had been commissioned to do Moore. Do Moore." That simple, but no big advances then, no advances. I was too dumb, too new to ask anyway.

GAW How did you go about the Moore work?

DH I spent a year talking to Tammy and Moore's friends, like the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the British art critic Kenneth Clark. As I think back on it, I had some background. When I went to college, poetry was the only thing. Then I remember an exhibition came to Harvard of Edvard Munch, a very literary painter.

A couple of years later at Oxford, in Paris the same show, and I went every day. From then on it was sculpture and painting for me, and every exhibition I learned more.

GAW Anything else?

DH Yes, Moore wanted to meet me before he consented to the work. He liked me, so we were on. I’ve done poems since about looking at sculpture, I see now it brought back something very early. When I was 14, I wanted to write poetry and then, for me, a poem was not merely an intellectual experience. Don’t read with eyes or ears, I felt. I read with my mouth, that’s the feel of sculpture.

GAW Was it different than writing poetry?

DH Even though poems can take a long while—the last poem I did was started back in 2008—prose takes longer for me. Prose takes many, many drafts. It was 40 of them for that New Yorker piece George is playing with on the floor.

GAW Ready for Michigan now?

DH I went out to the University of Michigan in 1957, and there I saw the changes from the Fifties into the Sixties and on the other side. The private/public university division we hear about now wasn’t in my mind. It wasn’t a distinction I made much then or now. For me, strangest thing was how much I loved to teach.

It’s said, you teach to support the poetry habit, though not many did it at that time as do now. The first classes I thought, O God, rigid as a skelton. I would not prepare much, just read the books over carefully, make it up as I went along. For the first ten years, every time someone asked me a question, out came my answer, and a new question in my own mind.

GAW I still have my notes from your "Yeats and Joyce course.” Years later I was told students had the same experience with your course of something new and exciting as you must have had at Harvard with Harry Levin’s Moderns—Proust, Mann and Joyce. Is this true?

DH Yeats was and remains remarkable for me, that was the energy behind the class. I first came in touch with Yeats not through the early oft quoted “Lake Isle of Innisfree” but Lapis Lazuli, Yeats’s last book which went right out of print.

Dylan Thomas came to Harvard when I was a Junior Fellow, or undergraduate. He read his own poems, then he read “Lapis.” Astounding. The same with Joyce’s Ulysses. That was the one book, I’ve never come to the bottom of – read it aloud to Jane [Kenyon], saw things then I had never seen.

First time I taught Ulysses in Ann Arbor, there was about half an hour left, and this girl stood up and asked, "What does that have to do with our lives?" The other kids groaned, I could not answer her. Just everything!

GAW You taught Joyce’s stories, Dubliners in that class too.

DH Each story was a jewel. I remember spending an hour and a half on “The Dead” alone. Lecture would overflow, I couldn’t get the kids to leave.

GAW So why did you leave? I had been in Boston a decade when I got word you were coming back to New England.

DH You could argue the institutional answer, or the change from the Sixties to the Seventies—but neither were the heart of it for me.

True, despite the inevitable grumbling and moving around of the academic furniture, the University was a happy place for me and the students engaging—each up to a point. When the regimes changed, you had these terrific warring factions. Every department, it’s said, commits suicide every twenty years and the Sixties had been special.

No, I always wanted to live in this house, write about this house. I would not have had the courage to make the break and to stay with it if Jane had not loved it here and wanted to remain here. At one point, I said to her, "You know this is just for the year." It was just a few months into it, and she said she would chain herself to a pipe in the root cellar rather than go back.

GAW What was the response from Ann Arbor?

DH Well, I wrote back to them and said I wanted to resign. They wrote back—not exactly had I lost my mind—would I like a second year leave?

No. I wasn’t fishing, playing a game. True, it wasn’t happening any more with the students and teachers whom I had admired, and whose praises old alums sung, had lost their steam. They had become contemptuous and unenthusiastic about literature.

No, I wasn’t leaving either of those situations so much as going towards, back ironically, to a place where I could do work I felt I needed and work I could do. Write.

GAW When I read your memoir of “a life in poetry,” Unpacking the Boxes, I was surprised just how deeply you, the poet, had gotten yourself into Civil Rights and anti-war politics.

DH Me too! I was audited by IRS six years in a row, an accident they said. Dan Ellsberg, either just before or just after he had leaked The Pentagon Papers, telephoned and said, You’re on Nixon’s “enemies” list.

Charlie Simic reviewed my poetry collection. He said, "You’re out there more than many imagined." In reality, politically I’ve always been more a follower than a leader.

GAW You’ve written a great deal about the many ways Jane Kenyon was a real partner.

DH As writers, the roles often reversed from what people might have imagined. You and I “get” this writer or that from our friends. From Jane, I didn’t get a new poet from her, I got her as the new writer. People assumed that because I was 19 years older and her teacher at Michigan, the creativity went one way.

No, she kept getting better and better as a writer. I began to write in styles, she just wrote straight out. She was so good, and before long I admired her so much. I wanted less to write like her, so strong was her influence.

When we were first married, people would condescend to her in front of me. It wasn’t long before everything became equal and balanced. Before she died, people were condescending to me!

I watched her work, we read each other’s, and helped each other greatly. Increasingly, I followed her in a thousand ways.

GAW Anything striking about her as a writer or reader?

DH Jane was an intensive reader; I was extensive. I read everything, new work, wild tangents. She fasten on one thing. For example, Jane would read Keats’ poems, then the letters and then three biographies. You might say that she didn’t know the 17^th Century particularly well, but she knew Keats, Dickinson and Bishop, and she was translating.

When Robert Bly was here, he said to her, "You need a master." He said, "Akhmatova." And so she fastened on one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20^th century.

It was magnificent to see her transform herself. She was attractive but did not think herself, with glasses and acne, a pretty girl. But into her 30s and 40s, as her poetry got better, she allowed herself to be pretty and acknowledged she was.

GAW The Back Chamber is 82 pages, 38 poems, three of them segmented (two of those longer sequences), written in a wide variety of forms and line lengths. While the tone is elegiac, there’s humor and some pretty edgy eroticism. How does it feel to get this out?

DH It’s my last book of poems, I think. Feel? Glad to do it. Hard to get back. By 2001 knew I was writing my last poem. The poem “Meatloaf” says it, no longer this stuff comes at me. Reading it aloud, reading at bookstores, I’ve been pleased. There’s some relief involved because, as I’m saying, these poems did not just arrive, they didn’t arrive easily.

It’s never easy, but this was more, much more to get at it, out, this was bit by bit.

I knew I was getting away from the source.

What’s good, having done the book, it liberated me into a kind of prose that I am taking great pleasure in. I’ve written poetry for 70 years, now it is OK to say the end. I am not depressed so much as launched into some other things. This other work is getting a lot of attention, which I don’t mind. Hometown boy made good.

GAW It seems as though what the poems are saying works itself out.

DH They came to me hard, bit by bit as I said. Much more out of situations, in my life. Before, poems used to come, reveal a situation, I wouldn’t know what they were about, heavy, hold on, often ending I knew not how.

With these, the poem finds its way. The poem knows in a way I did not. That segmented poem came over a long time, yet the story was there early. Maybe it’s the only thing I’ve written as a kind of epitaph. You know people would say, there’s no such thing as a happy ending.

GAW If I asked you to read me a poem from the book now, what would it be?

DH It’s near the end, “Envy ”—Ambitious in middle life, I envied her simple unambiguous joy.

GAW Thank you, Don.