PBS高端访谈:缅怀诗人唐纳德·霍尔（在线收听）

JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, Jeffrey Brown remembers renowned writer Donald Hall, widely considered one of the greatest poets of his generation.

JEFFREY BROWN: In 1975, Donald Hall came to live on the small Wilmot, New Hampshire, farm he'd visited as a boy, when his grandparents lived here. He told me of it when I visited in 2006.

DONALD HALL, Poet: I'm incredibly lucky. I fell in love with this place when I was 8 or 10, and loved the people in it, and loved the culture around it, loved the hills and valleys, loved the old houses, like this one, white with green shutters. And when I came back, I decided I had been writing about New Hampshire from a distance so much. Now that I was back in New Hampshire, I wouldn't write about it anymore. Quite the reverse. I went through everything. I wrote about all the old farm animals. I wrote about the hills. Everything about it stimulated me, and I had perhaps the most prolific year of my life when I first came back.

JEFFREY BROWN: There's a poem called Mount Kearsarge.

DONALD HALL: Mount Kearsarge. Great blue mountain, ghosts. I look at you from the porch of the farmhouse where I watched you all summer as a boy. Steep sides, narrow flat patch on top. You are clear to me, like the memory of one day.

JEFFREY BROWN: Two of his best-known books, Without and The Painted Bed, are about his most painful subject, the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, who died here of leukemia at age 47. Was that hard to do, or was that helpful?

DONALD HALL: It was helpful in the extreme. I took to writing her letters after her death. And writing her letters after her death gave me the only sort of happiness of the day. I felt in communication with her somehow, not supernaturally, but poetically. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. But when she was sick, dying of leukemia, what else could I write about?

JEFFREY BROWN: Hall was a prolific writer. In addition to poetry, there were memoirs, essays, children's books, even two books about his beloved baseball. He served as U.S. poet laureate in 2006. Among many other honors, he received a National Medal of Arts from President Obama. And, always, he was a writer of and advocate for poetry.

DONALD HALL: Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

JEFFREY BROWN: Donald Hall died of cancer at Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire on Saturday. He was 89.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, online, you can read a poem by the late author. That's on our Web site, PBS.orgNewsHour.

Elisabeth Marlin: Thank you very much for having me.

朱迪·伍德拉夫：今晚，杰弗里·布朗怀念著名作家唐纳德·霍尔，人们广泛认为唐纳德·霍尔是他这一代最伟大的诗人之一。

杰弗里·布朗：1975年，唐纳德·霍尔来到新罕布什尔州小威尔莫特定居，这里有一座农场，孩提时代的他曾来过这里，当时他的祖父母曾在此居住。2006年，我去看望他时，他将此事告诉我。

唐纳德·霍尔，诗人：我极其幸运。我8岁或10岁的时候就爱上了这个地方，喜欢那里的人，喜欢周围的文化，喜欢这里的山丘和峡谷，喜欢那些古老的房子，就像这间带着绿色百叶窗的白色小屋。当我回来的时候，我想，一直以来，写关于新罕布什尔州的文章，都是身隔千里。于是我决定，既然我回到了新罕布什尔州，我就不再描绘它了。恰恰相反。我经历了一切。我写了老农场里所有的动物。我写了山。这里的一切激发了我的创作灵感，我第一次回来的时候，也许是我一生中作品最多产的一年。

杰弗里·布朗：有一首诗叫《基尔萨吉峰》。

唐纳德·霍尔：《基尔萨吉峰》。伟大的蓝山，幽灵。小时候整个夏天，我都在看你，从农舍的门廊里看你。陡峭的边，顶部窄平的补丁。你的轮廓如此清晰，仿佛就在昨日。

杰弗里·布朗：他最著名的两本书，《空无》和《红绘》，谈论了他最痛苦的话题，他的妻子，诗人简·肯庸，47岁时死于白血病。这样做很艰难，还是会有帮助？

唐纳德·霍尔：这极其有帮助。她去世后，我开始写信给她。而她去世后我写的信为我带来了一天中唯一的幸福时刻。我觉得和她交流，不是超自然的，而是诗意的。我生命中每一件重要的事情都已融入诗歌。但是当她生病，死于白血病，我还能写些什么呢？

杰弗里·布朗：霍尔是一位多产的作家。除了诗歌，还有回忆录、散文、儿童读物，甚至还有两本关于他心爱棒球的书。2006年，他被评为“美国桂冠诗人”。他一生所获荣誉众多，其中，奥巴马总统为他颁发了美国国家荣誉艺术奖章。而且，他一直是诗人和诗歌倡导者。

唐纳德·霍尔：诗歌是美丽的艺术品，就像绘画，但艺术作品也体现情感，有些校园情怀。他们通过语言的美感来教会人如何感受。

杰弗里·布朗：唐纳德·霍尔因癌症于周六在新罕布什尔州鹰潭农场（Eagle Pond Farm）去世，享年89岁。

朱迪·伍德拉夫：您可以在我们的网站PBS.orgNewsHour上读一读这位已故作家的诗作。