Donald Hall, “Meatloaf”
I wrote this after scrapping an idea for a post on Language Efficiency. I spent a few hours doing research for that post and after several problems decided to save it for a later date.
I was reading last week’s issue of the New Yorker recently, and in the middle of an article about Sheriff Joe Arpaio was a poem by Donald Hall entitled Meatloaf.
The full text of the poem can be found at the New Yorker.
The poem is composed of nine stanzas of nine lines of nine syllables. Perhaps it’s this, or perhaps it’s the far-reaching topics that the poem covers, or perhaps it’s the importance of baseball to the poet, or perhaps it’s any number of other things, but I found this poem to be phenomenal and inexplicably touching. I printed out a copy and taped it to the door of my office. Later, JAR walked into my office and said that after he had read the same poem in his New Yorker, he cut it out of the magazine and saved it.
I recommend reading it.
Also interesting: Donald Hall, who was the 2006 Poet Laureate, and I share the same birthday, 9/20, although his occurred 59 years prior. Now I have a realistic name to share with others when asked who shares my birthday. Previously, I had only Sarit Hadad, and as catchy as “Yalla Lech Habaita Moti” is, she’s not actually that exciting.
[...] she passed the test and I decided to be nice to her. We later realized we share the same birthday. (Donald Hall [...]