As I grew older – collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five – poetry abandoned me. Donald Hall Read Quote
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious. Donald Hall Read Quote
One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes. Donald Hall Read Quote
By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit’s baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium – a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press. Donald Hall Read Quote
Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. Donald Hall Read Quote
When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the ‘Wolfman.’ The boy next door said I should read Poe. Donald Hall Read Quote
There’s a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want. Donald Hall Read Quote
As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago. Donald Hall Read Quote
