by Donald Hall
There used to be a lending library in every drugstore. Also you could buy a “drugstore paperback”—John Steinbeck or Agatha Christie or Pearl Buck—for a quarter or half a buck or a dollar, depending on the decade. You could even find an anthology of poetry. After I returned from Oxford to Connecticut, I found an Oscar Williams anthology in a corner drugstore, maybe The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse. If it was sweet and fitting to find poems next to a banana split, it was sweeter to find in a drugstore paperback poetry anthology my poem “Exile,” which had won Oxford’s Newdigate Prize. The canny anthologist had included the only young poet ever promoted by a Time photograph of “Yanks at Oxford.”
There were even literary quarterlies among the drugstore paperbacks, unavailable at your local bookstore—when there used to be local bookstores. Arabel Porter edited New American Writing’s semiannual unquarterly collection of highbrow fiction and poetry. Today, in the twenty-first century, in the MFA era, there are more poets, more poetry magazines, more poetry publishers, more books of poems—and no corner drugstores, no drugstore paperbacks, no book reviews, no bookstores, and no anthologies. We do find David Lehman’s essential annual, The Best American Poetry, an anthology that gives us new poems but never an assemblage of old ones. The same editor put together his monumental Oxford Book of American Poetry, 218 poets in 1,136 pages, from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first—excellent if unwieldy, useful especially if you sit at a table in a library. (There used to be libraries.) Garrison Keillor published Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times, collections as modest as their titles—one man’s scrapbooks of poems he likes. Late in the twentieth century only textbooks provided general anthologies. (There used to be textbooks.)
Back before literary textbooks, a century ago when I was young, Louis Untermeyer’s anthologies sold in bookstores and weighed down a bookshelf. I own a double Untermeyer volume, early 1940s: Modern American Poetry bound together with Modern British Poetry, 1,218 pages. After seventy years almost every poet included, T. S. Eliot excepted, has been forgotten. Another Untermeyer anthology dominated my adolescence as much as cheerleaders did. A Treasury of Great Poems is 1,288 pages, from anonymous ballads and songs past Chaucer and Tennyson to W. H. Auden. When I was fourteen I found there Thomas Wyatt’s sixteenth-century “They flee from me that sometime did me seek,” which I’ve read or consulted every season of my life. It showed the earliest embodiment I’d seen of poetry’s continuous assertion that opposites are identical. Untermeyer printed not Wyatt’s version but Tottel’s, which regularized Wyatt’s meter; growing up, I de-Tottel’d it. For each of his poets, Untermeyer wrote an introduction, frequently counterfactual but intriguing to a high school boy manic about poets and poetry. Chidiock Tichborne wrote this poem the night before his head was chopped off! Hart Crane drowned himself jumping off a merchant ship! And according to Untermeyer, Crane suffered from “sexual irregularities.” Attracted by self-murder and sexual irregularities, I read Crane’s complex and glorious lines, which sent me wading deep into dark language.
Back in the 1940s, Oscar Williams published hardbound anthologies called A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, A Little Treasury of Great Poetry, and A Little Treasury of American Poetry. Modern was my favorite, small in its dimensions but containing 668 pages of poems. Going through it again, seventy-two years after publication, I ride on the winds of Gerard Manley Hopkins through an unchronological poetic universe to W. H. Auden. Reading it this morning, I find poems I had loved but forgotten, by poets I had loved but forgotten. The first two pages of the table of contents list Delmore Schwartz, Vernon Watkins, George Barker, Conrad Aiken, Léonie Adams, and W. R. Rodgers. If you had claimed in 1941 that Elinor Wylie would be forgotten in the twenty-first century, no one would have believed you. Again and again, rereading this book with my rollator beside me, I have looked at a poem (the author’s identity concealed until the poem concluded on the next page) and the maker’s name has hurtled into my head, a poet I hadn’t recalled in a decade. Dunstan Thompson! Henry Treece! It is sad and amazing that this small book contains so many beauties that are so forgotten. Of course all of us will be forgotten.
