Quote

I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

Donald Hall

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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Grief
Loss
Behinds
Clump
Behind
Birch
Wish
Alongside
Oaks
Gray
Rising

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For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.
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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
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I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
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Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like gasp and cry. Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you by that time, you ought to have them right.
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I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.
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In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.
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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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