Thank You Thank You
April is Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2012, there were seven thousand four hundred and twenty-seven poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing; in April of 1948, there were fifteen readings in the United States, twelve by Robert Frost.
So I claim. The figures are imaginary but you get the point.
***
Whenever a poet comes to the end of a poetry reading, she pauses a moment, then, as a signal for applause, says, “Thank you,” and nods her head. Hands clap, and she says, “Thank you,” again, to more applause. Sometimes she says it one more time, or he does. How else does the audience know that the reading might not go on for six hours?
***
For better or worse, poetry is my life. After a reading, I enjoy the question period. On a tour in Nebraska I read poems to high-school kids, a big auditorium. When I finished, someone wanted to know how I got started. I said that at twelve I loved horror movies, then read Edgar Allan Poe, then… A young man up front waved his hand. I paused in my story. He asked, “Didn’t you do it to pick up chicks?”
I remembered cheerleaders at Hamden High School. “It works better,” I told him, “when you get older.”
***
It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road. He spoke well, his metre accommodating his natural sentences, and in between poems he made people laugh. At times, he played the chicken farmer, cute and countrified, eliciting coos of delight from an adoring audience. Once I heard him do this routine, then attended the post-reading cocktail party where he ate deviled eggs, sipped martinis, and slaughtered the reputations of Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Moore…
Back then, other famous poets read aloud only two or three times a year. If they were alive now, probably they could make a better living saying their poems than they did as an editor at Faber and Faber, or an obstetrician, or an insurance-company executive, or a Brooklyn librarian.
***
In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three. The London Times remarked on my “appropriately lugubrious voice.” When I first did a full-length poetry reading, three years later, my arms plunged stiff from my shoulders, my voice was changeless in pitch and volume, my face rigid, expressionless, pale—as if I were a collaborator facing a firing squad.
***
A question period for undergraduates at a Florida college began with the usual stuff: What is the difference between poetry and prose? Then I heard a question I had never heard before: “How do you reconcile being a poet with being president of Hallmark cards?” This inquisitive student had looked on the Internet, and learned that the man who runs that sentiment factory is indeed Donald Hall.
It’s a common name. Once before a reading a man asked me, “Are you Donald Hall?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So am I,” he said.
***
When my first book came out, in 1955, it was praised. I did a second book, my poems appeared in magazines—but nobody asked me to speak them out loud. I taught at the University of Michigan, which sponsored no readings. To my students, I recited great poems with gusto and growing confidence—Wyatt, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Hardy—and worked on performance without knowing it. It was a shock when, late in the decade, a lecture agent telephoned to offer a fee for reading my poems at a college. It happened again, and I flew off on days when I didn’t teach. Michigan paid minimal salaries, and most teachers amplified their incomes by plodding to summer school. I stayed home and wrote instead of employing the Socratic method in a suffocating classroom.
As the phone kept ringing, I supposed that poetry readings were some sort of fad, like cramming into phone booths; I would enjoy it as long as it lasted.
***
When my generation learned to read aloud, publishing from platforms more often than in print, we heard our poems change. Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning sound was imagined through the eye. Gradually the mouth-juice of vowels, or mouth-chunk of consonants, gave body to poems in performance. Dylan Thomas showed the way. Charles Olson said that “form is never more than an extension of content.” Really, content is only an excuse for oral sex. The most erotic poem in English is “Paradise Lost.”
In concentrating on sound, as in anything else, there are things to beware of. Revising a poem one morning, I found myself knowing that a new phrase was repellent, but realized it would pass if I intoned it out loud. Watch out. A poem must work from the platform but it must also work on the page. My generation started when poetry was print, before it became sound. We were lucky to practice both modes at once.
***
A chairman of English warned a friend of mine about her approaching audience. “They’re required to attend,” he said. “They don’t listen to anything. Sometimes in class I ask them to open a window, or to close it, just to see if they’re alive.” He sighed a deep sigh, as ponderous as tenure. “I don’t know what I’d do if The New Yorker didn’t come on Thursdays.”
***
It’s alleged that Homer said his poems aloud, though perhaps it was more like improv over centuries. Somewhat later, we learn, Tennyson read his poems to Queen Victoria, but we don’t know much more. In the nineteen-thirties, William Butler Yeats travelled by train from east coast to west, but the master of poetic noise didn’t speak his verses. At universities, to butter his bread, he read the typescript of a lecture called “Three Great Irishmen.” Maybe poets used to be paid not to say their poems?
