Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry by Donald Hall (English) Paper

Description: Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry by Donald Hall Donald Hall spent his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where as the doted-upon son of dramatically thwarted parents he first realized poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious. This book presents an account of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of his efforts at poetry writing. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Donald Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where as the doted-upon son of dramatically thwarted parents he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious." Hall eloquently writes of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writing—an endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful, formative days at Exeter are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard and in the post-war university scene at Oxford.After a failed first marriage Hall meets and marries Jane Kenyon, and the two poets return to Eagle Pond. Fittingly, the family home that loomed large in Hall's childhood is where he grows old, and at eighty learns finally "to live in the moment—as you have been told to do all your life.""Unpacking the Boxes" is a revelatory and tremendously poignant memoir of one man's life in poetry. Author Biography DONALD HALL, poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry, the Lenore Marshall Award, the 1990 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Review "Enchanting" - New York Times book review." Review Quote "Halls direct tone softens the extraordinariness of his life...When asked, at a Library of Congress dinner, the subject of his writing, he replies, Love, death, and New Hampshire." Excerpt from Book Domains At fourteen I decided to spend my life writing poetry, which is what I have done. My parents supported my desire, or at least did not attempt to dissuade me. My father hated his work, and it was his passion that I should do what I wanted to do. My mother was prevented by her gender and her era (born 1903) from exercising her intense aimless ambition, which settled on me. They worried how I would make a living at poetry, but would not pressure me to join the prosperous family business, the Brock-Hall Dairy in Connecticut, where my father added columns of figures from Monday into Saturday. Their support was affectionate, _passive, and generous. Beginning when I was a freshman in high school, they gave me for Christmas and birthdays the many books of poetry I listed for them. Why did I come to poetry at such an age? A few years ago in Nebraska, talking about my beginnings to high school students, I told about wanting to write because I loved Poe and Keats, later Eliot and Yeats. A skeptical boy asked, "Didnt you do it to pick up chicks?" "Yes!" I answered. "How could I forget?" In the absence of athletic skill, I found that poetry attracted at least the arty girls if not the cheerleaders. Ambition exists to provide avenue for the libido. This notion begets another, less flattering to the peacock male ego: Maybe all women are the one woman, and everything gets done to woo Mom. My mother died at ninety, in 1994, while my wife Jane Kenyon was sick. I emptied my mothers house, and a moving van left seventy or eighty boxes at our house and at a cottage we owned down the road. For a long time I could not open them. Three years after Jane died my assistant Kendel Currier moved into the cottage and helped me unpack the boxes. Most of the books would go to the library at the University of New Hampshire. From other boxes my childhood rose like a smoke of moths: a 78 of Connee Boswell singing "The Kerry Dance"; all the letters I ever wrote my father and mother; photographs of my young parents on the boardwalk at Atlantic City; my fathers colorless Kodachromes of Long Island Sound; snapshots of cats dead for fifty years; model airplanes and toy cars and a Boy Scout manual, a baseball, and a baseball glove with its oiled pocket chewed by mice. I felt the shock and exultation of exhumation. For weeks I unpacked the boxes, releasing the beginning decades of a life that was concluding its seventh: There were reams of manuscript, a thousand poems, novels I wrote at seventeen and nineteen; high school magazines with my poems and stories--the antique tracks of poetry and ambition. I found a high school theme called "The Wild Heifers." I found a verse play called The Folly of Existence. The unpacked boxes laid out my childhood and adolescence as if they assembled a model train, Lionel Standard Gauge, complete with a miniature village set beside the tracks, a hill for the train to tunnel through, a semaphore, mirror glass for a pond. I recollected earliest childhood, seeing a solemn child, three years old. He looks lonely, discontent, bored. At the height of summer he stands, wearing shorts with socks sliding down ankles over indistinct shoes, holding an indistinct toy beside a gray clapboard house, in heat and dust, under a sun that will not relent. The image resembles a black-and-white photograph, but I dont believe its a remembered snapshot. In family photographs Donnie is spiffed up with his hair combed and water-slicked, his arms stiff at his sides. Donnie was spiffed up and photographed many times: not merely an only child but an only grandchild. Perhaps I was discontent as the focus of the family lens, standing under a sun of singular attention and expectation. In childhood nothing happened. Born in 1928 as Mickey Mouse was--Thomas Hardy died that year--I breathed the air of the Great Depression. Men stood on street corners selling apples and pencils; tramps came to the back door--but my father had a secure job. My mother and father had married on September 10, 1927, and rented the second floor of a house on Coram Street near Lake Whitney in a neighborhood of Hamden, Connecticut, that developers called Spring Glen. Although my mother had been told that she was unlikely