Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry

Product Description

Donald Hall’s remarkable life in poetry — a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 — comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.

Hall’s invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was “secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious,” and ends with what he calls “the planet of antiquity,” a time of life dramatically punctuated by his appointment as poet laureate of the United States.
Hall writes eloquently 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, where he was sent like a naive lamb to a high WASP academic slaughter, are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard. Here he rubs elbows with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Edward Gorey, and begins lifelong friendships with Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, and George Plimpton. After Harvard, Hall is off to Oxford, where the high spirits and rampant poetry careerism of the postwar university scene are brilliantly captured.
At eighty, Hall is as painstakingly honest about his failures and low points as a poet, writer, lover, and father as he is about his successes, making Unpacking the Boxes — his first book since being named poet laureate — both revelatory and tremendously poignant.

About the Author

DONALD HALL (1928-2018) served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president.

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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, “Didn’t 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 mother’s 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 father’s colorless Kodachromes of Long Island Sound; snapshots of cats dead for fifty years; model airplanes and toy c