He learned to pay attention to sound from Edgar Allen Poe. In his time at Harvard he and his classmates took themselves seriously with their writing. This seriousness with which he took poetry carried into later in his life. He wrote a lot about his wife’s illness and death, in his poem “The Ship Pounding” he uses extended metaphor, how the ship is working every day, all the time and yet going nowhere. He admires James Hardy’s poems because of their stanzas and use of rhyme, the lines also vary in length. He taught Hall how to follow the organization of sound instead of a strict shape of the poem. When asked to define poetry, Hall notes the importance of sound by saying, “sound has always been the entryway and anytime my style has changed over the many years, it’s started by way of the noise that the poem makes.” He also says that,”every poem that’s to be any good has to have its own opposition built into it.” He encourages the use of ambivalence in poems and urges writers to include “some trace of a foreign element.” The two pieces of advice Hall gives are, “to expect, to work over a poem, to revise it.” He says there are some poets who have created good poems with very little revision but that most of the poets he knows and admires spend a lot of time revising their poems before publishing them. Lastly, Hall recommends “reading the old poets” because when you try reading the work of writers such as Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer for the first time “you need to have a mind or an ear that can receive the meter and you just aren’t born with that. You get it by reading the old poets.”
Donald Hall’s trajectory of life had led him to poetry. When he was 12 years old a neighbor recommended him to Edgar Alan Poe. Something that I found interesting was that Donald and his roommate would exchange poems when they lived together. It is interesting to me that they would write them in solitude and then leave them on each other’s desk without really mentioning it to the other. I also like that when Donald gave feedback back to his roommate he would say that the poems “were going to be good” meaning there was still work to do. There was also a small competition between them on who wrote better poetry but they never let it affect them personally. He was married to this girl, she passed from leukemia and he wrote about her illness and then his grief when he passed. I enjoyed his simile to her wife’s bald head, he related to her being as bald as Michael Jordan. Although one might find this funny I like this simile because it is memorable and striking to someone reading the poem. Weeds and Peonies was the first poem he started after his wife’s death. While his wife was sick he would spend 2 hours a day writing letters to her that got comprised into the second half of a book. He states that this was the only happy time of his day. This stuck with me because even though he was writing about something sad, he started to feel better about the whole situation because he was getting his feelings out and also feeling as though he was doing something to help his wife’s diagnosis of leukemia. When Donald is talking about poetry as a whole he describes sound being a key factor to a good poem. He also states that every good poem has to have its own opposition built into it. Personally, I see this as a resistance to something.
From this interview with Donald Hall, I learned several things, such as drafting takes time. For Hall, writing poetry was an outlet for his grief after his wife died. As he produced poems, he’d come back to them daily, weekly (which reminds me of our drafty poem), and rework and restructure his writing to make it as best as he could. He also stated that during that time in his life, that was the only way he felt content. When he wrote, it was his way of talking to his wife, a moment he could channel his energy into his work. Hall makes it clear that poetry helped him each step of the way in her treatment days through her passing. Along with his revision process, Hall’s formation process is unique. When Hall is writing, he doesn’t just look at how the words sound, their diction, or the actual language, but also the shape. He description of poetry is that “sound is the entryway to noise that the poem makes”. When someone is creating poetry, it’s not just about appearance but what weight the words hold. Every poem to be good has to have opposition built into it, tension that doesn’t have to be even but is noticeable. Hall’s final remark was to ‘cultivate the ear’, meaning that with progress, you can be confident in your own work, pull from within, and that will be perceived in the writing.
Things I learned from Donald Hall:
1) Sound as the entryway to poetry: Hall explained that his lifelong entry into poetry began with sound. Even when he read Poe as a child, it was the sound and rhythm that drew him in. For him, style and even subject matter often begin with the noises and music of language. This shows how important cultivating an “ear” is for poets—the way a poem sounds guides its meaning and form.
2) The necessity of opposition and tension: Hall insisted that every good poem contains its own opposition with some tension, ambivalence, or contradiction within it. A poem cannot be one-note or one-dimensional it needs friction to feel alive. He even mentioned going back to poems to insert that opposing force if it wasn’t already there.
