The Poetry of the Eternal Now, in Donald Hall’s The One Day,
for three Voices at the Cambridge Public Library
By Michael Todd Steffen
The Hastings Room Reading Series is excited to announce its upcoming presentation of Donald Hall’s book-length master poem The One Day, adapted for recitation by Michael Todd Steffen, with readers Mary Buchinger, Lisa DeSiro and Steven Ratiner.The reading will take place at the main Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway Street, inthe Lecture Hall, at 7pm, on Thursday March 2nd, 2023. Mark your calendars!
Donald Hall needs no introduction. He served as the 14th U.S. Poet Laureate from 2006to 2007. His many awards include the 1987 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the 1994Ruth Lily Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.
His first published poems date back to the late 1940s, Hall then in his late teens and early twenties. At age 86 he published his last verse in the Concord Monitor (New Hampshire),a political rhyme which had given Hall great pleasure to write, its subject the opponent of Jeanne Shaheen in the 2014 New Hampshire U.S. Senate race:
Get out of town
You featherheaded carpetbagging Wall Street clown,
Scott Brown.
At the time, Hall commented, he’d stopped writing poetry in the last few years. Poetry was largely sexual, the poet said, and he had run out of testosterone. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children’s literature, biography, memoir, essays, including 22 volumes of verse.
The book-length poem The One Day has been described as the greatest achievement in Hall’s poetic career, carrying public power rare in our time, a poetic confidence and inclusiveness that we associate with the major works of Modernism. Yet twenty years after the publication of The One Day, in his memoir Unpacking the Boxes, Hall made reference to his “greatest achievement” in utterly dismissive notes of failure:
Behind my neck roosts a rookery of bad manuscript. To write as much as I have done, I have needed often to fail. There is another book-length poem behind my neck, ten-line stanzas that look like surrealism but are actually bad dada. (page 136)
What is the difference between Surrealism and Dada? Dada is interruptive, unexpected, disjunctive and offensive in order to make criticisms of society and the logic and syntax that give order and direction to society. Surrealism tends to the psychology of dreams and of art. Dada is deliberate and strategic, with social consciousness in its masthead. In presenting an adapted version of The One Day for an audience, our intention is to re-present the generous and brilliant genius that brought Hall to the laborious task of this dark horse of an American masterwork of poetry.
I undertook the adaptation for public presentation with three readers after I’d gone to see The Poets’ Theatre present Dylan Thomas’s radio drama Under Milk Wood at the Sanders Theatre in the autumn of 2015. At the time Hall’s book had become a revelation to me and I was somewhat obsessed by its different voices: mother, son, father and daughter in the first part; in the second part more dramatically the voices, indicated for the text, of Marc and Phyllis in the poem “Pastoral” and the opposition of Senex and Juvenis in the poem “History,” which had won attention by being included in the first (1988) Best American Poetry anthology edited by David Lehman and guests.
Due to its textual length, the diversity of its topical registers from autobiography and the very personal, confessional, to items of modern history and pop culture clashing with ancient literary genres and history – Hall uses anachronism to great effect! – the long poem resists comprehensive analysis. The theme announced by its title (with a possible wink at Joyce’s Ulysses with its echo of epic and action inhabiting the one day, June 16 in Dublin?) suggests in a sense of Eastern mysticism the compression of all the memorable days of one’s life, along with the days recorded in history which become part of a writer’s awareness—all days into the one day of the present, accumulated and ongoing, the never-ending Now.
This involves one of time’s great paradoxes, both what T.S. Eliot named “the ecstasy of the animals,” and the poet/artist’s aspiration for immortality—Shakespeare’s So long as men can breathe or eyes can see…—the timeless expression of the short life through long labor for art:
by these hands I join
the day that will never return. This is the single
day that extends itself, intent as an animal listening
for food, while I chisel at alabaster. All day I know
where the sun is. To seize the hour, I must cast myself
into work that I love, as the keeper hurls
horsemeat to the lion:—I am meat, lion, and keeper…
This passage, and much of the beginning of my adaptation, comes from the beginning of Part III, To Build a House, of the original book-length poem. Initially, editing this manuscript for a public presentation came to me intuitively. Yet as I reflect, I wanted material that welcomed the audience both in theme and in tone. I wanted the reader/listener to get comfortable and settle in before introducing some of the more difficult themes, personal obsessions such as parental indiscretions and failures, as well as social and historical concerns, professional hypocrisies, marital silences, the clash of classes, the awareness of civilization’s rises and ebbs, the apparent inevitability of war, the long-term consequences both of empire and technological advancement, use, dependence, abuse, failure and erosion.
