Brief Summary: Hall stresses poetry's form over poetry's message and emphasizes the craft of poetry, noting that he takes two to four years to finish a poem. He says that poems are never about anything, that they embody feelings and the release of the poet from the control of civilization; thus, the importance of pre-rational thinking and dreams to poets. Hall regrets omitting Ginsberg from the 1962 edition of Contemporary American Poetry.

Work(s) Discussed:

• "Small Bone Bodies,"
• the essay "An Ethic of Clarity"

Work(s) Read:

• "The Man in the Dead Machine"
• "Reclining Figure"

Writers mentioned:

• Robert Bly
• Robert Graves
• LawrenceFerlinghetti
• Gary Snyder
• W. B. Yeats
• William Carlos Williams
• Robert Creeley
• Richard Wilbur
• Donald Justice
• Robert Frost
• Ernest Hemingway
• Ezra Pound
• George Orwell
• William Wordsworth
• William Stafford
• RichardEberhart
• Thomas Hardy
• W. D. Snodgras

I try to talk about the 'Peas Porridge Hot' part of John Donne.

-- Donald Hall

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