***
By chance, I had been an undergraduate at the one college in America with an endowed meagre series of poetry readings. Eliot was good, but most performances were insufferable—superb poems spoken as if they were lines from the telephone book. William Carlos Williams read too quickly in a high-pitched voice, but seemed to enjoy himself. Wallace Stevens appeared to loathe his beautiful work, making it flat and half-audible. (Maybe he thought of how the boys in the office would tease him.) Marianne Moore’s tuneless drone was as eccentric as her inimitable art. When she spoke between poems, she mumbled in the identical monotone. Since she frequently revised or cut her things, a listener had to concentrate, to distinguish poems from talk. After twenty minutes, she looked distressed, and said, “Thank you.” When Dylan Thomas read, I hovered above my auditorium seat as I heard him say Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” He read his own poems afterward, fabricated for his rich and succulent Welsh organ. I found myself floating again. In four American visits, from 1950 to 1954, when he died in New York, Thomas read his poems many times at many places, from New York’s Poetry Center through dozens of western colleges. Frost’s eminence among poetry readers disappeared for a time.
***
In a question period I launched into my familiar rant about dead metaphors, asserting that when “I am glued to the chair” equals “I am anchored to the spot,” we claim that a tugboat is Elmer’s glue. This afternoon, I was obsessed with dead metaphors of disability: the crippled economy, blind ambition, deaf to entreaties, the paralysis of industry, and…
At the end I summed up my argument. Guileless, I said, “All these metaphors are lame.”
Why was everyone laughing?
***
Late in the fifties, poetry readings erupted in the United States suddenly and numerously. Probably it was because of Dylan Thomas’s readings, though there was a gap before the volcano exploded. His popularity was not only on account of his voice or his verse. Thomas was a star, and most people came to his readings because of the Tales of Master Dylan—vast drunkenness, creative obscenity at parties, botched seductions, nightly comas—but if people attended because of his celebrity, at least they were going to a poetry reading. Maybe the explosion of readings was also because of a cultural change. Songs were no longer Tin Pan Alley, and the lyrics were worth heeding. When everyone listened to Bob Dylan, they heard lines that resembled poetry. When people heard memorable language sung from platforms, they became able to hear poems recited in auditoriums. The University of Michigan began to schedule poetry readings every Tuesday at 4 P.M. A gathering of students, sometimes three hundred, attended each week, and absorbed what they listened to. A few days after one reading, I met Sarah, a friend of my daughter’s. She recited a stanza from Tuesday’s poet. “You’ve been reading her books!” I said. “Oh, no,” she said. Sarah remembered the words.
***
Once, after a circuit reading, my driver left me at a house for a party. I would spend the night there, while he went to a motel to get some sleep, and he would pick me up the next morning at six. The party was good; the party was long. These were the days when people drank liquor. Our host drooped asleep on the sofa at 4 A.M., which was apparently his daily wont. I didn’t notice, because I was flirting with a pretty woman, whose husband stood dazed beside her, until he emerged into consciousness to attack me. His fist aimed at my jaw, but moved so slowly that I was able to duck. Three minutes later, we became friends forever, and at 6 A.M. I stood on the sidewalk, waiting for my escort to drive me to the next reading, the next party.
***
Poets love to tell stories about readings. After a woman friend performed in Mississippi one winter, a man handed her a heavy box of typewriter paper, saying, “I want to share my poems with you.” When she glanced through “Verses of a Sergeant Major, Ret.,” she found it unreadable. Telling me about it, she asserted that share has become a verb of assault disguised as magnanimity. “Unless you read my poems, I will gouge your eyeballs out.”
***
Bert Hornback ran the Tuesday readings in Ann Arbor, supplementing the English department’s pittance by appealing to university administrators for discretionary funds. After ten years of weekly readings, he burned out, and watched as the feckless department drooped to holding a reading a year. He decided to see what he could do by himself. On a January day in the eighties, he borrowed the university’s Rackham Auditorium, sold tickets for a joint poetry reading—five-fifty each, fifty cents for Ticketmaster—and invited some friends to do a joint reading: Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, and Seamus Heaney. On a Friday night—against a basketball home game, against the Chicago Symphony—Bert filled eleven hundred seats with paying poetry fans. The Fire Department permitted a hundred standing-room-only tickets, which sold out, and Bert added further S.R.O.s when the Fire Department wasn’t looking. Unexpected vanloads arrived from Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Each poet read for forty minutes, and after a break did ten minutes more. Outside, the crowd without tickets sulked and grumbled. It was said that scalpers charged as much as fifty dollars.
***
A Dodge festival in New Jersey was massive with poets, schoolteachers, and school kids. Each poet did panels, question periods, and readings. The first night, all twenty-five poets read, a few minutes each, to a crowd of three thousand. Nobody sitting at the back of the tent could have seen a poet’s face if the festival had not enlarged each visage on a screen like the Dallas Cowboys’. For closeups, the Dodge employed a black, jointed steel arm, a foot thick and fifty feet long, which curled and lurched its camera back and forth, grabbing each facial detail in its metallic tentacles. It looked as if it were searching for a source of protein.
