Donald Hall

I finally got around to reading a Paris Review interview with Donald Hall, which I came across on the magazine's web site and bookmarked several months ago. The interview is from 1991 (so I'm further behind on my reading than I thought), but parts of the interview speak to what I've been pondering lately. I'm particularly interested in what Hall had to say about his process:

...I begin with a loose association of images, a scene, and a sense that somewhere in this material is something I don’t yet understand that wants to become a poem. I write out first drafts in prosaic language—flat, no excitement. Then very slowly, over hundreds of drafts, I begin to discover and exploit connections—between words, between images. Looking at the poem on the five-hundredth day, I will take out one word and put in another. Three days later I will discover that the new word connects with another word that joined the manuscript a year back.

Hall, a devoted reviser (hundreds of drafts!), also says:

First drafts of anything are difficult for me. I prefer revising, rewriting. I’m not the kind of writer like Richard Wilbur or Thomas Mann who finishes one segment before going on to another. Wilbur finishes the first line before he starts the second. I lack the ability to judge myself except over many drafts and usually over years. Revising, I go through a whole manuscript over and over and over. Some short prose pieces I’ve rewritten fifteen or twenty times; poems get up to two hundred fifty or three hundred drafts. I don’t recommend it, but for me it seems necessary. And I do more drafts as I get older.

And:

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine. Why do I pick this scene or image? Within the action of kicking the leaves something was weighted, freighted, heavy with feeling—and because I kept writing, kept going back to the poem, eventually the under-feeling that unified the detail came forward in the poem. The process is discovering by revision, uncovering by persistence.

Yes! I sometimes think there's an overemphasis on creation and not enough attention to revision, which is just as magical, if not more so.

Hall also talked about the passage of time and its effect on him as a poet:

I’m more patient now. When I was in my twenties, I wanted to write many poems. I had goals; when I reached them, they turned out to be not worth reaching. When you begin, you think that if you could just publish a few poems, you’d reach your desire; then if you could publish in a good magazine; then if you could publish a book; then . . . When you’ve done these things you haven’t done anything. The desire must be, not to write another dozen poems, but to write something as good as the poems that originally brought you to love the art. It’s the only sensible reason for writing poems. You’ve got to keep your eye on what you care about: to write a poem that stands up with Walt Whitman or Andrew Marvell.

Okay, so I'm still impatient and I still desire publication of my book. However, there are moments of simplicity when the outside world (its charms and lures, its criticism and cold shoulder, its fleeting praise) falls away and I'm only concerned with the work at hand, with writing a poem that can stand up.