Librarian of Congress Appoints Donald Hall Poet Laureate

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has announced the appointment of Donald Hall to be the Library’s 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

Hall will take up his duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary series in October with a reading of his work. He will also be a featured speaker at the Library of Congress National Book Festival poetry pavilion on Saturday, Sept. 30, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Hall succeeds Ted Kooser as Poet Laureate and joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including most recently Louise Gl?ck, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Rita Dove.

On making the appointment, Billington said, “Donald Hall is one of America’s most distinctive and respected literary figures. For more than 50 years, he has written beautiful poetry on a wide variety of subjects that are often distinctly American and conveyed with passion.”

Hall has published 15 books of poetry, beginning with “Exiles and Marriages” in 1955. Earlier this year, he brought out “White Apples and the Taste of Stone” (Houghton Mifflin), a selection of poems 1946-2006. In 2005 he published “The Best Day The Worst Day,” a memoir of his marriage to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. Among his children’s books, “Ox-Cart Man” won the Caldecott Medal. Among his many books of prose are his essays on poetry, “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day” (2003).

For his poems he has received the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry. He has also received two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters.

Hall was born in Connecticut in 1928. He was educated at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford universities and taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. For the past 30 years he has lived on an old family farm in rural New Hampshire, in the house where his grandmother and his mother were born. He has two children and five grandchildren.

Dana Gioia, himself a poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, characterized Hall’s selection as “long-overdue recognition for one of America’s greatest and most-admired men of letters.”

Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate, in an April 16, 2006, Washington Post review of Hall’s latest work, “White Apples and the Taste of Stone,” said, “Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines.”
Background of the Laureateship

The Library keeps to a minimum the specific duties required of the Poet Laureate in order to permit incumbents to work on their own projects while at the Library. Each brings a new emphasis to the position. Allen Tate (1943-44), for example, served as editor of the Library’s publication of that period, The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, during his tenure and edited the compilation “Sixty American Poets, 1896-1944.” Some consultants have suggested and chaired literary festivals and conferences; others have spoken in a number of schools and universities and received the public in the Poetry Room.

Increasingly in recent years, the incumbents have sought to find new ways to broaden the role of poetry in our national life. Maxine Kumin initiated a popular women’s series of poetry workshops at the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center. Gwendolyn Brooks met with groups of elementary school children to encourage them to write poetry. Howard Nemerov conducted seminars at the Library for high school English classes. Most incumbents have furthered the development of the Library’s Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. Joseph Brodsky initiated the idea of providing poetry in public places—supermarkets, hotels, airports and hospitals.

Rita Dove brought a program of poetry and jazz to the Library’s literary series, along with a reading by young Crow Indian poets and a two-day conference titled “Oil on the Waters: The Black Diaspora,” featuring panel discussions, readings and music.

Robert Hass sponsored a major conference on nature writing called “Watershed,” which continues today as a national poetry competition for elementary and high school students, titled “River of Words.” Robert Pinsky initiated his Favorite Poem Project, which energized a nation of poetry readers to share their favorite poems in readings across the country and in audio and video recordings. Billy Collins instituted the Web site Poetry180 (www.loc.gov/poetry/180), designed to bring a poem a day into high school classrooms. Most recently, Ted Kooser created a free weekly newspaper column (www.americanlifeinpoetry.org) that features a brief poem by a contemporary American poet and an introduction to the poem by Kooser.