Anthologies are wonderful, anthologists maybe not. Louis Untermeyer’s own poems appear in his anthologies, as repellent as the nearby poems by his wife Jean Starr Untermeyer. In turn, the Little Treasury of Modern Poetry prints nine bad poems by Oscar Williams and four by his wife Gene Derwood. (William Carlos Williams gets two.) At the back of this Treasury, and on the covers of his drugstore paperbacks, Williams printed oval photographs of his poets, sixty-two at the back of the Modern. Would you care to guess whose portrait ends that book? Or whose portrait resides next to Homer’s on the cover of a paperback? Years ago I met both anthologists. In 1945 at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Louis Untermeyer spoke with me about my tenth-grade poems, clearly without having looked at them. Lucky him. Also at Bread Loaf Robert Frost talked of universities—he attended Dartmouth and quit, he attended Harvard and quit—and said, “I guess I feel about colleges the way Louis feels about women.” Untermeyer married Jean Starr twice, one or two other folks in between. There’s an Oscar Williams story I’ve told before which I must tell again. For reasons too long to recount, once at a dinner party I had to introduce him to T. S. Eliot. Startled but witty as always, Eliot said, “I recognize you from your photographs.” Without irony Williams burbled that he recognized Eliot too.
Why aren’t there more anthologies these days? Maybe there are no drugstore paperbacks because there are no drugstores, but why are there no new anthologies that Amazon could deliver in forty-eight hours? Years ago, a publisher commissioned me to do an anthology of American contemporaries, granting me $1,000 for permissions. Portions of that sum garnered me Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Frank O’Hara, W. S. Merwin—but John Berryman asked for $800 and I had to leave him out. There are no anthologies these days partly because publishers’ permissions departments ask $800 for each poem. What better device might there be to sell poetry than to provide a sample? Publishers haven’t noticed.
With two other poets of my generation I edited an anthology in the 1950s that became the Academic Anthology, which was contradicted and overwhelmed by Donald Allen’s later assemblage from the Beat Generation. Both books were bad, ours bad in a maddeningly conventional or old-fashioned manner. For a few years there appeared to be a civil war among American poets. In due course, the Academics and the Beats dropped their weapons and became friends. One Ann Arbor morning in the sixties I woke to find an ecumenical piece of paper wedged into the mail slot of my front door. Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, failing to wake me up, had improvised small poems and inscribed them to me, one on each side of a used envelope. Ten years later, when Allen had finished writing poems—to become the editor, librarian, and archivist of himself—he and I went out for a beer after I did a New York reading. Two elderly poets drank a quiet IPA together. Shortly after Jane died I saw him last, at a Dartmouth dinner to celebrate Richard Eberhart’s ninetieth birthday. I talked without pause about Jane Kenyon’s death—for five years I talked about nothing else—and the Buddhist Allen calmly told me that death didn’t matter.
Back in the sixties, ten years after the Academic Anthology, I wanted to make a decent and catholic anthology of new American poets—as a corrective, and in order to bring good news to a large, international audience. I thought of Penguin Books, independent and enormous, which produced great literature in paperback not for drugstores but for everybody in creation. I proposed Contemporary American Poetry, which contained twenty-four poets, including Lowell, Wilbur, Dickey, Snodgrass, Rich, James Wright, Creeley, Levertov, Duncan, Ashbery, and Snyder. It did not include Donald Hall. It sold not only in England and America but in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, and it brought American poetry to the huge Anglophone middle class of India. (Twenty years later, when Jane and I traveled to India, our listeners knew American poetry by way of the Peng
uin.) Because English is a lingua franca, American poetry reached Latvia, Japan, Finland, Malaysia, and Texas. After eight printings Penguin asked me to do a second edition. With Jasper Johns’s iconic Stars and Stripes on the cover, the second edition ran through nine more printings, adding Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton—why not Louise Glück, why not Ellen Bryant Voigt?—Tom Clark, Etheridge Knight, Ron Padgett, and one poet too many. Yes.
