Donald Hall

Donald Hall died a few months ago, late in June, a few months short of his 90th birthday. When he died, I posted this on Facebook:

Author and poet Donald Hall died Saturday at the age of 89. I first read his words not in the poetry field, but in his memoir String Too Short To Be Saved. His writing has never let me down, especially the heartbreaking and beautiful The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, his memoir of his marriage to Jane, a formidable poet herself, their life together, and her death from leukemia.

In my most recent book post, his work Essays After Eighty was #140 for the year and I commented on how much I loved his work. I just within the last hour finished his final work, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. After I read the last sentence and closed the book, I sat there holding the book and my heart in my hands.

Hall predicted, all too accurately, that poets he knew and admired would be forgotten, that his works and the works of his wife Jane Kenyon, would be forgotten, that being forgotten was the reality of being a poet. He writes of going back through old poetry anthologies, including one he helped edit, and being jolted by seeing good works by poets he knew well, and realizing he had forgotten those poems and those poets, not because of old age, but because poetry is always moving into the future. The same can be said of essayists: the Hall essays I took to first some 40 years ago will not be read in another 40.

In one of the Carnival essays, Hall talks about a live performance with Ira Glass in which an interview he gave Glass in 1998, 18 years earlier, was played while Hall sat on stage. The interview was given after the death of Jane Kenyon, and the topic was her death and his grief. The live evening up until then had been something of a comedic event, and Hall wrote that "the uproaring audience slid into immaculate silence." He noted how at the age of 86, he "entered the grief of of my mid-sixties in another century." And then Hall concludes:

Now I understood how death and desolation fit into the riotous joy at the Music Hall in Portsmouth. The emotional intricacy and urgency of human life expresses itself most fiercely in contradiction...Only the wrenching apart permits or reveals the wholeness. Enantiodromia. Up and down. Down and up. Way way down, way way up. A carnival of losses. 

A carnival of losses indeed.  And I've got tickets to the carnival.