The Vibrant Channeled Creator

illustrator: Marcin Piwowarski

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dream with the moon and

grow up with the sun-spread the

light on real talents!

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Donald Hall

born in Hamden, Connecticut (1928), who once said, “Every good poet in the world has written only a few terrific poems.”
At 89 years old, he longer writes poetry. “Not enough testosterone,” he says. Instead, he’s turned to prose: his last book is collection called Essays After Eighty (2014). Starting the book was simple. He said, “One day I looked out the window and began writing about being an old man looking out the window at the year going by.”
Hall was educated at Exeter, where he played softball with visiting poet Robert Frost, whom Hall remembers as “a spoiled brat,” even though Frost was 79 years old at the time. It was at Exeter that Donald Hall decided to become a writer. He’d been enamored of horror movies as a kid, which led him to reading Edgar Allan Poe, and trying to write like Poe, but at 14, he befriended some Yale students who kept mentioning a poet named T.S. Eliot. He says: “I saved up my allowance and bought the little blue, cloth-covered collected Eliot for two dollars and fifty cents and I was off. I decided that I would be a poet for the rest of my life and started by working at poems for an hour or two every day after school. I never stopped.”
Donald Hall’s books of poetry include Exiles and Marriages (1955), The Yellow Room (1971), Kicking the Leaves (1978), The One Day (1988), and Old and New Poems (1990). He’s a former U.S. poet laureate.