e in 1991.) It's wonderful stuff: click here to read the entire interview.Hall talks about how he became a poet, how encouragement--and discouragement--shaped his poetry in high school, and offers a brief warts-and-all portrait of Robert Frost, with whom he is sometimes compared.
He sometimes writes about baseball and has spent time among professional athletes. "Mostly, athletes are quick-witted and funny,' Hall says, "with maybe a ten-second attention span."
Hall was The Paris Review's first poetry editor (1953–1961), and he talks about his own Paris Review interviews with T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ("He spoke with a melody that made him sound like W.C. Fields."), and Marianne Moore.
Once, he says, "I rejected a good poem by Allen Ginsberg, who wrote George Plimpton saying that I wouldn't recognize a poem if it buggered me in broad daylight."
Above left is a manuscript page from Hall's poem "Baseball."
--Marshal Zeringue
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