The Penguin was my last attempt to atone for my first attempt. Later, in another country, I continued or extended the work of a man who had made the most consequent British anthology since Tottel’s Miscellany. In England in 1936 Michael Roberts published—only fourteen years after “The Waste Land” and Ulysses—The Faber Book of Modern Verse. Readers in the United Kingdom had never heard of modernism except in philistine journalistic ridicule, and Roberts’s book made a persuasive and percussive introduction to magnificent modern poetry. It began with Hopkins and Yeats and extended past Eliot and Pound to Auden and Dylan Thomas. (Roberts omitted Thomas Hardy, born in 1840.) At T. S. Eliot’s behest, I made a revised edition of Roberts’s Faber book. I added Geoffrey Hill, Thom Gunn, and Ted Hughes, together with other new English poets, and introduced to England the best modern Americans, from William Carlos Williams to Sylvia Plath. (I omitted Donald Hall. Eliot commended my discretion.) The book did well, even without the help of drugstores. John Berryman had learned modern poetry from the original Roberts when he was young in England. In Minneapolis a year before his suicide Berryman invited me to his flat because I had used his poems in the new edition. In Great Britain itself, my altered Faber book brought new poets to a new audience the way the original Roberts did. It even reached rural Northern Ireland and—he tells me happily—Paul Muldoon.
The Last Poem
Politics has clogged the air of my life. of course I vote, with my New Hampshire grandfather, for Democrats, or maybe I merely vote against Republicans. Only once did Wesley Wells neglect to vote Democratic: when the national party ran Al Smith for president. If a Catholic were president, it was common knowledge, the pope would occupy a wing of the White House. Only one time I didn’t vote. I couldn’t vote for Hubert Humphrey because he favored LBJ’s Vietnam War. I put Nixon in the White House.
The only time I’ve exposed my politics in a newspaper was in 2014. Back in 2010, a Massachusetts Republican named Scott Brown beat a complacent Democrat in a special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate after Kennedy died. Two years later, when the seat came up in the next scheduled contest, Brown lost to Elizabeth Warren, the engagingly liberal Democrat. Two years later, in 2014, Scott Brown moved his residence to New Hampshire and ran for the Senate against an incumbent Democratic woman. He was handsome, opportunistic, rich, corrupt, moronic, and drove a cosmetic pickup truck. That year was the Republicans’ Ebola Landslide. President Obama had assured the people that there would be no Ebola outbreak in the United States, and then to prove him wrong a West African man with Ebola flew to Houston and died. Scott Brown predicted that hordes of Mexican jihadists would crawl into Texas, their prayer rugs saturated with Ebola virus. He lost the election anyway. I take credit because of my last poem, three lines I contributed to my local daily:
Get out of town,
You featherheaded carpetbagging Wall St. clown,
Scott Brown!
The Boston Globe reprinted it. Somebody put it on the Internet and it went bacterial.
Anonymous
Linda remembers names the way Bill Clinton does, although she does not plan to run for public office. Neither do I, which is a good thing, because I cannot remember names. Jane was as bad as I am. In Ann Arbor she decided never again to read her poems and sign books in our local bookstore, because one day she looked up from the line and saw her best friend from kindergarten, with whom she had lunch the week before, and had no idea of her name. I understood. Many’s the time, after reading my poems, I’ve watched the line as a familiar face moved closer and closer, nameless, and felt my brain flutter into panic. Of course I apologized to my friend. “It’s ridiculous! I can’t believe it! How can I be so stupid . . . !” Stunned, my friend repeated his name, and maybe how to spell it. Each time it happened, things between us were never quite the same.
Jane and I lived in an old Ann Arbor farmhouse. Every weekend we were invited to six or seven cocktail parties. During my first marriage I went to all of them. Jane and I went to one, maybe two. (At the others our absence wasn’t noticed, the cigarette smoke was so thick.) To reciprocate, Jane and I assembled and executed one big cocktail party a year. It began at 6 p.m. on a Friday or Saturday. Our guests arrived around 7. (Some came as late as 10, after attending two or three other parties.) For us, it was terror and humiliation. When anybody opened the front door of 1715 South University Avenue, he or she faced a wall with portals left and right. To the left, one entered a long living room, which jogged to the right into the dining room and then to the kitchen at the back of the house. From the right-hand portal, people walked through my long, narrow workroom, then to the dining room and the kitchen. When friends coming to our party knocked at the front door, immediately Jane and I forgot their names. Each of us panicked about introductions, and each of us ran away to hide ourselves. Our guests opened the door, entered, and introduced themselves to one another as Jane and I fled by opposite routes back to the kitchen, where we bumped into each other. The circle of shame.
My handicap gets worse with old age. Linda tries to protect me. As we enter a restaurant and approach someone familiar, she whispers a name in my ear. (It has to be my good ear.) It’s not Alzheimer’s, not yet. My failure began early. In the cradle at two I could not remember my mother’s name. “Gramma? Dad? Aunt Fred?”
