Donald Hall

By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press. ”

I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. ”

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings. ”

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. ”

I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life. ”

For better or worse, poetry is my life. ”

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. ”

Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye. ”

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less. ”

Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working. ”