U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall to Visit RACC Miller Center
October 23 event sponsored by the Foundation for RACC included in
Greater Reading Literary Festival Calendar
Donald Hall, U.S. Poet Laureate for 2006-07, will present a reading at the Miller Center for the Arts, Reading Area Community College,Second and Penn streets, Reading, on Tuesday, October 23, at 6 p.m.
Sponsored by the Foundation for RACC, this major poetry event has additional support from Berks Bards, the Berks Arts Council, and the Miller Center Endowment Fund. It is also being held in conjunction with READING READS: The Greater Reading Literary Festival, which extends throughout the month of October in dozens of venues throughout Berks County.
Tickets are available for the general public at $10, and with proper student ID, $5. To reserve, call 610-607-6239 or email Hettie Campion at hcampion@racc.edu. Tickets will also be available at the box office on the day of the event.
"Hall has long been placed in the (Robert) Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet," Billy Collins, former poet laureate, said in The Washington Post. "His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority."
"It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines," said Collins.
The 19th. U.S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall has published fifteen books of poetry, beginning with Exiles and Marriages in 1955. Earlier this year, Houghton Mifflin published White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946 . 2006, a volume of his essential life's work.
Among his books for children, Ox-Cart Man won the Caldecott Medal. His twenty books of prose include Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories (2003), The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005), and a collection of his essays about poetry, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day (2003). He has written extensively about life in New Hampshire: Seasons at Eagle Pond (l987) and Here at Eagle Pond (2000). He is currently working on a third volume, Eagle Pond, scheduled for publication this year.
Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in l951, and in l953 his bachelor's in literature from Oxford University. For the past thirty years he has lived on Eagle Pond Farm in rural New Hampshire, in the house where his grandmother and mother were born. He has two children from his first marriage and five grandchildren.
He was married for twenty-three years to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in l995. In 1998, he published Without (Houghton Mifflin), a collection of poems expressing his grief over Kenyon's death: "The mosaic of a whole period, with all its inner moods and its physical accessories, is masterfully accomplished," wrote The New York Review Of Books.
For his poetry, Donald Hall received the Marshall/Nation Award in 1987 for his The Happy Man; both the National Book Critics Circle award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1988 for the The One Day; the Lily Prize for Poetry in 1994; and two Guggenheim Fellowships. He is a member of the American academy of Arts and Letters. This event is the first of the 2007-2008 season for the annual Bruce H. Stanley Memorial Poetry series, named in honor of Professor Bruce H. Stanley who taught at RACC for 25 years in the Humanities Division, from 1972 until his death in 1997.