3) Revision is essential: He pushed against the myth that first drafts are the “truest” version of a poem. For Hall, revision is not insincere, it’s the real work of poetry. The poet’s responsibility is to make the poem better, not to preserve the ego of the first draft.
4) Reading older poets is crucial: Hall stressed that young poets must read the classics, like Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Herbert, Chaucer, because those poets teach you how meter, form, and music work. You don’t “naturally” have an ear for poetry, you train it by immersing yourself in the masters who came before.
5) Community, argument, and seriousness matter: Hall described his time at Harvard surrounded by poets like Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, and Frank O’Hara. They argued constantly—sometimes until 3 a.m.—over what made a poem good. That seriousness and competitiveness shaped them all as poets. Poetry thrives when treated as something worth wrestling over.
6) Poetry as transformation of grief: His poems about Jane Kenyon’s illness and death taught him that writing can transform unbearable grief into art. The act of shaping pain into poems was his only “happy” time during mourning. Poetry gave him a way to continue addressing her, like one-way letters, and gave form to the formlessness of loss.
7) Children’s writing and the spark of story: Even in writing children’s books, Hall emphasized that ideas came from lived stories, such as folk tales passed down, or even things his children and grandchildren said. Poetry and prose are both rooted in listening, noticing, and then shaping.
I think for me, something I learned and picked up on from listening to Donald Hall talk was him explaining his experience during I believe Harvard, where he mentioned receiving inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, and the specifics that he mentioned were very interesting. More specifically, he mentioned listening to the sound of his work and establishing the rhythm that came through to him, as he stated that subject matter primarily starts with the noise or language of music. He picked up on the beat of Poe’s work, and it inspired him in the near future once he started to work more seriously with poetry. I think for me, this stood out to me because having an ear for a certain style of poetry or the listening of the tone and how the poem is told is important not just as a reader, but a writer as well. The way a poem sounds will guide the storytelling and writing techniques used. When you establish a sound for your poem, you can establish that first stanza that will then lead to the next poem. On the other hand, I think another thing that stood out to me was the idea of sorrow or grief, as he referenced several times in the video. Hall was married to a woman named Jane Kenyon, who passed away due to an illness, and he was obviously devastated by this event. However, he mentioned that this tragic event inspired a form of art for his work, and he connects it to turning grief into art. He mentioned that the act of turning this tragic event and grief into art was the only happy time and moments he had during this period. He also mentioned that the idea of poetry was his way to communicate with her, he could write letters to her and talk to her about things. Basically, I feel that this shows that poetry can be a form of escape or a way to remember someone you tragically lost. I, like him, believe that many individuals write to a deceased loved one in their life, and I think the ability to express grief on paper for other people to feel and experience is a very underutilized skill in poetry, and I do thank Hall for touching upon this fact.
Some takeaway I have from the interview with Donald Hall is the different inspirations he had throughout his life that made him the great poet he is. He starts by talking about what really drew him into poetry which was none other than Edgar Allen Poe’s influence. Hall really enjoyed the sound of his poems and that had opened his eyes to how beautiful poetry can be. Being at Harvard is when he first felt at home with his generation being surrounded by all the poets he met. He found his people where everyone who had taken an interest in poetry had taken it seriously. This helped him create a sense of motivation which can go for any aspiring poet—to surround yourself with others who share that interest. Hall also touches on the difficulties of grieving his wife Jane and how poetry was a great coping mechanism for him because he was able to transfer his thoughts and feelings into words. Writing poetry while grieving was a productive thing to do instead of sitting around alone and upset. At the end of his interview he leaves watchers with a piece of advice to revise your work. Though this may be basic advice it doesn’t make it any less important. There is always room for improvement. Taking the time to read over your work again and again and make revisions is never a waste of time. A first draft of a poem may be good but a second draft could be great. Workshopping with others is also another helpful tip to becoming a great poet. Getting someone else to look at your work will help provide ideas for something you may not have thought of because everyone’s brain is wired differently.
