"In a 1983 essay, “Poetry and Ambition,” Mr. Hall began it by saying, “I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.” He went on to assail much of the poetry world, finding mediocrity there, or what he calls the “McPoem.”" NYT on Donald Hall "“None of us knew we would ever publish a book, but we took it very seriously. We would stay up late arguing over whether one poem was good enough to go in our magazine. It was incredibly stimulating. We argued all the time.”" Donald Hall Irish Times "By age 14, he had decided to become a poet, inspired after a conversation with a fellow teen versifier who declared, 'It is my profession.' 'I had never heard anyone speak so thrilling a sentence,' Hall remembered." Daily Mail / Guardian "Hall’s whole-animal approach to writing — leaving no parts unused or wasted — recalls the poem he turned into his most popular children’s book, “Ox-Cart Man,” in which nothing is wasted in a farmer’s repetitive cycle of manufacture and market." Heller McAlpin Washington Post

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