Donald Hall: A Poet's View 'Out The Window'
"Poet Donald Hall spends much of his time in his blue armchair, looking at the landscape out his window. The 83-year-old former poet laureate has lived for years on the same New Hampshire farm that his grandparents used to own, and still writes in the room he slept in as a child.
In his recent New Yorker essay "Out the Window," Hall reflects on the view out his window that has both changed — and remained the same — throughout his life. He also contemplates how things have changed for him as he's grown older.
"However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy," he writes. "It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. ... They can be pleasant, they can be annoying, ... but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. ... People's response to our separateness can be callous, can be good-hearted, and is always condescending."
Hall tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he was recently in Washington, D.C., to receive the National Medal of Arts. Before the ceremony, Hall and his companion, Linda, decided to visit the National Portrait Gallery. They stopped in front of a sculpture created by Henry Moore, the subject of a 1965 New Yorker profile written by Hall. ..."
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In The Back Chamber, Donald Hall illuminates the evocative, iconic objects of deep memory—"a cowbell," "a white stone perfectly round," "a three-legged milking stool"—that serve to foreground the rich meditations on time and mortality that run through his remarkable new collection. While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted but rather is lively, irreverent, sexy, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets.
