Donald Hall

In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it. ”

Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad. ”

After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry. ”

When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being. ”

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. ”