Donald Hall awaits the Whippoorwill's return
A narrative dream about a famed American poet, his wife and a roll-top desk.
‘Bird’ by Zac Cuthbert, Pencil on paper, 2024 by kind permission of the artist
Donald Hall as a bird in size the size of a roll-top desk listens for Whippoorwills returning to Eagle Pond. Was there ever a doubt? His voice whirls in recital with no musicality, the abstract sound of a roll-top desk composing poetry early, articles for the Boston Globe then watching his wife sunbathe for an hour after lunch. Prose for later. You don’t realise how handily the recital recycles, as if storytelling could never be done with now Whippoorwills have returned. From behind the podium Donald flights his delivery with urgency, mentions the soul occasionally, for which there is no evidence other than a statement by broadcasters halting a live broadcast exclaiming wait! That’s a nightjar! And it isn’t. It’s all nightjars. Donald fills his body four hundred times or more with a Whippoorwill’s three-note call and all the broadcasters hear is a nightjar not the three-note call but a nightjar’s call prefigured in their brain, accreting. Yes, that’s the right word, Accrete. Accrete! Accrete! Accrete! Donald looks at me sideways with a droopy eye, calling, recalling, leaving nothing out, the loss to our natural wonder if he would. To read more of my poems, click Short, Long, Epic Afterword Donald Hall, an indefatigable writer on poetry and regarded as one of the major American poets of his generation said one of the truest things anyone has said about poetry. It originated from a story told to Hall by a cousin that he turned into a poem and then into a prize-winning children's book, Ox-Cart Man.
A farmer gathers together surplus equipment and unused storage at the end of every year, loads them onto an oxcart and sets off to the local market where everything is sold, including the ox. In an interview, Hall applied the analogy of Ox-Cart Man to poetry saying 'You have to completely empty yourself before the poetry is able refill'. Hall's comment is certainly true of Rimbaud, (see Still-life with Endive) who had spent and refuelled the vessel of his poetic torrent many times over before it came to define and therefore entrap him. Hall is also known for his marriage and relationship with the poet Jane Kenyon which has taken on a mythic status in the history of twentieth century American letters. Since 1975 when Hall had taken the decision to renounce his teaching position at the University of Michigan, this literary couple lived in Hall's ancestral home in New Hampshire on the shore of Eagle Pond. All of their income from that point derived mainly from Hall's writing, with poetry allocated to the earliest portion of the day. The increasing reputation of Jane Kenyon following her death at the age of 47 and the publication of her Selected Poems, Otherwise, in 1996 persuaded Hall to more publicly and candidly discuss the couples domestic arrangements in books and interviews and the camaraderie they shared from being first readers of each others poetry. Although much of Hall’s poetry is nature-based, he increasingly became known for poetry about loss and aging following Kenyon's death. Kenyon's writing was similarly based in the cycles and rhythm of the land and an introverted personal life but, (as with Emily Dickinson) you don't feel she is quite writing about what she is writing about. 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant' is the well-known opening of Dickinson's poem 1263 in R.W. Franklin's 1998 variorum. Whilst keeping it slant can be taken in the literal sense, (poetry propelled using baselines of lexic dissolution and splicing) both Kenyon and Dickinson articulate a frame of mind by the use of small bracts of everyday meanings they finally select for the page much like a composer picking out a particular instrument in a score. This ultimately resolves into an individualised writing style that invites us to walk with them through the many intangibles of their poetic reasoning. If this all sounds rather esoteric, then consider these comprise two of the most nuanced and subtle writers in the whole of poetry. I believe what lies behind that hint of a hesitation is a quandary over the act of composition. For Kenyon, the presence in nature of fully resolved fauna and flora makes an unlikely intersect to herself. Poetry is a means to address this phenomena, if it can be shown as such, as in the sense of elements so beautifully observed in her poem Apple Dropping into Deep Early Snow.
The snow offers a cushioned landing for this one remaining fruit of the crop with the loss to the tree our gain and the gain of nature recycling it's own produce. In the second stanza, Kenyon reveals her personal doubt. Is she at such a disposal or is she the gain to her surroundings, the last apple held for what exactly? Is the apple, by being last and in poor condition, useless for eating or storing, included merely as a discordancy, recorded at the last throw of nature discarding? What is the exact nature of coincidence and which, out of all these many emerges as dominant? Why limit the poem only to two stanzas? Does the first stanza represent departure and the second a quality of arrival, suspended in downy snow whilst some further reckoning of a life-force is made? Kenyon conveys in her poetry a pre-disposal of circumstances whilst holding off from any final prediction. Always she is trying to reconcile herself to the distance between. I hope I have explained enough to show why someone might dream about Donald Hall as a bird the size of a roll-top desk but I haven't given any information about the bird so I will do that now. The Whippoorwill is a small migratory bird of the nightjar family, named for it's three-note song, which it can repeat up to 400 times. This New York State Writers Institute YouTube video commences with Hall reciting Twilight After Haying. The more I discover about this remarkable and remarkably dedicated and hard-working couple, the more moving I find his reading.
Whip-poor-will, Plate 82 of Birds of America by John James Audubon Image licensed by Wikimedia Commons To read more of my poems, click Short, Long, Epic
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