1 Cyan Magenta Yellow Black These are the people in your neighborhood 10 years of conversations <strong>Hippo</strong> | July 1 - 7, 2010 | Page 12 1 For years now, <strong>Hippo</strong> h<strong>as</strong> run weekly Q&As — with candidates for public office, authors, downtown boosters, business people, people who have gone on journeys or achieved interesting goals and even the occ<strong>as</strong>ional psychic. These conversations offer a different way to get to know the people in our community. And occ<strong>as</strong>ionally, we’ve even sat down with some for longer interviews — conversations not just about the news of the moment but also about the p<strong>as</strong>t and the <strong>issue</strong>s that matter to someone who h<strong>as</strong> played a role in state politics or spent a lifetime entertaining audiences. We’ve published more than a dozen of these conversations in our 10 years. Here’s a look back at what some of these folks have had to say.
october 10, 2002 January 2, 2003 donald Hall, poet Donald Hall first spoke to the <strong>Hippo</strong> for the Oct. 10, 2002, <strong>issue</strong>. Hall, who w<strong>as</strong> U.S. Poet Laureate in 2006, lives northwest of Concord. In 1998, he rele<strong>as</strong>ed a book of poems called Without, which dealt with the illness and death in 1995 of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. His collections of poetry since then have included The Painted Bed in 2002 and White Apples and the T<strong>as</strong>te of Stone in 2006, a collection of his poems from 1946 through 2006. In fall 2009, he published Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry. In 2002, Hall spoke with Dan Szczesny about The Painted Bed and about Kenyon. Do you believe you need to be p<strong>as</strong>sionate in order to be a poet? Yes. What most people do in living is, in order to avoid suffering, they turn the volume down in general, and you can’t do that. Now, maybe we have that character to begin with, which is why we can continue to be poets. The incidence of bipolarity in writers, <strong>as</strong> you probably know, is extraordinary. Do you try to repress the emotion when you are writing or embrace it? I don’t try to pull back. I don’t know how to pull back. I guess I don’t believe in it. It’s a subject of will when it comes to those extremes. Hall also spoke about living in New Hampshire and the farm house in Wilmot that had been in his family. You’ve written that the people of <strong>this</strong> house and farm inhabit your present, not your p<strong>as</strong>t. Is that still the c<strong>as</strong>e? Yes. I mean I don’t literally see them — we didn’t feel their presence like they were ghostly presences. But it just w<strong>as</strong> habitual. It’s metaphorical, rather than spiritual. I mean here is the barn where I used to sit on a threelegged stool and watch my grandfather milk <strong>as</strong> he recited poems to me. I have the stool in the parlor now. There’s so much here that goes way back. I w<strong>as</strong> first here in 1928 at the age of six weeks. What type of energy or inspiration do you get from the community? How does it become part of your work? It h<strong>as</strong> diminished <strong>as</strong> the community h<strong>as</strong> gotten older and died and h<strong>as</strong> not been replaced by the same people with whom I have the same long continuation of commu- 1 nity. But then again, when I w<strong>as</strong> growing up, I w<strong>as</strong>, like a lot of kids named Donald, called Donny, and when I came back there were still people calling me Donny, and it sounded great! My grandmother played the organ in the church from the age of 14 to 92, and that is continuity. I can practically see her little black sequined hat. And there are a lot of people I see occ<strong>as</strong>ionally who were with me in Sunday school, so there is some continuity of the same people, the same buildings. I come back and the hills are so much more full of forest now, but they’re still there. Continuity. … Hall spoke with Dan Szczesny again for the Aug. 3, 2006, <strong>issue</strong> of the <strong>Hippo</strong> shortly after being named poet laureate. Are you intimidated by the company of p<strong>as</strong>t laureates you keep? No, why should it? I <strong>as</strong>sume you are friends of some of them. I know them or are friends with some of them. Pinsky is an old friend and I talked with him on the telephone. Have they given you any advice? Ted Kooser told me that he wrote 500 postcards saying “I cannot read your manuscript,” “I cannot write a blurb for your book.” I will do that too. Pinksy told me I w<strong>as</strong> not to expect any help from the Library of Congress. You don’t have an <strong>as</strong>sistant or a secretary there. You don’t have an office. You have certain duties which I’ve spoken to you about but they are very minimal. You are a stand-in for poetry. This title h<strong>as</strong> now incre<strong>as</strong>ed your reading fees, made you more of a valuable entity. Yes, I’m told that the normal fee for a poet laureate is $10,000 per reading. I’ve been getting $5,000 for a long time. The most important question I guess is how will <strong>this</strong> title affect your social life. It’s going to get me some! I don’t have any and I will be seeing more people than I ever have otherwise, which may be something good for me at <strong>this</strong> age. Is that something you’re looking forward to? Not particularly, but it will be there and I’ll see what I can do with it. … Your career h<strong>as</strong> spanned half a century, giving you the opportunity to work with and be part of many different literary movements and trends. Instead of <strong>as</strong>king you what’s the secret to life, I’ll settle for what’s the secret to a good poem. Though if you have the secret to life, that would be good too. [Laughs] I want the poem to be the receptacle and embodiment of a feeling or a series of feelings, feelings sometimes in contradiction to each other, and with that <strong>as</strong> my end I need to arrive right with the beauty of sound and the beauty of resolution of metaphor and all sorts of things I would call beauty, and that is the tool or the method for expressing and memorializing a particular feeling. dick Anagnost, developer Dick Anagnost h<strong>as</strong> been the public face for a lot of Manchester’s development projects over the years — particularly when it comes to turning historic buildings into modern residential or commercial space. The Bond Building, the Ch<strong>as</strong>e Block, the Pearl Street School, apartments across the city — Anagnost seems to be perpetually in the news for bringing new purpose to properties, including his current project, River’s Edge, which will feature Elliot Hospital facilities, on the former Jac Pac site. He spoke to Dan Szczesny for the Jan. 2, 2003, <strong>issue</strong> of the <strong>Hippo</strong>. From your perspective <strong>as</strong> a local developer, is there a danger in redeveloping a city and losing its character? You always watch out for that, but I don’t think that’s the c<strong>as</strong>e. An outside developer is going to come in b<strong>as</strong>ed on the foresight of people recently in office and in the Planning Department. They looked at Manchester and said “<strong>this</strong> is the character we want to have here, <strong>this</strong> is the character that we want to maintain” and they put <strong>this</strong> into effect by creating things like a Millyard Review Committee. Is that the re<strong>as</strong>on why there h<strong>as</strong>n’t been much interest from chains, a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble, for the downtown? Well, there h<strong>as</strong> been a lot of interest. The problem is we can’t necessarily fit their criteria and if we are going to make them think outside the box — I mean even Dunkin’ Donuts, we had a heck of a time getting them onto Concord and Elm streets because we had to make them think outside the box. A retailer comes in and says “we need <strong>this</strong> many households, <strong>this</strong> amount of disposable income, <strong>this</strong> amount of square footage in a square box in 062617 062755 063155 Page 13 | July 1 - 7, 2010 | <strong>Hippo</strong> Cyan Magenta Yellow Black 1
Change language