Three Seasons: Letters by Donald Hall and Charles Bane, Jr.

Winter

By Charles Bane, Jr.
QuailBellMagazine.com

In the winter of 2012, Donald Hall, then eighty three years old, could sit back at his rural home, Eagle Pond Farm, in New Hampshire and accurately reflect that he was the most significant contemporary poet in the United States.  He had recently been awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President Barack Obama. He was past Poet Laureate of the United States; a winner, in 1988,  of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his masterwork “The One Day”, which was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He was a two-time Guggenheim Fellow, and winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. 

In all, he had authored more than fifty works of verse, children’s books, essays and biography. Much of his later work focused on his relationship with his wife, the distinguished poet Jane Kenyon who died of leukemia in 1995, and whose death was a blow from which he never recovered.

In a life devoted to his craft , Hall had interviewed and formed lasting relationships with four titans of twentieth century poetry: Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. These interviews appeared in both the Paris Review ( he was the Reviews’ Poetry Editor from 1953 until 1961 ), and later books.

Hall and I began writing one another in January of 2012. It was a condition of our correspondence that I would not ask for a public endorsement of my work, nor publish our letters in full until after his death. Hall himself never went near a computer. I emailed my letters to his assistant Kendall Currier, who transcribed these into hard copy. Hall then replied by hand or dictation and these were emailed in return. I have added footnotes where quotes, other poetry and Hall’s published works are referenced.

Ill and weary, his letters stopped in July of that year. We had exchanged a flurry for three short seasons of the calendar. It was a privilege.

WINTER

January 17, 2012

Dear Mr. Hall

A. L. was kind enough to forward your email address and I’m grateful to you for permitting me to write. I understand and respect your desire not to respond to requests for book endorsements. It is enough to write you and be understood as poets are seldom known, except to one another. I cannot say, at sixty, that I know more about making poetry than I did as a boy. The impulse was the same: something emerged from me and I sensed that the otherness of it was to be welcomed. It was a “spirit seeking flesh, but finding words. “ * I felt humbled.

If I understood the mystery of making poems, there would be no journeying place for my soul to explore. All my readers and yours would no longer be adults, but returned to a state of wonder as though Eden were reopened. Our words would be decorous, but the truth we have sought would be accessible. That is the importance I give to our craft and its beauty that I can never fully understand except in those rare poems that are no part of myself, but instantly recognized by the reader as a mirror reflection. Thank you so very much for the opportunity to write, and I look forward to your reply as time allows.

Cordially, 
Charles

*Joseph Brodsky.


January 24, 2012

Dear Don,

We could not live in more different climates; reading your prose in the New Yorker piece, I marveled at a scene unlike mine. In Florida, nature is subtle. Pioneer families are few. When I was a boy, moisture gathered over the Everglades and watered all the state every afternoon. It filled the sugar cane fields and aquifers. The dependence of nature on all things was obvious. Without apple snails, the kites that bear their name on their wings would go without food. To see Florida as it was loved by Marjorie Kennan Rawlings requires travel. Florida’s hammocks shake in hurricanes as New England trembles in the cold.

Hurricane Frances lifted the roof from my home and set it down again. As the eye passed over, I dashed outside for a walk. An anhinga was hopelessly trapped in the plastic top of a six – pack. Cursing mankind, I waded into the pond where he floundered. He was quiet. I told him he was my favorite kind of bird. The storm would be upon us again in a few minutes. I told him I liked better Snakebird, the name he was given by the Seminoles. Free, he hurried away.

I write poetry for another also. I have never learned who the reader is. I hope he or she admires snow roofed barns and flame trees equally, and uses a graceful recipe for measuring years. Always,

Charles


January 30, 2012

Dear Don,

I’m originally a native of Chicago. I was extremely close to my father, like you a Harvard and Oxford graduate ( Queen’s ). He was an individual of uncommon grace, and we were on rare terms. I was educated by tutors, but loved words and their auguries. The exemplar , to me, of our craft was Ezra Pound. I read the poems of the jongleurs, whose works he had championed into translation and was awed by the modernity of their verse. I was riveted by the account of your interview. * 

I miss the walks I took with my father on winter streets, when I was discovering poetry that poured like stars, but his encouragement allowed me to pursue my life’s work. Pound called you figlio. I write, fratello.

Always,

Charles

*Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions – Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, by Donald Hall, Harper 1978. Revised Edition published as Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, Remembering Poets and More Poets, Tickner & Fields 1992


February 4, 2012

Dear Don,


I’m only a portion of a way through Unpacking The Boxes *. The book is fresh as an apple. At the same age as you were reading Poe, I was mesmerized by Shakespeare. It wasn’t only the shipbuilder: I wanted to watch every cask being hooped, every yard of rigging wound.

When I felt Shakespeare pause at perhaps the three quarter mark of a sonnet, and take the shortest of minutes to look ahead, he became not less great, but more; one breath only before the race’s close and then a flood of words like the beach lights here that make columns on the sea.

It was heaven to feel along the poem’s seams, and to feel as a boy that I might pilot alone , in my room on paper. Let me stop and finish your memoir.

Affectionately,

Charles

*Unpacking The Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, by Donald Hall. Houghton,Mifflin, Harcourt 2008


February 6, 2012

For Jane Kenyon
The hollow is
Filled with every
Kind of traveling
Bird that lowers its
Wings to drink. And
I rage beside the flock
And remember I
Closed your eyes.
It is difficult to be snared
In warmth and cold
And pressed inside
A page. Unread times
Are so far away; with
Every taste that holds
Me, my lips close
On yours.

