Susan Jackson

A 144-acre farm in rural New Hampshire hardly seems like the place for a publicity hub handling interview requests from some of the nation’s largest media outlets, but it is there on Eagle Pond Farm that Houghton Mifflin author Donald Hall is doing just that. A celebrated poet for more than sixty years, Hall can now add Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, or simply Poet Laureate, to his list of accomplishments. The seventy-seven-year-old New Hampshire writer will serve as the country’s fourteenth poet laureate when his duties begin this fall, and because of it he is receiving quite a bit of attention.

The position of poet laureate was created to raise the national consciousness of and enhance appreciation for the reading and writing of poetry. Hall hopes to continue the tradition of the last several laureates and extend poetry’s reach to a wider audience. The sometimes outspoken writer is interested in the possibility of a poetry channel on satellite radio or perhaps on cable television. This is an interesting choice for a man who lives and writes in a rural farmhouse without the aid of a computer or even a typewriter.

Eagle Pond Farm has been in Hall’s family for several generations and it was there that at age twelve, the poet began practicing his craft. At sixteen, he attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont as a fellow. Then, after studying at Harvard College and Oxford University, Hall went on to teach at the University of Michigan.

Toward the end of his eighteen years at Michigan, Hall met Jane Kenyon, then a student who would later become his wife and an accomplished poet in her own right. After marrying, Hall left his tenure and he and Kenyon moved to Eagle Pond Farm to take up the uncertain life of freelancing. They lived and wrote together for twenty years until Kenyon’s tragic passing in 1995 after battling with leukemia. Ironically, they had initially put off marrying for fear that Hall, nineteen years older than Kenyon, would leave her as a young widow.

Kenyon’s death deeply affected Hall and its presence in his writing is clear. His 2005 novel, The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, is an intimate look into their twenty-three-year marriage that further imparts the sense of loss felt in Without, an earlier book of poetry reflecting Hall’s grief.

Hall’s most recent work, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, chronicles more than two hundred poems from his lengthy career. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington noted that the new laureate is “one of America’s most distinctive and respected literary figures. For more than fifty years, he has written beautiful poetry on a wide variety of subjects that are often distinctly American and conveyed with passion.” The array of those subjects is featured in this collection, from details of his life on Eagle Pond Farm, to his marriage, and even his love of baseball.

As former five-year poet laureate of New Hampshire with thirty-five books of poetry and prose, children’s books, and plays to his record, Donald Hall is certainly a highly qualified man of letters. When he begins his duties as the nation’s laureate, he will travel to his Washington, D.C., post at the Library of Congress several times a year, and make appearances around the country. However, even with the increased attention on Hall’s life and work and the $35,000 stipend given to laureates, it is likely that much of the business of his new position will still be arranged through that unlikely media hub nestled within the walls of an 1803 New Hampshire farmhouse.