Hall might well have said of this undertaking what Pound said when setting out to write The Cantos: It’s a poem about—everything. In an insightful and very interesting NOTE ON THIS POEM the author imparts to us as a postscript to his book, Hall describes the initial intervention of the whale of inspiration for the poem on him:
The poem began in the fall of 1971. Beginning to emerge from a bad patch of middle-life, I was briefly subject to long and frequent attacks of language. I wrote as rapidly as I could, page after page, loose free verse characterized by abundance and strangeness rather than by anything else, certainly not by art or the discipline of imagination. The meteor shower continued for several weeks. If I drove to the supermarket I carried a notebook: I might stop three times in a ten-minute journey to take dictation…
It would take Hall 17 years to grapple the material into a coherent sequence, which he published as the book The One Day in 1988.The actual recorded intervention of the poem’s inspiration, these “long and frequent attacks of language,” are behind the extraordinary visit to the poet depicted in the poem, toward the beginning of my adaptation, also to treat the audience with something strange and humorous to get the reading going. This passage also is taken from Part III in the poem’s book version:
This afternoon the king and queen of Norway drove
downtown from their consulate to my studio. As we sat
drinking tea together, they were fastidious and democratic;
I had been told: It was not required to curtsy…
When the entourage disappeared into Third Avenue
I changed into jeans and climbed on my sore ankle
to the marble under the skylight. Matisse said, “Work
is paradise”; Rodin, “To work is to live without dying”;
Flaubert, “It passes the time.” For three hours
my mallet tapped while Donatello hovered above me.
Such an extraordinary visit (as unexplained and unsubstantiated as any weird appearance in a dream, which the best poetry models itself on) makes a good equivalence in expression to what Hall describes as the undertow of the especially focused language that came to him emerging from his bad patch of middle-life. We might know and acknowledge the accuracy of the astonishing experience and of its expression. We furthermore may smile at the extraordinary humility of the self-defined realm of the vision upholding the labor of love, listening to Donatello (containing the poet’s first name, Don) hovering above the artist as she taps away with her mallet. In this way, and in so many other ways throughout the poetry of The One Day, the very near and isolated and the utterly present meet with the far away and the far over and lost.
About us:
Mary Buchinger is the author of six poetry collections, including Navigating the Reach (2023), Virology (2022), /klaʊdz/ (2021), and einfühlung /in feeling (2018). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Hollins Critic, Interim, Nimrod, PANK, phoebe, Plume, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. She serves on the New England Poetry Club board and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston.
Lisa DeSiro is a writer and musician. Her poetry collections include Simple as a Sonnet(Kelsay Books, 2021), Labor (Nixes Mate Books, 2018), and Grief Dreams (White Knuckle Press, 2017). Her poems have also been published in many literary magazines and anthologies, and set to music by several composers. Lisa works as a professional accompanist and a freelance editor. She resides in Cambridge, MA. Read more about her at thepoetpianist.com.
Steven Ratiner has published three poetry chapbooks. His work has appeared in scores of journals in America and abroad including Parnassus, Agni, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, Salamander, QRLS (Singapore), HaMusach (Israel), and Poetry Australia. He's also written poetry criticism for The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Giving Their Word – Conversations with Contemporary Poets was re-issued in a paperback edition (University of Massachusetts Press) and features interviews with many of contemporary poetry’s most important figures, including two interviews with Donald Hall. From 2019 through 2022 Ratiner served as the Poet Laureate for Arlington, Massachusetts.
The Hastings Room Reading Series is excited to announce its upcoming presentation of Donald Hall’s book-length master poem The One Day, adapted for recitation by Michael Todd Steffen, with readers Mary Buchinger, Lisa DeSiro and Steven Ratiner.The reading will take place at the main Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway Street, inthe Lecture Hall, at 7pm, on Thursday March 2nd, 2023. Mark your calendars!
