Donald Hall, considered by many to be one of the most influential poets of his generation, died on June 23, 2018 at the age of 89.
He taught for 30 years at the University of Michigan, served as US poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, and won numerous awards, including two Guggenheim fellowships, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
While a prolific and acclaimed poet, memoirist and essayist, his work can also be seen as a curriculum in the health humanities: it addresses themes related to illness, aging, mortality and loss, and embodies a deep reverence for the ordinary intimacies of relationships and the beauty of the natural world.
I was introduced to his work in a narrative medicine seminar at Columbia University in 2012 through his poem The Ship Pounding. It is one of the pieces I remember most from an intense weekend of reading, reflection, writing and discussion. Written following the death of his wife (poet Jane Kenyon) from leukemia at age 47, it captures the idea of serious illness as a journey to an alien world.
His description of the hospital as a “huge vessel that heaves water, without leaving port… its great engines pounding” stayed with me long after I returned home. His words come back to me sometimes as I walk the halls (or “gangways”) of a hospital.
His writing is informed by the experience of profound loss but also by the comforting day-to-day routines of his marriage and life on the farm. A few years ago he wrote an essay in the New Yorker about the view from his armchair and his thoughts on aging, memory and the world outside his window (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/23/out-the-window).
He draws our attention to cultural attitudes towards aging and the inevitable “narrowing of circles” that accompanies growing older. Reflecting on how the old are so often marginalized and made “permanently other,” Hall writes:
When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances. People’s response to our separateness can be callous, can be good-hearted, and is always condescending.
He also has some interesting things to say about changes in the field of creative writing over the past forty years, and the way music has made poetry more accessible to a greater audience. “More people heard poetry’s possibility for the first time by listening to Bob Dylan’s guitar. Sung words let language loose.”
In an era of increasing cultural disconnection and alienation Hall felt poetry’s primary purpose was to be a sort of “school for feeling.” In an interview in 2006 he said, “There are works of art that embody emotion and that are a sort of school for feeling. They teach how to feel and they do this through the beauty of language.”
In his essay The Poetry Crowd (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetry-of-america/essays/essay-donaldhall.html), Hall writes,
A poet is someone who dedicates herself or himself to a universe of feeling not facts, to the pursuit of beauty not information. Whether the poets write well or not, they define themselves as seekers of the sensuous and emotional.
It seems appropriate to end with Hall’s words about the beauty of the everyday — and his reminder that we may not need to go far to notice it.
When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.
For more information about Hall’s poetry see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/147251/remembering-donald-hall
The Ship Pounding
BY DONALD HALL
Each morning I made my way
among gangways, elevators,
and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room
to interrogate the grave helpers
who tended her through the night
while the ship’s massive engines
kept its propellers turning.
Week after week, I sat by her bed
with black coffee and the Globe.
The passengers on this voyage
wore masks or cannulae
or dangled devices that dripped
chemicals into their wrists.
I believed that the ship
traveled to a harbor
of breakfast, work, and love.
I wrote: “When the infusions
are infused entirely, bone
marrow restored and lymphoblasts
remitted, I will take my wife,
bald as Michael Jordan,
back to our dog and day.” Today,
months later at home, these
words turned up on my desk
as I listened in case Jane called
for help, or spoke in delirium,
ready to make the agitated
drive to Emergency again
for readmission to the huge
vessel that heaves water month
after month, without leaving
port, without moving a knot,
without arrival or destination,
its great engines pounding.