Crossing The Pond With Poetry

At the Library of Congress, U.S. and British Laureates Put a Notion in Motion

Donald Hall, who will step down as poet laureate in June, joined Britain's Andrew Motion in a reading. (By Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)

The queen's visit is history. So for anyone looking to bathe in continued warm fuzzy feeling between Great Britain and its former colonies, the place to be last night was the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium -- second stop on the first-ever Transatlantic Poet Laureates Tour.

"I know she's been here. I don't think she knows I'm here," said British poet laureate Andrew Motion, referring to the sovereign whose family's weddings, births and other milestones he occasionally is called on to commemorate. This drew a laugh from the perhaps 400 poetry lovers in attendance. Among them was Sir David Manning, Her Majesty's ambassador to the United States, looking remarkably chipper after a stressful week.

The joint reading, Motion said in an interview the day before, came out of a conversation with John Barr, who runs the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation.

One of Motion's initiatives in Britain has been to launch the Poetry Archive, which records poets reading their own work. While discussing ways this effort could be expanded to include more Americans -- last month, the foundation and the archive announced a partnership to that end -- Barr suggested that if Motion were "serious about this sort of transatlantic thing," he should do some readings with the American poet laureate, Donald Hall.

Tall, tieless and dapper in dark suit and white shirt, Motion began his portion of the proceedings by reading three poems by "people who are not me" -- Brits perhaps unknown to American audiences. He began with "Waking With Russell," which the Scottish poet Don Paterson wrote for a young son:

Whatever the difference is, it all began

the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers

and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again . . .

"Part of the reason for doing this," Hall had said in an interview Wednesday, "is that English and American poetry in the '50s and '60s was a sort of continuum," in which poets on both sides of the Atlantic stayed familiar with each other's work. After that, for reasons he doesn't know, "we drew apart."

At 78, Hall has fond memories of personal connections with British poets from time spent in England early in his career. There was a particular London pub, for example -- "the Salisbury, at the end of St. Martins Lane" -- where "a bunch of writers, mostly poets, gathered on Wednesday noons" to hoist pints, talk literature and gossip. Motion's predecessor as laureate, Ted Hughes, was a regular.

Motion, who is 24 years Hall's junior, also has noticed the drawing apart. He told his American audience that he thinks it had something to do with "the way that you guys received modernism and embraced it and the way that we received it and didn't." Academic-oriented poetry is valuable but too limiting, he said, "if it means that you lose sight of the general reader."

The British laureate grew up in a not especially literary household, but was turned on to poetry at around 16 by a beloved teacher. "I have a vivid memory of him, the first time that I was in his classroom, talking to us about a poem by [Thomas] Hardy called 'I Look Into My Glass,' " Motion said. He went on to fall in love with, among others, John Keats and Philip Larkin (whose biographies he would later write) and a less well-known poet named Edward Thomas, who "wrote a hundred and some poems before going off to the First World War and being killed."