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
Last night I went to bed at 10:30 and got up at 7, a good night’s sleep. During the night I woke three times, but I didn’t lie there twitching. When I woke I looked at the clock’s illuminated hour, turned on my reading light, took a sip of water, stood up to piss in a bottle, took another sip of water, read a paragraph in The Economist, and went back to sleep. Each waking interlude—at 11:37 p.m., 2:12 a.m., and in the weak August light of 5:15—took four and three-quarters minutes. I follow this script seven nights a week, sometimes two wake-ups with pees and a page, sometimes four wake-ups, and once I didn’t wake until 8 a.m. I feel fine, sip some coffee, smoke an electronic cigarette, eat breakfast, read the paper, do an eighty-seventh revision, an eighty-eighth . . .
I forgot to say that at bedtime I take a pill. Many times in my life I’ve stayed awake all night even though I’ve taken a pill. Living in Ann Arbor in the 1960s, between marriages, I enjoyed the then-popular diet of Dexedrine and Nembutal. Between medications I drank bourbon, Heaven Hill at $2.50 a bottle, because I was born in 1928. (My students, born twenty years later, smoked dope and tripped on acid.) I drank whiskey because I was depressed, and whiskey made sure I stayed depressed. When the poet Ted Berrigan stole my speed, my pal the doctor scratched me another prescription.
After I married Jane, I didn’t have trouble sleeping. Jane went to sleep before I did and woke later in the morning. I read for two hours after she closed her eyes, and during the night I got up to scoop ashes from the cast-iron stove, to replace them with logs and leave the drafts shut tight. At 5 a.m. I got up again, opened the drafts, and napped until the house hotted up. I hung my nightshirt behind the stove, unhung my daytime blue jeans, made coffee, and drove to get the paper at Bob Thornley’s general store. Back home I carried a cup of coffee to Jane, looked at the paper, then scratched away in my workroom, trying to write poems. Jane walked Gus the dog to wake herself up. When she returned to the house, she was still yawning. I interrupted my work to tell her either “I am immeasurably great” or “Everything I write is shit.” She understood and climbed the stairs to her workroom.
When she was sick I slept surprisingly well. After she died I dreamed that she left me for another man, and I we
nt back to sleeping pills. Even with pills sometimes I couldn’t sleep. Then I discovered that sleeping pills worked better if I drank port just before I took them. When I woke in the night I drank more port. Back then I smoked Pall Malls, and once I almost burned the house down. I fell down regularly for the Wilmot Volunteer Fire Department to pick me up. So I checked into the New London Hospital for eight days. As I was going home a nurse practitioner stood stiffly before me and spoke the injunction, “Never drink booze with sleeping pills at bedtime!” She didn’t say “booze.” I think my son Andrew—sixty years old by this time—wrote the script. It was Andrew who told me not to walk around the house when I woke up. With a plastic piss bottle I had almost everything I needed. I added reading a paragraph from The Economist.
When I wake during the night it is always a dream that wakes me. Sometimes I dream that I’m awake. Sometimes I dream that I’m asleep. Often it’s a sepia-colored nightmare in which a body hurtles to the floor, someone I know but I never remember the name. Last night my friend Caroline Finkelstein crashed into the bedroom screaming, “Teddy killed himself!” Quickly I understood that Caroline had not burst into my bedroom. She was asleep beside Bill outside Atlanta. “Teddy” was not his name, but I knew exactly who he was: an execrable poet, an acquaintance of Caroline’s. Once a brainless publisher did a book of his poems. Nobody else ever published him, which was why he killed himself.
The next night in bed I thought of writing an essay about sleeping. At 3:21 a.m. I woke from a dream about writing an essay about sleeping. I turned on the light, drank a sip of water, and read The Economist for two and a quarter minutes. I could not get back to sleep because I kept thinking about writing an essay about sleeping. I needed to take notes. I found a piece of paper on the table beside me but I didn’t have anything to write with. Anyway, tomorrow I would not have been able to read my handwriting. I turned off the light and kept planning my essay. I couldn’t stop planning so I got out of bed exhausted at 4:27 a.m. and started “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” which I changed to “A Good Night’s Sleep.” Should I change it back?