Donald Hall needs no introduction. He served as the 14th U.S. Poet Laureate from 2006to 2007. His many awards include the 1987 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the 1994Ruth Lily Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.
His first published poems date back to the late 1940s, Hall then in his late teens and early twenties. At age 86 he published his last verse in the Concord Monitor (New Hampshire),a political rhyme which had given Hall great pleasure to write, its subject the opponent of Jeanne Shaheen in the 2014 New Hampshire U.S. Senate race:
Get out of town
You featherheaded carpetbagging Wall Street clown,
Scott Brown.
At the time, Hall commented, he’d stopped writing poetry in the last few years. Poetry was largely sexual, the poet said, and he had run out of testosterone. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children’s literature, biography, memoir, essays, including 22 volumes of verse.
The book-length poem The One Day has been described as the greatest achievement in Hall’s poetic career, carrying public power rare in our time, a poetic confidence and inclusiveness that we associate with the major works of Modernism. Yet twenty years after the publication of The One Day, in his memoir Unpacking the Boxes, Hall made reference to his “greatest achievement” in utterly dismissive notes of failure:
Behind my neck roosts a rookery of bad manuscript. To write as much as I have done, I have needed often to fail. There is another book-length poem behind my neck, ten-line stanzas that look like surrealism but are actually bad dada. (page 136)
What is the difference between Surrealism and Dada? Dada is interruptive, unexpected, disjunctive and offensive in order to make criticisms of society and the logic and syntax that give order and direction to society. Surrealism tends to the psychology of dreams and of art. Dada is deliberate and strategic, with social consciousness in its masthead. In presenting an adapted version of The One Day for an audience, our intention is to re-present the generous and brilliant genius that brought Hall to the laborious task of this dark horse of an American masterwork of poetry.
I undertook the adaptation for public presentation with three readers after I’d gone to see The Poets’ Theatre present Dylan Thomas’s radio drama Under Milk Wood at the Sanders Theatre in the autumn of 2015. At the time Hall’s book had become a revelation to me and I was somewhat obsessed by its different voices: mother, son, father and daughter in the first part; in the second part more dramatically the voices, indicated for the text, of Marc and Phyllis in the poem “Pastoral” and the opposition of Senex and Juvenis in the poem “History,” which had won attention by being included in the first (1988) Best American Poetry anthology edited by David Lehman and guests.
Due to its textual length, the diversity of its topical registers from autobiography and the very personal, confessional, to items of modern history and pop culture clashing with ancient literary genres and history – Hall uses anachronism to great effect! – the long poem resists comprehensive analysis. The theme announced by its title (with a possible wink at Joyce’s Ulysses with its echo of epic and action inhabiting the one day, June 16 in Dublin?) suggests in a sense of Eastern mysticism the compression of all the memorable days of one’s life, along with the days recorded in history which become part of a writer’s awareness—all days into the one day of the present, accumulated and ongoing, the never-ending Now.
This involves one of time’s great paradoxes, both what T.S. Eliot named “the ecstasy of the animals,” and the poet/artist’s aspiration for immortality—Shakespeare’s So long as men can breathe or eyes can see…—the timeless expression of the short life through long labor for art:
by these hands I join
the day that will never return. This is the single
day that extends itself, intent as an animal listening
for food, while I chisel at alabaster. All day I know
where the sun is. To seize the hour, I must cast myself
into work that I love, as the keeper hurls
horsemeat to the lion:—I am meat, lion, and keeper…
This passage, and much of the beginning of my adaptation, comes from the beginning of Part III, To Build a House, of the original book-length poem. Initially, editing this manuscript for a public presentation came to me intuitively. Yet as I reflect, I wanted material that welcomed the audience both in theme and in tone. I wanted the reader/listener to get comfortable and settle in before introducing some of the more difficult themes, personal obsessions such as parental indiscretions and failures, as well as social and historical concerns, professional hypocrisies, marital silences, the clash of classes, the awareness of civilization’s rises and ebbs, the apparent inevitability of war, the long-term consequences both of empire and technological advancement, use, dependence, abuse, failure and erosion.