I thought it was really interesting how Donald Hall explained the craft of poetry. He talked about how poetry is influenced by three things: old movies, our everyday culture, and our memories. He wants us to understand that poetry does not have to come from something grand or rare, it can be an inspiration from regular life. It could be anything from an old family memory to your daily routine. I learned that it is the poet’s job to seek out ordinary material and transform it into something emotional. One takeaway is when Hall reads his poems out loud. There are specific pauses, breaths, and tones that help to shape the poem’s rhythm. Hall’s delivery on certain lines adds weight and depth to his poems, making them feel more natural. Another important detail that Hall expresses is how the craft of poems are built over time, not just from a single burst of inspiration. Poems are made the long way through several drafts. Going back to the influence of memory, Hall uses personal history and experience of living in other places in his poetry. He explains that these things are not supposed to be vague, they are filled with different landscapes and people. It makes a poem more authentic, more at home with what you are feeling. I think my favorite part that I learned was that humor is good in poetry. Hall explains how anything from silly to serious can be used in a poem. He wants us to understand that poetry does not have to always sound “poetic” and that we are always welcome to use comedy. I think this video was a great inspiration for me. It opened my eyes to a lot more things I can create within my poems. Hall really taught me that poetry is built from the ground up, just like a flower that grows from a seed. It takes patience and your constant to grow your skills as well as the poems you write.
As I was listening along to the video, I took down some notes and made some bullet points when I heard something that felt as though it’d be worth reflecting on. The ideas which I took away the most from Donald Hall are as follows:
– Hall spoke about how the first thing that drew him to poetry, specifically the poems of Edgar Allen Poe, was the sound of them. This made me think about how important the sound of a poem is to its structure. It’s one thing to be able to write a good poem, but does the poem sound as good when heard aloud as it does when read on the page? This is something that is certainly worth considering, and made me think that I should be reading my poems out loud to myself once I’ve done writing them to see how they sound spoken aloud.
– Hall also talked about the importance of the revision process when it comes to poetry. This isn’t a new concept to us, even in this class, where we did the Drafty-Draft Poem project which involved an entire week of revisions to one poem. Hall pushed very hard on the idea of revision when it comes to poems isn’t just recommended, but it’s practically essential to bringing out the best version that a poem can possibly be.
– Finally, the other big idea that stuck to me was the idea of opposition that Hall talked about. He specifically used the word opposition, which to me also seems to mean friction or contention between ideas in the poems. This is somewhat of an abstract idea, but to me what I think he means is that poems need to be wrestling with something, and it’s okay for ideas in a poem to be at odds with one another.
In the interview there was a lot of really interesting stuff that was talked about. The first thing that popped out to me was when Hall was talking about him and Jane’s writing and revision process. Later on in the interview he tells young poets to expect to work and revise drafts. I think this is really important because it is really easy to write a poem and revise it once or twice then be done with it. The thing is when you go back to look at it later you might find something that you want to change. In the interview Hall mentioned that poems can sometimes take him as long as a year. That might seem like way too long for one poem, but the poem continues to grow and evolve if you stick with it. Another thing from the interview that stood out to me was how Hall reiterated multiple times that sound is important. This is super important because poems are usually meant to be read out loud, so when writing it is important to take into account what the poem sounds like when read out loud. The way that a poem sounds can do a lot for conveying the emotions and message a writer is trying to get across. One thing I noticed about Hall’s poems is that there wasn’t always a pattern to them, they would vary in rhyming and line or stanza size which I enjoyed. I feel like letting go of having a pattern to my poems is something that I definitely need to work on. I usually like to have a very specific pattern occurring when I write. The last piece of advice Hall shared was to read the old poets. I thought this was interesting because I feel like some people think of the old poets as overdone, but they are famous for a reason so there is something to learn there. Overall, I enjoyed this interview and I thought it was quite interesting and thought provoking.
