Donald Hall--Interview by David McDonald

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

DH: It's hard to know whether teacher-poets write otherwise than they would have written if they had not been teachers. It sounds intolerable to me, spending your life teaching workshops. I' taught literature mostly, at Michigan. Certainly some of the poets of my own generation and younger-- whom I admire the most-have spent their lives teaching: Phil Levine, Louis Simpson, W. D. Snodgrass, Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, Mark Strand. . . . Others have not: Bly and Merwin, for example. My own work changed radically when I left teaching and came here. I think perhaps "here" mattered more than "leaving teaching." The culture is so different, and the solitude so much easier to sustain.

Yes, there is now a greater diversity in the way poets make their livings, maybe the result of too many poets and too few jobs. Poets have become arts administrators, among other things. The trick is to find something by which you can make your living in a relatively short number of hours, so that you have more time to devote to writing and reading. Low overhead helps.

DM: Robert Bly has said that you were doing your most substantive work in the poems of The Happy Man and The One Day. That your earlier books had naked oppositions of things like country and suburb. But that isn't true, according to Bly, in "Shrubs Burnt Away," which first appeared in The Happy Man and later became the opening section in The One Day. Bly says that there is no longer a bad suburb vs. a good farm. That people living in the good farm have disturbing dreams. Do you agree with Bly's assessment?

DH: I'm not sure about the naked oppositions of country and suburb. I tend to think of my work in stylistic terms rather than in terms of subject matter. But maybe Robert is on to something. How would I know?

DM: The "house" is central to The One Day. In fact, you first called the book Building the House of Dying. What kind of house were you building with this poem? Was it a house for dying? For turning "hysterical misery" into "ordinary unhappiness," as your epigraph from Freud suggests?

DH: Originally, I was building my own imaginative house, growing clapboard around my body, a final self-made enclosure. . . . I began that poem before I knew that I would live here, or even suspected it. Then the house became this house, as described in the third section. I tried to make the couple not precisely Don and Jane. Although this place is the best house, I suppose the epigraph from Freud is still apropos. There was considerable happiness with Jane-but also there was.depression, downers, not bad times between us but bad, bad times. And then the cancers.

DM: What is going on in the middle section, "Four Classic Texts," of The One Day? For me, it is the most difficult part. It seems to invoke an Old Testament type of prophecy, but why?

DH: I wanted to cancel out the centuries, one of the tasks in The Happy Man and maybe of other poems. Everything happens at once. I spoke of "Classic Texts" and used. classical titles, or ancient ones. "Prophesy" is of course the Old Testament, not the Greek or Latin. It comes out of Amos a lot, but also the New Testament's Revelation. I wanted to denounce everything and then bring it back-- at least a little, with "Eclogue" following Virgil's fourth eclogue. Themes from the first and third sections turn up in the middle section, treated in a less realistic way.