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Poetry readings: Distressed Haiku

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Poetry readings: Her Garden
Donald Hall Poet
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Her Garden. Jane was a great gardener, and this is another poem lamenting her.

 I let her garden go.

                let it go, let it go

    How can I watch the hummingbird

           Hover to sip

           With its beak's tip

The purple bee balm — whirring as we heard

           It years ago?

 

        The weeds rise rank and thick

                let it go, let it go

    Where annuals grew and burdock grows,

           Where standing she

           At once could see

The peony, the lily, and the rose

           Rise over brick

 

        She'd laid in patterns. Moss

                let it go, let it go

    Turns the bricks green, softening them

           By the gray rocks

           Where hollyhocks

That lofted while she lived, stem by tall stem,

           blossom with loss.

The 14th US Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018) was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, then earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1951 and a BLitt, from Oxford in 1953. He published many essays and anthologies of both poetry and prose including String too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Without: Poems, and Ox-Cart Man, a children's book which won the Caldecott Medal. Hall was editor of the magazine Oxford Poetry, literary editor of Isis, editor of New Poems, and poetry editor of The Paris Review. He won many awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Robert Frost Medal. At the end of his first Oxford year, he also won the university's Newdigate Prize, awarded for his poem Exile.

Listeners: Kendel Currier

Kendel Currier started working for Donald Hall in August of 1994 as his correspondence typist. Later she took on his manuscript typing as well, and in October of 1998 moved 100 meters down the road from Donald and became his personal assistant, adding many various new tasks to her work. As well as working for Donald for the last 10 and-a-half years, Donald Hall and Kendel Currier share a set of great (or for Kendel great-great) grandparents, making them distant cousins and part of a similar New Hampshire heritage.

Tags: Jane Kenyon

Duration: 1 minute, 5 seconds

Date story recorded: January 2005

Date story went live: 24 January 2008