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Poet Donald Hall…

has died. UD thanks Van, a reader, for telling her. She will expand this post with some comments on Hall.

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Donald Hall loped through poems, rather like the laconic farmer he was, loping through fields of New Hampshire hay. His strongest emotions appear in the volume Without, an extended effort to understand his condition of rage and loss after the leukemia and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon (“pain vomit neuropathy morphine nightmare”), but this condition of being too overwhelmed for tempering commas and capitals does not produce his best poetry, UD thinks. His strength was in all that laconic loping through life, in an earthy egoistic uprightness that kept him going until 89. In his calm long stretchy verbal reach, he was the anti-Rilke.

He was most himself in poems like “Closings,” in which he brought his characteristic precise observation, empathy, and conversational simplicity to the violent suicide of a close friend and fellow poet, Liam Rector. In nine stanzas of short-lined free verse, he moves from Rector’s flamboyant physical appearance (“Liam the dandy/ loved Brooks Brothers shirts, double-breasted / suits, bespoke shoes, and linen jackets.”) to his membership in the community of too-soon-dead poets (“T.S. Eliot turned old and frail at sixty, pale, preparing for death. / Then poets of new generations / died — Frank O’Hara first, then Jim Wright / with throat cancer in a Bronx hospice, / Sylvia Plath beside the oven, / Thom Gunn of an overdose…”), to memories, now that Rector’s life has “closed,” of his very open intensity during most of his life (“erupting with gusto / as he improvised his outrageous, / cheerful, inventive obscenities.”).

As he moves toward the end of his in memoriam, Hall notes that when Hall became an important cultural voice in America, Rector sent him a list of projects he might undertake, including

“Urge poets to commit suicide.”
His whole life he spoke of suicide
lightly …

Lightly, and like a lot of people who get very debilitatingly sick, practically. It was a solution to intolerability.

Hall closes where he opened, with Rector’s flamboyance – a flamboyance he expressed to the very end, dandily dressed and dancing with his wife.

[O]n August fifteenth Liam pulled
the shotgun’s trigger. The night before,
wearing a tux over a yellow
silk shirt, he danced with Tree once again,
before bed and the morning’s murder.
He left Tree alone and desolate
but without anger. Tree knew Liam
did what he planned and needed to do.

It is a blunt and matter-of-fact conclusion to a poem that urges, in the case of suicides like this one, an acceptance of the integrity of the choice.

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And by the way, all you have to do is read Rector’s wonderful “This Summer” to see why he and Hall were buddies. There’s the laconic morbid material:

I roar out of the Farber Clinic

(how splendid to have cancer in Boston
and fall heir to the astute care
available here)

in the silver sports car I sport
during this debacle…

Sport/debacle: great stuff. You see Rector jauntily/dreadfully keeping his head above water through the worst… He smokes tons of marijuana through chemo and radiation, and praises it highly – lightens the pain, clarifies things. The praise brings on several stanzas of unabashed delight at the memory of his hippie summers of love past – the joints, the music – and somehow the awareness that he delightedly lived that free life makes death okay.

This summer
I have conversed with death every minute

and found out I have the talent
to submit, to leave, even to flee…

****************

In a wonderful phrase, he describes his existence as

a late century life afloat on a sea of loans.

And then he ends the poem brilliantly, hilariously, with his sixteen year old daughter’s prim dismissal of the drug that has meant as much to him in his youthful exultation as in his aging agony:

[I] hear over the telephone my sixteen-year-old
daughter in Virginia saying she now thinks

she will never ever smoke marijuana
because it is, after all,
just another “gateway drug.”

This is laugh out loud stuff if you ask old UD; and since Rector has, earlier in the poem, written about the gates of heaven —

I think I may die without god,
my single comic integrity

that I have remained
an atheist in the foxhole,
though I am ready

to roar through the gates
if there are gates.

— we get the terrific payoff of those two kinds of gates – one doubted, profound, mysterious, beckoning; the other flat as a pancake.

Margaret Soltan, June 24, 2018 1:41PM
Posted in: poem

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