Hall might well have said of this undertaking what Pound said when setting out to write The Cantos: It’s a poem about—everything. In an insightful and very interesting NOTE ON THIS POEM the author imparts to us as a postscript to his book, Hall describes the initial intervention of the whale of inspiration for the poem on him:
The poem began in the fall of 1971. Beginning to emerge from a bad patch of middle-life, I was briefly subject to long and frequent attacks of language. I wrote as rapidly as I could, page after page, loose free verse characterized by abundance and strangeness rather than by anything else, certainly not by art or the discipline of imagination. The meteor shower continued for several weeks. If I drove to the supermarket I carried a notebook: I might stop three times in a ten-minute journey to take dictation…
It would take Hall 17 years to grapple the material into a coherent sequence, which he published as the book The One Day in 1988.The actual recorded intervention of the poem’s inspiration, these “long and frequent attacks of language,” are behind the extraordinary visit to the poet depicted in the poem, toward the beginning of my adaptation, also to treat the audience with something strange and humorous to get the reading going. This passage also is taken from Part III in the poem’s book version:
This afternoon the king and queen of Norway drove
downtown from their consulate to my studio. As we sat
drinking tea together, they were fastidious and democratic;
I had been told: It was not required to curtsy…
When the entourage disappeared into Third Avenue
I changed into jeans and climbed on my sore ankle
to the marble under the skylight. Matisse said, “Work
is paradise”; Rodin, “To work is to live without dying”;
Flaubert, “It passes the time.” For three hours
my mallet tapped while Donatello hovered above me.
Such an extraordinary visit (as unexplained and unsubstantiated as any weird appearance in a dream, which the best poetry models itself on) makes a good equivalence in expression to what Hall describes as the undertow of the especially focused language that came to him emerging from his bad patch of middle-life. We might know and acknowledge the accuracy of the astonishing experience and of its expression. We furthermore may smile at the extraordinary humility of the self-defined realm of the vision upholding the labor of love, listening to Donatello (containing the poet’s first name, Don) hovering above the artist as she taps away with her mallet. In this way, and in so many other ways throughout the poetry of The One Day, the very near and isolated and the utterly present meet with the far away and the far over and lost.
About us:
Mary Buchinger is the author of six poetry collections, including Navigating the Reach (2023), Virology (2022), /klaʊdz/ (2021), and einfühlung /in feeling (2018). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Hollins Critic, Interim, Nimrod, PANK, phoebe, Plume, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. She serves on the New England Poetry Club board and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston.
Lisa DeSiro is a writer and musician. Her poetry collections include Simple as a Sonnet(Kelsay Books, 2021), Labor (Nixes Mate Books, 2018), and Grief Dreams (White Knuckle Press, 2017). Her poems have also been published in many literary magazines and anthologies, and set to music by several composers. Lisa works as a professional accompanist and a freelance editor. She resides in Cambridge, MA. Read more about her at thepoetpianist.com.
Steven Ratiner has published three poetry chapbooks. His work has appeared in scores of journals in America and abroad including Parnassus, Agni, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, Salamander, QRLS (Singapore), HaMusach (Israel), and Poetry Australia. He's also written poetry criticism for The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Giving Their Word – Conversations with Contemporary Poets was re-issued in a paperback edition (University of Massachusetts Press) and features interviews with many of contemporary poetry’s most important figures, including two interviews with Donald Hall. From 2019 through 2022 Ratiner served as the Poet Laureate for Arlington, Massachusetts.
***********************************************************************************
Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in journals includingThe Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse,and The Concord Saunterer.Of his second book, On Earth As It Is, now available from Cervena Barva Press, Joan Houlihan has noted Steffen’s intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light…the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.
The Hastings Room Reading Series is now in its 10th year of hosting poetry events, featuring area poets. We have also organized a yearly Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading, a Happy 100th Prufrock (2017), and, last November, a centenary celebration reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in journals includingThe Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse,and The Concord Saunterer.Of his second book, On Earth As It Is, now available from Cervena Barva Press, Joan Houlihan has noted Steffen’s intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light…the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.
The Hastings Room Reading Series is now in its 10th year of hosting poetry events, featuring area poets. We have also organized a yearly Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading, a Happy 100th Prufrock (2017), and, last November, a centenary celebration reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