to bear a child, I was born a year and ten days after the wedding. When I was one, my parents moved, renting a small house two miles away in another part of Hamden called Whitneyville, originally the site of housing that Eli Whitney made for workers at his gun factory. (A dam at the end of Lake Whitney supplied waterpower.) By the time my father was born, in 1903, near Whitney Avenue, Whitneys village was becoming a New Haven suburb, and soon a trolley line ran four miles to the citys green. The family business thrived a few blocks from our Winette Street house. The Brock-Hall Dairys horses and wagons delivered milk seven days a week to the back doors of New Haven and its suburbs. Hamden was my fathers place, far from my mothers rural New Hampshire. Sometimes my grandmother Kate visited from the farm, a days journey by train. My grandfather Wesley came rarely; he needed to stay home and tend to the animals. The generations were close in age: My parents were twenty-five when I was born, and Kate was only twenty-five years older. Nothing happened. Some stories of childhood are tales that grown-ups repeated. I must have been three when I pulled the carrot, and my mother told everyone what Donnie did. She kept a vegetable garden at the bottom of the back yard, and every night before supper she took me with her to pull a fresh carrot for my supper. One evening I walked into the kitchen, a little early, holding my carrot of exemplary intelligence. Memory is stronger when it recalls transgression. I played with a neighbor boy while a repairman worked on the kitchen refrigerator, which had a white coil at its top. The repairmans dented Model T, cut down to a pickup, stood beside the kitchen door on two narrow strips of breaking-apart cement. My playmate and I lifted chunks of concrete onto the pickups bed. My mother, peeking out the screen door, issued a reprimand, and my friend and I set to undo the crime. I stood in the truck bed lifting chunks down to my accomplice, who wore an Indian headdress. I stood above the boy looking down on his head surrounded by feathers, and carefully dropped a large lump of concrete onto his skull. Oh, the bliss of targeting a head circled by feathers! He howled and ran home; I was sent to my room. Nothing happened. I was small when I wandered a block or two up Augur Street, and sideways into one of the short blocks that paralleled Winette, with no notion of how to get home. Desolation. A tender deliveryman in a red truck returned me to my distraught mother. When I was four I saw my first nude female body. The three-year-old daughter of friends of my parents, who also lived on Winette, came dashing naked out of her house as I walked up the street. I remember my wicked joy as I watched a flustered grandmother run from the house and grab Molly back into privacy. License and rapture began with this vision. My fathers parents lived nearby. After a blizzard, my grandfather Henry Hall, who loved horses, had his picture in the New Haven Register because he saddled up and delivered Brock-Hall milk to customers with babies. (He kept a saddle horse with the milk-truck workhorses in the dairys long stable.) Yet, Henry and Augusta were frightening figures to me--because they were frightening to my parents. Their house was always dark; it felt like held breath. When we visited them, often on Sundays, I picked up my parents anxiety. Would my mother be mocked for her New Hampshire accent? Would my father be found wanting, and be chewed by his fathers sarcasm? My father was first child of Henry the self-made man, known at the dairy as H.F., who left school after fifth grade and by hard, honest work built up a business. My father was raised to understand that he could never do anything right, and when he died at fifty-two still labored in vain for his fathers approval. On the other hand, my mother grew up eldest of three girls--she was forever the older sister; even in her eighties she was older sister to the universe--on a farm in rural New Hampshire, oil lamps and church Sundays and an outhouse with five graduated holes. Brought together by the chance of college, in their backgrounds my parents were diverse. Hamden was alien in its gentility and sophistication, and my mother felt intimidated by the manners and mores of Whitneyville and Spring Glen. If she pronounced "Coca-Cola" as "Coker-Coaler," she was teased. Her mother-in-law Augusta had the habit, at our house, of trailing a white-gloved finger across the ledge invisible on top of a doorjamb, then displaying a digit of dust. Doubtless Augusta, daughter of unschooled German immigrants, had needed to establish her own credentials. Nevertheless, my mother tried to do everything as it should be done. She embraced Hamdens suburban culture with the appearance of enthusiasm. When she rode the trolley into New Haven, to shop at Malleys or Shartenbergs, she wore a hat, a veil, and gloves. My father earned thirty-five dollars a week, yet they spent five of the dollars to hire a full-time maid. Aggie (for Agnes) OBrien, ten years younger than my parents, was not servile. She sat at the kitchen table with my mother, smoking cigarettes and chatting. I loved Aggie and cuddled with her, listening to her favorite radio programs. She agreed to wait, to marry me when I caught up with her. When my mother felt required to put Aggie in a black dress and black stockings with a white apron, like the French maid in the play, Aggie turned sullen. Details ISBN054724794X Author Donald Hall Short Title UNPACKING THE BOXES Publisher Mariner Books Language English ISBN-10 054724794X ISBN-13 9780547247946 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2009 Publication Date 2009-09-30 DEWEY B Pages 195 Imprint Houghton Mifflin Subtitle A Memoir of a Life in Poetry Place of Publication Boston Country of Publication United States Birth 1928 Residence Danbury, NH, US Audience General/Trade Imprint US Ecco Publisher US HarperCollins We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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