A Poet Has Died
One of the first news items of the day was that Donald Hall has passed. The poet died on Saturday at his home in New Hampshire. He will be missed by many. If you are interested here is the NY Times ARTICLE on his life and work.
A poem by Donald Hall:
Affirmation
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
Poetry is language’s excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.
Poetry is the singular vibration of a voice. This vibration can create resonances, and resonances may produce common space….
This place we don’t know is the place that we are looking for, in a social environment that has been impoverished by social precariousness, in a landscape that has been deserted. It is a place that will be able to warm the sensible sphere that has been deprived of the joy of singularity.
—excerpt Franco “Bifo” Bernardi, The Uprising, On Poetry and Finance
