A Carnival of Losses by Donald Hall

Author:Donald Hall [Hall, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

E. E. Cummings

Only once did I lay eyes on E. E. Cummings. (People are cute and write “e. e. cummings,” but the signature printed on his Collected Poems is “E. E. Cummings.”) He was judging an undergraduate poetry contest, listening to half a dozen Ivy League competitors, and his face never looked as if he heard anything. He was sullen, unsmiling, dour—possibly because he was judging an undergraduate poetry contest.

Tom Clark and the Lower East Side

Tom Clark was the best student I ever had. As a senior at the University of Michigan he wrote a forty-four-page paper about the structure of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, replete with Chinese characters—Tom’s back hurt from carrying Chinese dictionaries—and Greek, neatly ballpointed. What he wrote was not the last word—the last word will never be spoken—but his paper went further into Pound’s structure of improvisation than anyone else had done.

Fifty years later, Tom’s poems are strong, short, plain, and never worked-over. After Ted Berrigan died, Tom wrote a brief elegy which I praised. Tom told me it was “the usual fifteen-second poem.” Tom has written many books of poems, many prose books about baseball. In 2006 Coffee House Press published a three-hundred-page selection called Light and Shade, beginning with a poem I have loved forever.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.