Learning about Donald Hall’s approach to poetry really shifted how I think about writing. What stood out most was how crucial sound is to his work. For Hall, poetry isn’t just about the words on the page or the look of the poem; it’s about the noise the poem makes, the rhythm, the musicality. He described sound as the “entryway” into poetry, which made me realize how important it is to develop an ear for music in language. It’s something you learn over time by reading the greats like Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, whose works train you to recognize meter and form. Another thing I found fascinating was Hall’s idea that every strong poem needs some kind of internal opposition or tension, something that keeps the poem alive and layered. Without that friction or ambivalence, the poem feels flat or one-dimensional. I like that he encourages poets to embrace complexity and even introduce “foreign elements” to add depth. Hall’s process also emphasizes the value of revision. Contrary to the idea that a poem’s first draft is its purest form, Hall insists that real poetry comes through persistent reworking. Most poets he admires spend a lot of time revising, reshaping their work until it truly sings. This reminded me of how important patience and persistence are in writing. On a more personal level, Hall’s poems about his wife’s battle with leukemia and her death showed me how poetry can be a way to channel grief and find meaning. His daily letters to her, which eventually became part of a book, were his only happy moments during that painful time. Poetry was more than just expression, it was a way for him to process loss and keep their connection alive. The vivid simile comparing his wife’s bald head to Michael Jordan’s stuck with me, it’s a striking and memorable image that blends humor with heartbreak. Finally, I appreciated how Hall’s time at Harvard shaped his seriousness about poetry. Alongside peers like Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery, they engaged in fierce debates about what made a poem good. That mix of competition and community pushed them all to grow as poets. Overall, Hall’s insights remind me that poetry is a craft grounded in sound, tension, revision, and deep emotional honesty. It’s not just about putting words on a page but about listening, wrestling with ideas, and shaping something meaningful from life’s complexities.
The singular thing that really stood out to me as something I hadn’t encountered before was Hall’s emphasis on the “sound” of a poem. I think this idea is especially different for me is because I’ve always considered poetry to be very tied to the page. While Hall’s version of “sound” does seem to go beyond the strictly audial with his short discussion of the visual shape of his poetry, he places a lot of focus on the way a poem comes to life when read aloud. This is what is at the core of his advice for younger poets and a guiding notion for him during his own development. I feel like I don’t fully understand. I haven’t developed my ears as it was said during the interview. This is something I need to ruminate on in order to be able to apply it.
I learned from Donald Hall that the sound of a poem is very important. I don’t think that many people think about how their poem sounds outloud, but rather just how it looks and reads on the page. Since poetry is a written form of art, I have never really thought of how my poems sound. Hall made me think about how poetry is almost a kind of music in its own way.
12 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 7”
He learned to pay attention to sound from Edgar Allen Poe. In his time at Harvard he and his classmates took themselves seriously with their writing. This seriousness with which he took poetry carried into later in his life. He wrote a lot about his wife’s illness and death, in his poem “The Ship Pounding” he uses extended metaphor, how the ship is working every day, all the time and yet going nowhere. He admires James Hardy’s poems because of their stanzas and use of rhyme, the lines also vary in length. He taught Hall how to follow the organization of sound instead of a strict shape of the poem. When asked to define poetry, Hall notes the importance of sound by saying, “sound has always been the entryway and anytime my style has changed over the many years, it’s started by way of the noise that the poem makes.” He also says that,”every poem that’s to be any good has to have its own opposition built into it.” He encourages the use of ambivalence in poems and urges writers to include “some trace of a foreign element.” The two pieces of advice Hall gives are, “to expect, to work over a poem, to revise it.” He says there are some poets who have created good poems with very little revision but that most of the poets he knows and admires spend a lot of time revising their poems before publishing them. Lastly, Hall recommends “reading the old poets” because when you try reading the work of writers such as Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer for the first time “you need to have a mind or an ear that can receive the meter and you just aren’t born with that. You get it by reading the old poets.”
Donald Hall’s trajectory of life had led him to poetry. When he was 12 years old a neighbor recommended him to Edgar Alan Poe. Something that I found interesting was that Donald and his roommate would exchange poems when they lived together. It is interesting to me that they would write them in solitude and then leave them on each other’s desk without really mentioning it to the other. I also like that when Donald gave feedback back to his roommate he would say that the poems “were going to be good” meaning there was still work to do. There was also a small competition between them on who wrote better poetry but they never let it affect them personally. He was married to this girl, she passed from leukemia and he wrote about her illness and then his grief when he passed. I enjoyed his simile to her wife’s bald head, he related to her being as bald as Michael Jordan. Although one might find this funny I like this simile because it is memorable and striking to someone reading the poem. Weeds and Peonies was the first poem he started after his wife’s death. While his wife was sick he would spend 2 hours a day writing letters to her that got comprised into the second half of a book. He states that this was the only happy time of his day. This stuck with me because even though he was writing about something sad, he started to feel better about the whole situation because he was getting his feelings out and also feeling as though he was doing something to help his wife’s diagnosis of leukemia. When Donald is talking about poetry as a whole he describes sound being a key factor to a good poem. He also states that every good poem has to have its own opposition built into it. Personally, I see this as a resistance to something.
