Thank You Thank You
APRIL IS POETRY MONTH, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2013 there were 7,427 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 15 readings in the United States, 12 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 âThank youâ and nods her head. Hands clap, and she says âThank youâ 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 how 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, âDidnât you do it to pick up chicks?â
I remembered cheerleaders at Hamden High School. âIt works better,â I told him, âwhen you get older.â
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 meter accommodating his natural sentences, and in between poems he made people laugh. At times onstage he played the chicken farmer, cute and countrified, eliciting coos of delight from an adoring audience. Once, after I heard him do this routine, I 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 the first time, booming in Oxfordâs Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. The London Times remarked on my âappropriately lugubrious voice.â 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, paleâas 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: âHow do you reconcile being a poet with being president of Hallmark cards?â This inquisitive student had looked on the Internet and learned that the man who runs the sentiment factory is indeed Donald Hall.
Itâs a common name. Once before a reading a man asked me, âAre you Donald Hall?â
âYes,â I said.
âSo am I,â he said.
At the end of the airportâs titanium tube a man carried a sign with the poetâs name. The assistant professor drove her an hour to his campus, talking nervously all the way about whether heâd get tenure from his English department. When he drove her back for her flight the next day, he asked her to write a letter of recommendation.
When my first book came out in 1955, it was praised, I did a second book, my poems appeared in magazinesâbut 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 confidenceâWyatt, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Hardyâand worked on performance without knowing it. It was a shock when 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 didnât 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 out-loud mouth-juice of vowels, or mouth-chunk of consonants, gave body to poems in performance. Dylan Thomas showed the way. Charles Olson said that âform is never more than an extension of content.â 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 a cliché or a dead metaphor, but realizing that I could intone it aloud so that it would pass. 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. âTheyâre required to attend,â he said. âThey donât listen to anything. Sometimes in class I ask them to open a window, or to close it, just to see if theyâre alive.â He sighed a deep sigh, as ponderous as tenure. âI donât know what Iâd do if the New Yorker didnât come on Thursdays.â
Itâs alleged that Homer said his poems aloud. Somewhat later, we hear that Tennyson read his poems to Queen Victoria, but we donât hear much more. In the 1930s William Butler Yeats traveled by train across America, from East Coast to West, but the master of mellifluous stanzas didnât speak his verses. At universities, to butter his bread, he read the typescript of a lecture called âThree Great Irishmen.â 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 series of poetry readings. Eliot was good, but most performances were insufferableâsuperb 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 the boys in the office would tease him.) Marianne Mooreâs tuneless drone was as eccentric as her inimitable art. When she spoke between poems, Moore mumbled in an 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 âThank you.â When Dylan Thomas read, I hovered above the auditorium seat as I heard him say Yeatsâs âLapis Lazuli.â 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 1953, when he died in New York, Thomas read his poems many times at many places, from New Yorkâs Poetry Center through dozens of western colleges. Frostâs eminence among poetry readers disappeared for a time.
In a question period I launched into my familiar rant about dead metaphors, asserting that when âI am glued to the chairâ equals âI am anchored to the spot,â we claim that a tugboat is Elmerâs Glue. This afternoon I was obsessed with clichĂ©s using disability metaphors: the crippled economy, blind ambition, deaf to entreaties, the paralysis of industry, and . . .
At the end I summed up my argument. Guileless, I said, âAll these metaphors are lame.â
Why was everyone laughing?
Dylan Thomasâs 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 Dylanâvast drunkenness, creative obscenity at parties, botched seductions, nightly comasâbut if people attended because of his celebrity, at least they were going to a poetry reading. Maybe the explosion of recitation 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 four 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 daughterâs. She recited a stanza from Tuesdayâs poet. âYouâve been reading her books!â I said. Oh, no, she said. Sarah remembered what the poet recited.
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 four a.m., which was apparently his daily wont. I didnât 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 six a.m. I stood on the sidewalk waiting for my escort to drive me to the next reading, the next party.
After a poet friend performed in Mississippi one winter, a man handed her a heavy box of typewriter paper, saying, âI want to share my poems with you.â When she glanced through âVerses of a Sergeant Major, Ret.,â she found it unreadable. Telling me about it, she asserted that âshareâ has become a verb of assault disguised as magnanimity. âUnless you read my poems, I will gouge your eyeballs out.â
Bert Hornback ran the Tuesday readings in Ann Arbor, supplementing the English departmentâs pittance by appealing to university administrators for discretionary funds. After ten years of weekly readings he burned out, and watched as the feckless department dropped to holding one reading a year. He decided to see what he could do by himself. On a January day in the eighties he rented the universityâs Rackham Auditorium, sold tickets for a joint poetry readingâ$5.50 each, 50 cents to Ticketmasterâand invited some friends to read: Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Seamus Heaneyâlong before Seamus went to Stockholm. On a Friday nightâagainst a home basketball game, against the Chicago SymphonyâBert 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 SROs when the fire department wasnât looking. Unexpected vanloads arrived from Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Michiganâs 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 $50.
