Donald Hall

After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.

Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.