CB Feb 4


February 9, 2012

Dear Don,

I’m engrossed in The One Day *, and look forward to writing you when I’ve finished it. I’m enclosing a very brief article I wrote about Karl Shapiro that was published online by Curbside Splendor. Affectionately,

Charles

 *The One Day, by Donald Hall, Ticknor & Fields, 1988



Memories of Karl Shapiro
By Charles Bane. Jr.

In 1968, I was writing poetry that I knew would be my life's work; there were many in a pantheon of contemporary poets who were crafting astonishing work, but none whose complete honesty of expression meant more to me than Karl Shapiro. He observed and caught reality; in "A Garden In Chicago", he nailed it: “A gutter of poetry flowed outside the yard, making me think I was a bird of prose."  Shapiro's poetry had a rootedness that comforted me. It was the poetry of the present day, down to earth, and unbelievably beautiful: “In the mid-city, under an oiled sky/ I lay in a garden of such dusky green/ it seemed the dregs of the imagination. / Hedged round by elegant spears of iron fence, / my face became a moon to absent suns." His poems came from a rare, unflinching truthfulness. Of the University of Virginia, where he was an undergraduate he wrote, “To hate the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum.”  He did not return there after military service in the Second World War.

Shapiro scheduled a reading, three blocks from my Chicago home. I rushed to go. He was exactly as his work: deceptively easy going, with a deprecating sense of humor, and accessible. He was profoundly learned, but he wore it lightly.  He told the audience that he had thrown open to his students to choose a subject for his next poem. A boy called out, “Manhole Covers”, and Shapiro was stuck. He read the resulting poem, and there was an ovation; it was a small masterwork.

The reading ended, and I approached him; we shook hands and I said only that I wrote poetry.  At the word, his hand was on my shoulder.  Without the slightest preamble, he said, "The end must explode into meaning.”


February 27, 2012

Dear Don,

Thank you for the fire writing of The One Day. As you spoke to Dylan Thomas, you are a major poet and your description of aging in The New Yorker seems at odds with the agelessness of the book of poems I devoured in a sitting. I think humility and suffering are important to the making of serious poetry, but neither should humility cast a shadow on the light of a profound gift. The One Day is a perennial and bowered over me; every poem, I realized after, is a parent and its offspring ever anxious to be near.

Always, 

Charles


March 1 , 2012

Dear Don,

 I’ll seek out “ Kill The Day”. I walked to my nearby Starbucks this morning and reread The One Day while ibis fed in the grass beside the café’s terrace. It states the obvious to say the book is modern, but I don’t write “modern” as in Jackson Pollock. The book has affected me as the Georgics did when I first read Dryden’s translation. It continues Virgil’s search while acknowledging the overlay of our times:

“ that lives so briefly to contain coffee and its whitener/ for ten minutes between the cellophane stack/ and the trash compacter; like the granite boulder/ that the glacier deposited by the orchard’s creek.”

And Virgil, deposited in the blur of our era would have instantly understood:

“ I remember the dead fox warm on the barn floor/ inexplicably dead, and how my grandmother tenderly/ lifted the body on her pitchfork, strands of hay/ under the delicate corpse of the young red fox/ to the burying place by the willow at the garden’s edge…”

More, not only Virgil who recognized that on foreign shores were such as we and mortal things touch their hearts would have bowed at “ I have buried your body a thousand times”.

This is what I’m trying to convey by “modern” : a continuum of the heroic struggle to find meaning in the everyday. The world may be instantaneous, and the deepnesses of poetry hurried and unnoticed but I think we remain the same classical singers of songs:

       When something closes in
That changes or seems
To change the prospects
Of the day, I think of you
And your voice on the phone.
I hear waves of you returned
From space in sound that circles
Half in dark, half in light to find
My waiting call. Baby, you say,
And I take my cell outside and
Standing, lift my face.

Always,

Charles


March 6, 2012

Dear Don,

Whether your grandmother or grandfather carefully lifted the fox, the gesture’s lasting. I wish I were wise enough to know what works of poets will be remembered. When I think of poems so rich, I think of Sylvia Beach hiding her stores from the Germans as they entered Paris. They interred her for six months, but she was at ease, knowing her volumes were hidden in the attic over Shakespeare and Company. It wounded her to pass its boarded windows until Liberation. One afternoon, she had word that a jeep was in front of the shop and Americans busy there. She hurried down the street. A gruff, burly man was pulling away the shutters with a vengeance. It was Hemingway.

I want to set your poems in the sunlight of a busy street.

Always, 

Charles


March 13, 2012

Dear Don,

Let me describe my island home. There are wild parrots; they’re not native but migrated here from the south and formed a colony. When they land in a park or neighboring tree, it’s like emerald rain. A walking trail traverses the length of the island, south to north. At the farthest end, the air is salt. Hibiscus open shop at daylight; storks hold court. I came here as a boy and turned brown as a coconut. I wrote during hurricanes; poetry appeared at midnight, like turtles on the beach that know the secrets of the sea.

I’d been ill as a child but now grew well. A family friend, Kay Rybovich, lived on the waterway. The morning dropped like a ball onto a waiting court, and Kay would open her screen door and we’d have coffee. Kay’s husband John had owned the marina that built Hemingway’s fishing crafts and she and John would motor them to Cuba for delivery. She told me, as we watched the sky, of fishing with the author and of marlins that rose from the waves like gods.

I never went home until the west glowed, or a storm was near. I wrote by lantern if the narrow streets were riverbeds but when I woke my poems were arrows.

Always,

Charles

To be continued...

#Letters #Winter #ThreeSeasons #Donald Hall #CharlesBaneJr #Poetry

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