Donald Hall - Working for the BBC and Wednesday drinks in London (46/111)

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US Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018) published essays and anthologies of both poetry and prose including "String too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm", and "Ox-Cart Man", a children's book which won the Caldecott Medal. [Listener: Kendel Currier; date recorded: 2005]
TRANSCRIPT: My wife had adored that village, and the village life. She really wanted to stay, but we couldn't stay then. During that year, I came back with as much money as I left with, because I worked for the BBC a lot too. And I did 'The Critics', I think I did 'The Critics' twice. It was... it was the radio critics, where six critics of different disciplines sat around a table, and improvised a discussion. It was broadcast every Sunday at noon, and people would run home from church to turn it on. I think we recorded it on a Thursday before. And I was on with Steven Porter and A Alvarez and... oh, David Sylvester, the art critic, all sorts of people I was glad to be with, and it paid very well, and they repeated it later in the week, and you got exactly double when they repeated it. And I also did other BBC work... Third Programme work on poets, and... oh, I was an... an American voice in a dramatic production of an American poem - DG Bridson cast me in one programme. Frequently I would go up to London on Wednesday. I'd arrange my BBC dates on Wednesday, because that was the day that John Wayne, the novelist, came in from his house in Reading, and did his literary endeavours, I mean picking up books to review or whatever. So that a whole bunch of us would gather at the Salisbury, the old pub on St Martin's Lane. It was Wednesday at the Salisbury... John was always there, Ted Hughes came by sometimes, A Alvarez, Peter Redgrove, mostly poets, um... and usually I'd manage to spend two or three hours hanging around with them, and it was fun. Some of them were old friends, some of them were not so friendly, but it was a feature of that year.