A Dodge Festival in New Jersey was massive with poets, schoolteachers, and schoolkids. 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 poetâs face if the festival had not enlarged each visage on a screen like the Dallas Cowboysâ. For close-ups 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, last yearâs 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-seven more, but she didnât 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 enclosed an airline ticket with blank dates.
Itâs okay to be pleased when an audience loves you, or treats you as deathless, but you must not believe it. Someone says that my reading is the best she has ever heard; a man tells me that he has read me for thirty years and that I am a giant in American letters. I know Iâm not. Doubtless many praisers believe such extravagance when they say it, and it does no good to argue. I could tell them nasty things people have said about me in print. I could list the prizes I have not won and the anthologies from which I have been omitted. It is best to believe the praiser and dismiss the praise. Nine-tenths of the contemporary poets who win prizes and praises, who are applauded the most, who are treated everywhere like emperorsâor like statues of emperorsâwill go unread in thirty years. 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. âDo you know youâre any good?â His revised and printed response was formal, but in person he was abrupt: âHeavens no! Do you? Nobody intelligent knows if heâs any good.â
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. Gamely, 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 canât be heard in the tenth row. Itâs not only the debility of age. Oneâs 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. Thereâs a poem in which I moo like a cow. Cowsâ 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, âMm-mmm-mmmmm-mmmmmmmm-uggh wanchhh.â My friends say itâs the best line Iâve ever written.
After the group-talk of the question period comes the poet-and-one. People line up for signatures. Sometimes the seeker dictates a dedication, âSay, âWith love to Billy and his adorable wife Sheila who makes a great pound cake.ââ The signer should demur, or at least edit. Everyone in line must spell a name, or âFeliciaâ turns out to be âPhylysha.â (Once at a prep school a boy asked me to write, âFor Mom and Dad.â I said that my parents were dead. 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 hostâthe man who invited the poet to the campus, who picked her up at the airport, with whom she had a lengthy conversation, who will give her the check, who hands her a book to signâand she has no idea of his name.
Once I read at a college in Minnesota. As the dean led me up the platform, he told me something he had forgotten: I should read for only twenty-five minutes, instead of the contracted fifty, because after my presentation the students would elect this yearâs Homecoming Queen. The auditorium was packed. (At lunch afterward, English professors told me that they had entered the auditorium astonished: so many students for a poetry reading!) After I read, the applause was long. An audience applauds longest when it knows it has not been paying attention. A young woman wearing a ball gown and a gold crown ascended the platform and stood at the rostrum where I had stood. She was last yearâs Homecoming Queen, who would preside over this yearâs vote and coronation. Six girls in ball gowns hovered in the wings. âNow,â said the retiring Queen, ânow comes the moment youâve all been waiting for!â
The dean sitting beside me on the platform whispered in my ear, âShe doesnât mean it the way it sounds!â
Once I flew half a day to be picked up in Oklahoma for a reading the next morning in a corner of Arkansas, to read at chapelâa compulsory gathering of all studentsâat a small Christian college. Sometimes at such places a self-satisfied piety hovers over faculty and students like smog in Los Angeles. Sometimes these places are lively and responsive. Itâs hard to plan what to read, but I would never choose a poem to Ă©pater my hosts. This time, three people picked me upâa woman who chaired English, shy, who spoke little; a man who ran Humanities, thrilled by poetry and ample in literary knowledge; and the older woman who had brought me there, I think a dean of Honors, who was ebullient and talkative, funny and smart and warm. Because we had a long way to drive, we stopped outside the airport for supper before continuing. I was returning from the menâs room when I heard the dean address her companions: âWell, Ahâm going to tell him.â
As I sat, she turned to me and spoke sweetlyâsmiling broadly, saying what she needed to say, unashamed of her language: âDonald, if you say âfuckâ in chapel tomorrow, Ahâll get fahrd.â
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. Introducer and poet carried music stands into the wings. In London a reading was to begin at six 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.
âGracias,â we said. âGracias.â...