"A poem," said Richard Hugo, "should happen in a heart-wrenching moment, quick, dramatic." Not a bad description of himself. Richard Hugo "happened" in the years I knew him. He happened in quick, dramatic, heart-wrenching moments as a teacher and mentor and man. As a poet, he reverberated; he got you "kicking the loose gravel home."…
I Decision to go abroad. My dearest friend and my latest love. A Proustian party. A night in Vermont. Meaning to stay as long as possible, I sailed for Europe. It was March 1950. New York and most of the people I knew had begun to close in. Or to put it differently, I felt…
When New Yorkers said "train" it meant the subway. As in Count Basie's "Take the ‘A’ Train," you took the "train" to go downtown to Greenwich Village, or uptown to Columbia on Morningside Heights. I took the IRT line to the local stop at 116th and Broadway and got off there to go to college….
What draws us to poetry in our early, inarticulate years? Answers to the question must vary. From the days when, as a child, I passively absorbed poetry from songs and hymns and when, as an adolescent, I tried to cobble together my own verses, nudged onto paper in imitation of poems from books, I recall…
My Entries aren't a journal in the ordinary sense, a record of occurrences: they are entries into ideas. An event that strikes me as significant or something I've read in a book or newspaper may help me to clarify my ideas and induce me to write a page or two. Making these remarks clears my…
Myers: Your work on The One Day lasted more than a decade, I believe. How long exactly? Hall: It was sixteen years from the time I started the poem-not knowing what I was starting-until I finished it. (I'm always tempted to put quotations around the word, when I say "finished," because, when I have a…
One Intimations Falling Maybe children wake to a love affair every morning or so, maybe that's why, if they are given any chance, they seem to like the world so much. Maybe falling for the world is a thing that happens to them all the time. I hope so, I hope it is purely commonplace….
Take all away from me, but leave me ecstasy. -Emily Dickinson Out of all modesty-and sanity-I would like to think of these poems and stories as approaching the ecstatic state, rather than being expressions of ecstasy. In fact, when I called for work for this issue of Ploughshares, I said I was mostly interested in…
A speech delivered on June 12, 1990 in Tokyo at the American Center. First of all, may I present two stories from two different parts of my own country. One month ago, in Iowa, I went with my next-door neighbor, Cheryl Huang, to attend her swearing-in ceremony as a new American citizen. Cheryl is of…
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