From this interview with Donald Hall, I learned several things, such as drafting takes time. For Hall, writing poetry was an outlet for his grief after his wife died. As he produced poems, he’d come back to them daily, weekly (which reminds me of our drafty poem), and rework and restructure his writing to make it as best as he could. He also stated that during that time in his life, that was the only way he felt content. When he wrote, it was his way of talking to his wife, a moment he could channel his energy into his work. Hall makes it clear that poetry helped him each step of the way in her treatment days through her passing. Along with his revision process, Hall’s formation process is unique. When Hall is writing, he doesn’t just look at how the words sound, their diction, or the actual language, but also the shape. He description of poetry is that “sound is the entryway to noise that the poem makes”. When someone is creating poetry, it’s not just about appearance but what weight the words hold. Every poem to be good has to have opposition built into it, tension that doesn’t have to be even but is noticeable. Hall’s final remark was to ‘cultivate the ear’, meaning that with progress, you can be confident in your own work, pull from within, and that will be perceived in the writing.
Things I learned from Donald Hall:
1) Sound as the entryway to poetry: Hall explained that his lifelong entry into poetry began with sound. Even when he read Poe as a child, it was the sound and rhythm that drew him in. For him, style and even subject matter often begin with the noises and music of language. This shows how important cultivating an “ear” is for poets—the way a poem sounds guides its meaning and form.
2) The necessity of opposition and tension: Hall insisted that every good poem contains its own opposition with some tension, ambivalence, or contradiction within it. A poem cannot be one-note or one-dimensional it needs friction to feel alive. He even mentioned going back to poems to insert that opposing force if it wasn’t already there.
3) Revision is essential: He pushed against the myth that first drafts are the “truest” version of a poem. For Hall, revision is not insincere, it’s the real work of poetry. The poet’s responsibility is to make the poem better, not to preserve the ego of the first draft.
4) Reading older poets is crucial: Hall stressed that young poets must read the classics, like Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Herbert, Chaucer, because those poets teach you how meter, form, and music work. You don’t “naturally” have an ear for poetry, you train it by immersing yourself in the masters who came before.
5) Community, argument, and seriousness matter: Hall described his time at Harvard surrounded by poets like Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, and Frank O’Hara. They argued constantly—sometimes until 3 a.m.—over what made a poem good. That seriousness and competitiveness shaped them all as poets. Poetry thrives when treated as something worth wrestling over.
6) Poetry as transformation of grief: His poems about Jane Kenyon’s illness and death taught him that writing can transform unbearable grief into art. The act of shaping pain into poems was his only “happy” time during mourning. Poetry gave him a way to continue addressing her, like one-way letters, and gave form to the formlessness of loss.
7) Children’s writing and the spark of story: Even in writing children’s books, Hall emphasized that ideas came from lived stories, such as folk tales passed down, or even things his children and grandchildren said. Poetry and prose are both rooted in listening, noticing, and then shaping.
I think for me, something I learned and picked up on from listening to Donald Hall talk was him explaining his experience during I believe Harvard, where he mentioned receiving inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, and the specifics that he mentioned were very interesting. More specifically, he mentioned listening to the sound of his work and establishing the rhythm that came through to him, as he stated that subject matter primarily starts with the noise or language of music. He picked up on the beat of Poe’s work, and it inspired him in the near future once he started to work more seriously with poetry. I think for me, this stood out to me because having an ear for a certain style of poetry or the listening of the tone and how the poem is told is important not just as a reader, but a writer as well. The way a poem sounds will guide the storytelling and writing techniques used. When you establish a sound for your poem, you can establish that first stanza that will then lead to the next poem. On the other hand, I think another thing that stood out to me was the idea of sorrow or grief, as he referenced several times in the video. Hall was married to a woman named Jane Kenyon, who passed away due to an illness, and he was obviously devastated by this event. However, he mentioned that this tragic event inspired a form of art for his work, and he connects it to turning grief into art. He mentioned that the act of turning this tragic event and grief into art was the only happy time and moments he had during this period. He also mentioned that the idea of poetry was his way to communicate with her, he could write letters to her and talk to her about things. Basically, I feel that this shows that poetry can be a form of escape or a way to remember someone you tragically lost. I, like him, believe that many individuals write to a deceased loved one in their life, and I think the ability to express grief on paper for other people to feel and experience is a very underutilized skill in poetry, and I do thank Hall for touching upon this fact.
