Donald Hall, My Old Heaven

“I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in."
-from an interview in Narrative magazine”
― Donald Hall

"My body causes me trouble when I cross the room," he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in a 2012 interview, "but when I am sitting down writing, I am in my heaven — my old heaven."

“When I was nineteen,
I told a thirty-
year-old man what a
fool I had been when
I was seventeen.
'We were always,' he
said glancing down, 'a
fool two years ago.”
― Donald Hall

“IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. 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.”
― Donald Hall

He was a staggeringly prolific writer who chose freelance work over teaching — a decision, as Mr. Collins put it, “to detach himself from academic life, with its slow but steady intravenous drip of a salary.”

In “Last Days,” a poem in “Without,” Mr. Hall describes how he and Ms. Kenyon chose the poems for “Otherwise,” her posthumous collection. Then,

. . . he saw how weak she felt,
and said maybe not now; maybe
later. Jane shook her head. “Now,” she said.
“We have to finish it now.”
Later, as she slid exhausted into sleep,
she said, “Wasn’t that fun? To work together? Wasn’t that fun?”