Donald Hall, who died in June this yr at the age of 80-nine, was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose piece of work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was The Paris Review'due south  first poesy editor, and he served as the U.Southward. poet laureate. HisArt of Poetry interviewappeared in our Fall 1991 result.  Before his death, he compiled 1 final book of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, an excerpt from which appears below.

Donald Hall, 1977

When I was xvi, I read x books a week: Eastward. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to tiresome downward. Thirty years later on, in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at nighttime. Jane went to sleep quickly and didn't mind the light on my side of the bed. I read The Turn down and Fall of the Roman Empire and six huge volumes of Henry Adams's letters. I read the late novels of Henry James over and over once more. After Jane died, I kept reading books, at first simply murderous or violent writers like Cormac McCarthy. Today I am forty years older than Jane ever got to exist, and I realize I haven't finished reading a book in a year.

An athlete goes professional at xx. At thirty, he is slower merely more than canny. At forty, he leaves behind the identity that he was born to and that sustained him. He diminishes into fifty, lx, seventy. Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or fifty-fifty old endures the inevitable loss of appetite's fulfillment. In a Hollywood retirement home to meet a friend, I watched a handsome old woman in a wheelchair, unrecognizable, jump upward in ecstasy when I walked toward her. "An interview!" she said. "An interview!" A writer usually works until late in life. When I was eighty, still doing frequent poetry readings, audiences stood and clapped when I concluded, and kept on clapping until I shushed them. Of form I stayed to sign volume afterwards volume and returned to my hotel understanding that they applauded and then much considering they would never see me again.

Suppose I am the hundred-l-year-sometime maple outside my porch. When winter budges toward spring, I push out tiny leaves, which gradually curl yellow green, then overstate, turning darker green and flourishing through summer. In September, flecks of orange seep into green, and October turns the leaves gorgeously orangish and red. Leaves fall, emptying the branches, and in Dec, just a few remain. In January, the last survivors flutter down onto snowfall. These black leaves are the words I write.

Back then, I wrote all day, getting up at v. By this time, I rise scratchy at six or twitch in bed until 7. I drink coffee before I choice up a pen. I expect through the newspaper. I endeavor to write all morning, but exhaustion shuts me downwards by ten o'clock. I dictate a letter. I nap. I ascension to a lunch of crackers and peanut butter, followed past further burnout. At night I watch baseball on boob tube, and between innings run through the New York Times Volume Review. I roll over all dark. Breakfast. Coffee.

When Jane was alive, our dog Gus needed walking every day. Jane walked him when she woke, feeling sleepy before breakfast. When they left, I lifted my hand from the page, waving bye. Midday, we had tiffin and a nap, and and so I walked Gus. In my car, I drove him upwardly New Canada, the dirt road near our business firm, and parked where the single lane widened. We walked the flat earth, non for long because I wanted to go dorsum to the manuscript again. Now when someone brings a dog to the house, I barricade myself in a big chair. An attentive domestic dog would break my hip.

Louise is my cat. X years ago, her vigorous sister Thelma squirmed out of the house and discovered Route 4. My assistant Kendel dug a hole, and we set a half-butt over the grave to impede hungry animals from enjoying a Thelma snack. Louise is passive, besides shy to scoot through an open door. At night, when I picket MSNBC, she annoys me by rubbing my knee, but she never knocks me over.

Striving to pay the mortgage in the tardily seventies and eighties, some years I published four books. At present it takes me a calendar month to terminate seven hundred words. Here they are.

Donald Hall (1928–2018) served as the U.S. poet laureate from 2006 to 2007. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts.

"Seven Hundred Words" excerpted from A Funfair of Losses: Notes Nearing Xc, past Donald Hall. Copyright © 2018 past Donald Hall. Used past permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.