Some takeaway I have from the interview with Donald Hall is the different inspirations he had throughout his life that made him the great poet he is. He starts by talking about what really drew him into poetry which was none other than Edgar Allen Poe’s influence. Hall really enjoyed the sound of his poems and that had opened his eyes to how beautiful poetry can be. Being at Harvard is when he first felt at home with his generation being surrounded by all the poets he met. He found his people where everyone who had taken an interest in poetry had taken it seriously. This helped him create a sense of motivation which can go for any aspiring poet—to surround yourself with others who share that interest. Hall also touches on the difficulties of grieving his wife Jane and how poetry was a great coping mechanism for him because he was able to transfer his thoughts and feelings into words. Writing poetry while grieving was a productive thing to do instead of sitting around alone and upset. At the end of his interview he leaves watchers with a piece of advice to revise your work. Though this may be basic advice it doesn’t make it any less important. There is always room for improvement. Taking the time to read over your work again and again and make revisions is never a waste of time. A first draft of a poem may be good but a second draft could be great. Workshopping with others is also another helpful tip to becoming a great poet. Getting someone else to look at your work will help provide ideas for something you may not have thought of because everyone’s brain is wired differently.
I thought it was really interesting how Donald Hall explained the craft of poetry. He talked about how poetry is influenced by three things: old movies, our everyday culture, and our memories. He wants us to understand that poetry does not have to come from something grand or rare, it can be an inspiration from regular life. It could be anything from an old family memory to your daily routine. I learned that it is the poet’s job to seek out ordinary material and transform it into something emotional. One takeaway is when Hall reads his poems out loud. There are specific pauses, breaths, and tones that help to shape the poem’s rhythm. Hall’s delivery on certain lines adds weight and depth to his poems, making them feel more natural. Another important detail that Hall expresses is how the craft of poems are built over time, not just from a single burst of inspiration. Poems are made the long way through several drafts. Going back to the influence of memory, Hall uses personal history and experience of living in other places in his poetry. He explains that these things are not supposed to be vague, they are filled with different landscapes and people. It makes a poem more authentic, more at home with what you are feeling. I think my favorite part that I learned was that humor is good in poetry. Hall explains how anything from silly to serious can be used in a poem. He wants us to understand that poetry does not have to always sound “poetic” and that we are always welcome to use comedy. I think this video was a great inspiration for me. It opened my eyes to a lot more things I can create within my poems. Hall really taught me that poetry is built from the ground up, just like a flower that grows from a seed. It takes patience and your constant to grow your skills as well as the poems you write.
As I was listening along to the video, I took down some notes and made some bullet points when I heard something that felt as though it’d be worth reflecting on. The ideas which I took away the most from Donald Hall are as follows:
– Hall spoke about how the first thing that drew him to poetry, specifically the poems of Edgar Allen Poe, was the sound of them. This made me think about how important the sound of a poem is to its structure. It’s one thing to be able to write a good poem, but does the poem sound as good when heard aloud as it does when read on the page? This is something that is certainly worth considering, and made me think that I should be reading my poems out loud to myself once I’ve done writing them to see how they sound spoken aloud.
– Hall also talked about the importance of the revision process when it comes to poetry. This isn’t a new concept to us, even in this class, where we did the Drafty-Draft Poem project which involved an entire week of revisions to one poem. Hall pushed very hard on the idea of revision when it comes to poems isn’t just recommended, but it’s practically essential to bringing out the best version that a poem can possibly be.
