Earlier this month, Donald Hall gave his first official reading as the new Poet Laureate of the United States. Even before his prestigious appointment by the Librarian of Congress, Hall was well known for his poetry of love and loss, and for the ways his accessible verse evokes the hardscrabble New England countryside where he was born and where, at 78 years old, he still lives.

U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall signs a copy of his latest poetry collection

For a recent VOA interview at his ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, Hall sat, rumpled and august, in his favorite armchair in the front room, petting his cat. He was musing on his new status as Poet Laureate, an annual appointment by the Librarian of Congress that carries with it a small stipend, but a big responsibility: to promote poetry and appreciation of that art in the United States.

"It's just been amazing," he says. "I like the attention, but sometimes maybe there is such a thing as too much attention. I like solitude."

Even so, Hall is glad for an opportunity to represent poetry in the public eye, and to encourage a wide swath of Americans to discover just what a poem is.

"A poem is a bit of language put together with attention to its sound," he explains. "By the sound of a poem you are creating a feeling and you can transmit it from one person to another and even across different ages and times, much less geographical areas."

Language is what separates poetry from music, he says, "because language has this everyday meaning, and we use the same language we use in our everyday speech. But we shape it into a work of art." He reads from his poem "The Poem" to illustrate:

"It discovers by night  what the day hid from it.  Sometimes it turns itself into an animal.  In summer it takes long walks by itself where meadows  fold back from ditches. Once it stood still  in a quiet row of machines. Who knows  what it is thinking?"

Indeed, Hall often speaks of a poem almost as a living thing, as an entity, that in his words, "takes its input from 'the alien.'"

"It feels like that!" he says excitedly. "The poem begins and I am not sure where it's going. It has a mind of its own! And you find yourself saying things that you didn't know you knew."

One subject Hall knows well is loss, a theme both universal, and intensely personal "each time different, each time new," he says.

Donald Hall stands on the porch of his white frame ancestral home in New England

The southern New Hampshire farmland where he grew up promoted this feeling. Once, the area was relatively populous, with many working farms. By 1929, when Hall was born, many had already left for mill jobs down south, and for the richer farmland out West. "So I was aware of a lessening place, a place of great beauty, where the fields that had been cleared to raise corn were now growing up to trees again. And it was a wistful feeling." But this perception didn't detract from his love for the place. "If anything," he says, "it increased it. Because it was vanishing."

In his poem "Kicking the Leaves" excerpted below, Hall recalls now-vanished New England scenes from his childhood at his grandparents' home, where he sits now.

 

"… Each fall in New Hampshire, on the farm where my mother grew up, a girl in the country my grandfather and grandmother finished the autumn work, taking the last vegetables in from the cold fields, canning, storing roots and apples in the cellar under the kitchen. Then my grandfather raked leaves against the house as the final chore of autumn…"

Hall writes poignantly of other losses too. He has written many poems about his wife, Jane Kenyon, also a poet, who died in 1995, at the age 47. "It's as if all the original poems of loss were a preparation for this great loss," he says.

Here is an excerpt from the poem "Without."

"we lived in a small island stone nation without color under gray clouds and wind distant the unlimited ocean acute lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls or palm trees without vegetation or animal life only barnacles and lead colored moss that darkened when months did …"

As a poet, Hall knows well how the cycles of human and natural life intertwine. He says this connection may be especially clear in New England, where the seasons are so distinct. "And we fill ourselves with this constant change. The leaves come and the leaves go. They do it annually, they go through their productions and we follow them as we follow our own lives progressing from spring to summer to autumn to winter," he says, adding with a twinkle, "I am pretty wintry by this time myself!"

Hall's poetry contains a vein of optimism. Human life, he says, is a "perennial plant," always renewed in its season.

In "Oxcart Man," one of Hall's most famous poems (which was adapted into a children's book that won the coveted Caldecott Medal in 1996), a farmer walks his ox and cart, heavy with produce, to market. He sells his wares, then his ox and cart, and returns home. Here is an excerpt:

"… and at home by fire's light in November cold stitches new harness for next year's ox in the barn, and carves the yoke, and saws planks building the cart again."

Donald Hall, the new Poet Laureate of the United States has published 15 books of poetry. His most recent collection of verse, is "White Apples and the Taste of Stone,"  and was published earlier this year by Houghton Mifflin.