A week after the readings and lectures of the festival, a recent Pulitzer poet received a thick letter from a woman in South Carolina who had fallen in love. The envelope was heavy with amorous poems, and she told him that there were ninety-five more, but she didn’t have the stamps. She attached a photograph of a mature woman in front of a ranch house, and implored him to fly down immediately. She sent an airline ticket with blank dates.
***
It’s O.K. to be pleased when an audience loves you, or treat you as deathless, but you must not believe them. If a poet is any good, how would the listeners know? Poets have no notion of their own durability or distinction. When poets announce that their poems are immortal, they are depressed or lying or psychotic. Interviewing T. S. Eliot, I saved my cheekiest question for last. “Do you know if you’re any good?” His revised and printed response was formal, but in person he was abrupt: “Heavens no! Do you? Nobody intelligent knows if he’s any good.” No honor, no publication proves anything. Look at an issue of the Atlantic in 1906; look at a Poetry from 1931. A Nobel Prize means nothing. Look in an almanac at the list of poets who have won a Pulitzer Prize; look at the sad parade of Poets Laureate.
***
Sometimes an audience is not three thousand. A friend of mine arrived at a hall to find that his listener was singular. They went out for a beer. I heard of another poet who showed up for a crowd of two. Gamefully, she did a full reading from the podium, and afterward descended to shake the hands of her crowd. One was dead.
***
When I was young, I could project, and now without a microphone I can’t be heard in the tenth row. It’s not only the debility of age. One’s range is diminished by habitual use of microphones. (When stage actors spend twenty years making movies, they are inaudible when they return to Broadway or the West End.) But there are advantages to artificial enhancement. There’s a poem in which I moo like a cow. Cows’ lungs are bigger than ours. I approach the microphone intimately, and softly but audibly moo as long as a cow moos. Proximity to the microphone saves my wind as I croon, mm-mmm-mmmmm-mmmmmmmm-ugghwanchhh. My friends say it’s the best line I’ve ever written.
***
After the group-talk of the question period comes the one-on-one. People line up for signatures. Sometimes the seeker dictates a dedication. “Say, ‘With love to Billy and his adorable wife, Sheila, who makes a great pound cake.’ ” The signer should demur, or at least edit. Everyone in line must spell a name, or “Felicia” turns out to be “Phylysha.” (Once, at a prep school, a boy asked me to write, “For Mom and Dad.” I told him my parents were dead, and we worked things out.) If there are just a few in line, the poet can speak with them as if they were people. If the line is long, it becomes impossible to distinguish one petitioner from another. At the end stands the host—the man who invited the poet to the campus, who picked her up at the airport, with whom she had lengthy conversation, who will give her the check, who hands her a book to sign—and she has no idea of his name.
***
Some readings prove memorable for a single eccentricity. On an occasion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an orchestra was finishing rehearsal in the auditorium as the poetry reading was due to begin. The introducer and the poet carried music stands into the wings. In London, a reading was to begin at 6 P.M. in the ancient Church of St. Giles in the Fields. Evensong prevailed. Another time, in the state of Chiapas, in Mexico, eight writers sat onstage waiting hours for the governor to arrive. A large audience had departed by the time he walked in, surrounded by bodyguards with machine guns. In fatigue, we each read to the governor for five minutes. “Gracias,” we said. “Gracias.”
***
As I limped into my eighties, my readings altered, as everything did. Performance held up, but not body; I had to read sitting down. When an introduction slogged to its end, I lurched from backstage, hobbled, and carefully aimed my ass into a chair. For a while, I began each reading with a short poem I was trying out, which spoke of being twelve and watching my grandfather milk his Holsteins. In the poem I asked, in effect, how my grandfather would respond if he saw me now. When I finished saying the poem, there was always a grave pause, long enough to drive a hayrack through, followed by a standing ovation. I had never received a standing O after a first poem; now it happened again and again, from Pennsylvania to Minnesota to California, and I thought I had written an uncannily moving poem. When I mailed copies to friends for praise, they politely expressed their dismay. I was puzzled and distressed until I finally figured it out. The audience had just seen me stagger, wavering with a cane, and labor to sit down, wheezing. They imagined my grandfather horrified, seeing a cadaver gifted with speech. They stood and applauded because they knew they would never see me again.
Donald Hall published his final book of poems, “The Back Chamber,” last autumn. This November, he will publish “Christmas at Eagle Pond,” about New Hampshire in 1940. He may be reached via e-mail.
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