Donald Hall

Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons.

Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.

I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.

Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.

In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut - during the school time of year - but I preferred it in New Hampshire. I preferred the culture, the landscape, the relative solitude. I've always loved it.

My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down.

Obviously, death is ahead of me. I don't look forward to dying one little bit. But, you know, I simply don't worry about it because it's going to happen to me as it does to anybody.