Quote

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.

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
Hurt
Addiction
Wonderful
Useless
Gasp
Next
Tend
Nouns
Important
Cry
Adjectives
Every
Tough
Verbs
Things
Poet
Virtually
Like
Beginning
Hurts
Especially
Poems

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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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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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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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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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 wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
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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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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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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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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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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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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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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