[lith] POETS TOGETHER: SHARED LIVES: The Poetry of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon (Nordamerikanische Literaturen und Kulturen) - Einzelansicht

This course will examine the work of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon.  Hall was born in 1928.  He published his first book of poems in 1955, and has published fourteen books of poems since then, as well as more than twenty-five books of fiction and essays.  Kenyon was born in 1948, and died in 1995.  She published four collections of poems between 1978 and 1993.  Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils were published after her death.

Hall’s generation of American poets included James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Kizer, Louis Simpson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and a dozen others.  His house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was an intellectual and creative focus—Hall’s meeting hall, it could have been called--for those poets from 1958 until 1974.

Hall’s 1964 Penguin anthology of New American Poetry, was the most important book of its kind and its time.  It introduced his generation to a wide and appreciative audience.  He was a brilliant teacher, and a wonderful mentor for numerous younger poets and fiction-writers during his years in Ann Arbor. Among them were Gregory Orr, Richard Ford, Joyce Pesserof, Lawrence Rabb, and Jane Kenyon.

In 1972 Hall and Kenyon married, and in 1994 they left Ann Arbor for New Hampshire, where Hall still lives—in his great- grandparents’ house at Eagle Pond Farm.

We will begin with a few poems by Hall’s 1950s and 1960s contemporaries, and then spend the first four weeks of the term reading Halls poems from 1955 to 1995.  Then we will spend eight weeks reading Kenyon’s  poems.  Then we will finish with Hall’s poems since 1995.

Expectations for the course are serious reading—and reading aloud.  (Hall says poems are “a banquet in the mouth.)  We will also listen to both Hall and Kenyon read their poems.  You will write “scribbles” for the last ten or fifteen minutes of each class.  And I will expect good, interesting, and well-written essays.

Our texts will be Donald Hall, White Apples and the Taste of Stone:  Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Mariner Books), and Jane Kenyon, Collected Poems  (Graywolf Press).

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