{"id":10937,"date":"2018-06-24T22:09:56","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T02:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=10937"},"modified":"2018-06-24T22:09:56","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T02:09:56","slug":"american-poet-donald-hall-89-has-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=10937","title":{"rendered":"American Poet Donald Hall, 89, Has Died"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poet Donald Hall, 89,<\/a> has passed away. David Kirby has this in the New York Times obit:<\/p>\n

\u201cHall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet,\u201d\u00a0Billy Collins,<\/a>\u00a0another American poet laureate, wrote in The Washington Post in April 2006, two months before Mr. Hall himself was given the post.\u00a0 . . . He was a staggeringly prolific writer who chose freelance work over teaching \u2014 a decision, as Mr. Collins put it, \u201cto detach himself from academic life, with its slow but steady intravenous drip of a salary.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Back in 2001, Hall called for a death to the death of poetry.<\/a>\u00a0Here’s how that essay begins.<\/p>\n

Some days, when you read the newspaper, it seems clear that the United States is a country devoted to poetry. You can delude yourself reading the sports pages. After finding two references to \u201cpoetry in motion,” apropos of figure skating and the Kentucky Derby, you read that a shortstop is the poet of his position and that sailboats raced under blue skies that were sheer poetry. On the funny pages, Zippy praises Zerbina\u2019s outfit: \u201cYou\u2019re a poem in polyester.\u201d A funeral director, in an advertisement, muses on the necessity for poetry in our daily lives. It\u2019s hard to figure out just what he\u2019s talking about, but it becomes clear that this\u00a0poetry<\/i>\u00a0has nothing to do with\u00a0poems<\/i>. It sounds more like taking naps.<\/p>\n

Poetry<\/i>, then, appears to be:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    a vacuous synonym for excellence or unconsciousness. What else is common to the public perception of poetry?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    It is universally agreed that no one reads it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Poet Donald Hall, 89, has passed away. David Kirby has this in the New York Times obit: \u201cHall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet,\u201d\u00a0Billy Collins,\u00a0another American poet laureate, wrote in The Washington Post in April 2006, two months before Mr. Hall himself was given the post.\u00a0 . . … Continue reading American Poet Donald Hall, 89, Has Died<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,11],"tags":[786],"class_list":["post-10937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-poetry","tag-donald-hall"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}