– Finally, the other big idea that stuck to me was the idea of opposition that Hall talked about. He specifically used the word opposition, which to me also seems to mean friction or contention between ideas in the poems. This is somewhat of an abstract idea, but to me what I think he means is that poems need to be wrestling with something, and it’s okay for ideas in a poem to be at odds with one another.
In the interview there was a lot of really interesting stuff that was talked about. The first thing that popped out to me was when Hall was talking about him and Jane’s writing and revision process. Later on in the interview he tells young poets to expect to work and revise drafts. I think this is really important because it is really easy to write a poem and revise it once or twice then be done with it. The thing is when you go back to look at it later you might find something that you want to change. In the interview Hall mentioned that poems can sometimes take him as long as a year. That might seem like way too long for one poem, but the poem continues to grow and evolve if you stick with it. Another thing from the interview that stood out to me was how Hall reiterated multiple times that sound is important. This is super important because poems are usually meant to be read out loud, so when writing it is important to take into account what the poem sounds like when read out loud. The way that a poem sounds can do a lot for conveying the emotions and message a writer is trying to get across. One thing I noticed about Hall’s poems is that there wasn’t always a pattern to them, they would vary in rhyming and line or stanza size which I enjoyed. I feel like letting go of having a pattern to my poems is something that I definitely need to work on. I usually like to have a very specific pattern occurring when I write. The last piece of advice Hall shared was to read the old poets. I thought this was interesting because I feel like some people think of the old poets as overdone, but they are famous for a reason so there is something to learn there. Overall, I enjoyed this interview and I thought it was quite interesting and thought provoking.
Learning about Donald Hall’s approach to poetry really shifted how I think about writing. What stood out most was how crucial sound is to his work. For Hall, poetry isn’t just about the words on the page or the look of the poem; it’s about the noise the poem makes, the rhythm, the musicality. He described sound as the “entryway” into poetry, which made me realize how important it is to develop an ear for music in language. It’s something you learn over time by reading the greats like Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, whose works train you to recognize meter and form. Another thing I found fascinating was Hall’s idea that every strong poem needs some kind of internal opposition or tension, something that keeps the poem alive and layered. Without that friction or ambivalence, the poem feels flat or one-dimensional. I like that he encourages poets to embrace complexity and even introduce “foreign elements” to add depth. Hall’s process also emphasizes the value of revision. Contrary to the idea that a poem’s first draft is its purest form, Hall insists that real poetry comes through persistent reworking. Most poets he admires spend a lot of time revising, reshaping their work until it truly sings. This reminded me of how important patience and persistence are in writing. On a more personal level, Hall’s poems about his wife’s battle with leukemia and her death showed me how poetry can be a way to channel grief and find meaning. His daily letters to her, which eventually became part of a book, were his only happy moments during that painful time. Poetry was more than just expression, it was a way for him to process loss and keep their connection alive. The vivid simile comparing his wife’s bald head to Michael Jordan’s stuck with me, it’s a striking and memorable image that blends humor with heartbreak. Finally, I appreciated how Hall’s time at Harvard shaped his seriousness about poetry. Alongside peers like Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery, they engaged in fierce debates about what made a poem good. That mix of competition and community pushed them all to grow as poets. Overall, Hall’s insights remind me that poetry is a craft grounded in sound, tension, revision, and deep emotional honesty. It’s not just about putting words on a page but about listening, wrestling with ideas, and shaping something meaningful from life’s complexities.
The singular thing that really stood out to me as something I hadn’t encountered before was Hall’s emphasis on the “sound” of a poem. I think this idea is especially different for me is because I’ve always considered poetry to be very tied to the page. While Hall’s version of “sound” does seem to go beyond the strictly audial with his short discussion of the visual shape of his poetry, he places a lot of focus on the way a poem comes to life when read aloud. This is what is at the core of his advice for younger poets and a guiding notion for him during his own development. I feel like I don’t fully understand. I haven’t developed my ears as it was said during the interview. This is something I need to ruminate on in order to be able to apply it.
I learned from Donald Hall that the sound of a poem is very important. I don’t think that many people think about how their poem sounds outloud, but rather just how it looks and reads on the page. Since poetry is a written form of art, I have never really thought of how my poems sound. Hall made me think about how poetry is almost a kind of music in its own way.