Donald Hall--Interview by David McDonald

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2002 by McDonald, David

DH: When Hardy was seventy-five he married a thirty-five-year-old woman and lived until he was eighty-nine, writing great poetry. Eliot did not write great poetry after his late marriage, but he was happy. Picasso. Saul Bellow . . . and Tony Randall?

Yes, it is happiness, and yes, it is anti-death. Maybe the energy of the ongoing artist leads him to further work as well as to younger women-- rather than younger women eliciting the energy. On the other hand virtually all aging men are attracted to younger women. Of course there's an excuse. It used -to be "The Devil made me do it." Now, "DNA makes me do it." It's totally unfair to older women.

DM: Are you still obsessed with time? Does it have to do with your love life?

DH: Sometimes my pleasure with a woman seems a distraction from.the tedium of survival. I dislike getting old, which makes me no different from anyone else-except that I lost a much younger wife, and underwent the trauma of taking care of her in her long illness. (I loved taking care of her.) At first after her death I wanted the safety of many women. (Look what happened the last time I loved one person!) Now I would prefer something longterm, insofar as "long-term" exists for someone in his eighth decade.

DM: The Happy Man opens with a series of poems that show great affection for animals and country living. But the poems are not just about these things, there is always something more-about your grandfather and the day of his death, about the ravages and deterioration of old age, about suicide. Does a good or great poem have to have these multiple levels of meaning?

DH: A good poem must have multiple levels. I resist the word "meaning." Levels of intelligence, imagination, sensuality, motive, especially feeling together with counter-feeling. A poem without internal contradiction is not a poem.

DM: You have gone through two battles with cancer. How has that affected you as a writer? What projects did you drop and which did you strive to finish?

DH: I dropped all sorts of things after the first cancer. I dropped a huge prose project that would have taken me at least five or six years to do, taken me away from poetry. I gave up editorships and other activities, peripheral to writing, which I had enjoyed earlier. I re-wrote Remembering Poets into Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, which I had been intending to do for some time, but which I had put on hold. My second cancer was supposed to kill me. I concentrated on writing poems. Then I concentrated on taking care of Jane . . . then on writing out of my bereavement.

I don't think that the prospect of my death has much effect upon me at the moment. Mind you, when I learn that I am dying, I will not like it. DM: In your title essay in Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, you wrote poignantly of the aging athlete. Watching Willie Stargell running around second base, feeling the passion of his aging body, digging, pushing, extending itself into pain for the sake of its dignity. Stargell had, according to you, a strength of spirit, but at the same time, maybe accounting for it, a sense of inevitable defeat hung over him. Is it the same for the aging writer? DH: I often say that old poets never retire, they just get worse and worse. It's not always true. Yeats as well as Hardy.