from Unpacking The Boxes by Donald Hall
It was a letdown returning to classrooms and faculty meetings, to office hours and papers and cocktails after the game. From six to eight in the morning it was still poetry, and I finished my third book of poems. Sometimes it was hard to get started. To warm up, I began a comic blank-verse narrative— a few lines before going back to free verse— out of a medieval fabliau. I found the old manuscript twenty years later, in New Hampshire, and tried to revise it. Where I sit today, working at my desk, there are shelves behind me that are dense with abandoned or unfinished work— including the book-length mock epic in iambic pentameter. 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. rooting around, I recently found another long collection, written in the sixties in a time of fret and distress. It is what Robert Bly has called light-verse surrealism, and nothing fit to print.
(p. 136, Unpacking The Boxes: A Memoir of a life in poetry. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston 2008)
