Time flies! Tomorrow will already be one week since I heard Donald Hall--the 14th poet laureate of the United States--read and discuss his work at the National Book Festival in Washington DC.

At age 78, Hall is a prolific and brilliant poet whose writings have been profoundly inspired by place. He spent his summers as a child at his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire. "I've always loved New Hampshire so much that I remembered it all the time when I wasn't living there. I wrote out of memory," he remembered. When he was in his 50s, Hall moved back there to dedicate his life to writing poetry.

Hall lives a life close to nature. Of his work, the former poet laureate Billy Collins has said:

"Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines."

At the National Book Festival, Hall read several poems from his new book White Apples and the Taste of Stone, and talked about his life-long relationship with words. He started writing poetry at age 12 and his first poem was published when he was 16. "The first poet I loved when I was 12 was Edgar Allen Poe." Hall told us. "Then, at age 14, I discovered the modern poets--Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens."

As a young poet, Hall said that he wrote a lot of "very decorative verses" but didn't focus on "personal expression." Over time, he feels he has undergone a process of "gradual nakedness" on the page. He has poured more and more of himself into his work.

What is it about poetry that has made him keep writing all these years? "Poetry expresses a great multiplicity of feelings--it fills the human mind."

I had not read too many of Hall's poems before this event and was intrigued by his comment that when it comes to poetry, "first the sounds, then the meaning" are important. What did he mean by that? I've been pondering that question and it strikes me that the simplest way to explain this is to give you this example:

What is the difference between these two sentences:

The year endured without punctuation. - from Donald Hall's poem "Without"
The 365 days passed without any periods, commas, or exclamation marks.

Same meaning - different sound. The first one, however, evokes a strong feeling of the passage of time ... and the word endured stretches, just like time stretches when it passes slowly.

EXTRA:
* Listen to a podcast of Donald Hall talking about poetry at the National Book Festival. Download.
* Listen to Donald Hall read three of his poems out loud: National Public Radio