Publishing News and the Recording of a Loss

by Wayne Cresser

I have a new short story called, “The Faces of Macbeth,” in the Spring issue of Review Americana: http://www.americanpopularculture.com/review_americana/spring_2018/cresser.htm.

In the story I mention a photograph featuring three men: the professor protagonist, Warren Charles, his colleague Jeffrey Blackstone and a poet named Don Miller, who is visiting the college where Charles and Blackstone teach. Miller is based on the wonderful Donald Hall, poet and friend to the real life facsimilies of the teachers in the story.

Gregory Orr wrote of Hall’s 1975 poem, “Kicking the Leaves,” that it is a poem of “family, four generations of Hall’s personal family inhabit its seven sections. But it also belongs to the family of poems. At the source of the poem’s unspoken genealogy, its genealogy of imagination, is Homer’s famous metaphor from The Iliad, where Glaucos, challenged to identify himself by Diomedes, responds: Magnanimous Diomedes, why do you ask who I am? The frail generations of men have scarcely more lineage than leaves. Wind blows them to earth in the fall, but spring brings the blossoms again. So one generation succeeds another.”

Here is Part 3 of Kicking the Leaves:

One Saturday when I was little, before the war,
my father came home at noon from his half day at the office
and wore his Bates sweater, black on red,
with the crossed hockey sticks on it, and raked beside me
in the back yard, and tumbled in the leaves with me,
laughing , and carried me, laughing, my hair full of leaves,
to the kitchen window
where my mother could see us, and smile, and motion
to set me down, afraid I would fall and be hurt.

Donald Hall, poet of love and loss, died on Saturday, June 23, He will be missed.