Poet Laureate
 

The US has its 14th Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, of Wilmot, NH.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060614/.../poet_laureate

This is probably a giant heap of SBC for most of you, and probably would be for me if I didn't know him.

Back when he was an associate professor at Michigan, he and my father shared an office. His family and mine were inseparable until he fell for one of his students, Jane Kenyon (another famous poet, who died about ten years ago), divorced and moved to his family's farm in New Hampshire.

(just for reference, I think my parents had the only marriage that survived the '70s in Michigan's English department - Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich had nothing on those guys - and no, he is not my father, nor is Peterson or Kekich).

Don remained close to my parents, they used to write just about every week (English professors don't like telephones). He read for Angela and I at our wedding, and we've remained in contact (so if you know his work and would like to pass along congratulations, I can do that).

He's really a great guy. Extremely liberal, of course, and he's given me considerable grief for my admiration of Ayn Rand.

A fine poet indeed, who's contributed worthwhile scholarly work as well. A great choice for the position.

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

--Donald Hall

Just in case anyone else has to look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poet_Laureate

I had no idea we had one of those.

I couldn't tell you who 12 of the other 13 have been, but I remember Maya Angelou being a Poet Laureate during the Clinton years.

Umm... sure about that?

I was just poking around for a list... found on at the Library of Congress:

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate-1990-2005.html

I know they made a big deal about her my 7th grade year.

In looking, she read a poem of hers for Clinton's inauguration in '93.

I could've sworn she was also Poet Laureate at some point.

Don is being interviewed on NPR right now, if people are interested.

He did a couple of readings today on my local carrier of NPR (WNYC). I really liked the poems he read. Reminded me of Robert Frost.


The Man In The Dead Machine

High on a slope in New Guinea
The Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines
as thick as arms. In 1943,
the clenched hand of a pilot
glided it here
where no one has ever been.

In the cockpit, the helmeted
skeleton sits
upright, held
by dry sinews at neck
and shoulder, and webbing
that straps the pelvic cross
to the cracked
leather of the seat, and the breastbone
to the canvas cover
of the parachute.

Or say the shrapnel
missed him, he flew
back to the carrier, and every
morning takes the train, his pale
hands on the black case, and sits
upright, held
by the firm webbing.

Has he just been named poet laureate? It just seems like last year that a new Poet Laureate had been named. I think I heard him giving an interview just a few months back.

In any case, I'll listen for the interview on the way home today.