Quote

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.

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
Horse
Soil
Curves
Riley
Hundred
Fifty
Pushed
Pasture
Dead
Ghost
Horses
Pastures
Tree
Trees
Makers
Pine
Chester
Names
Bones
Autumn
Blossoms
Heaved
Past
Winter
Pale
Ribs
Mackerel
Years
Roots
Yellow
Frost
Nellie
Ground
Lady
Roger
Flourished

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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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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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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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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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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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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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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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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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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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If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.
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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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Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
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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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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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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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