Your children will wander looting the shopping malls
for forty years, suffering your idleness,
until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot.

       Nothing here to help the digestion between rounds at Kiawah. Even if the children aren't looting, what if they're just shopping the shopping malls (though this would deprive us of the pleasure of looting's diminution into our lot--lot), is that any consolation? The prophecy holds. This in itself may not be a great claim, but it is the beginning of a great claim--a great question. If virtue and invention come of necessity, then does the lack of necessity in modern life, the luxury we have to idle (granted, the idle is set frenetically high for many) mean the end of virtue and human resourcefulness, the end of what millenia of experience have taught us to think of as distinctly, valuably, essentially human? "We forget/ every skill we acquired over ten thousand years of labor," Hall writes. "I practice smiling; I forget how to milk a goat." Does abundance mean atrophy? Does push-button technology render us effete and ineffectual, as in "Of course I couldn't kill a rat with a putter/ even if it shuddered in my daughter's crib," so that we have no response to and indeed no ideas better than the looming barbarian solution?

... Tribes wandering
in the wilderness of their ignorant desolation,
who suffer from your idleness, will burn your illuminated
missals to warm their rickety bodies.
Terrorists assemble plutonium because you are idle

and industrious.

       What are we to do? The One Day asks this question quite clearly, quite emphatically. It also, and this is what makes it a risky, great book, answers the question it poses.
       Not that one reads the poem for this big question and answer, the meaning; such is, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, "a bit of nice meat for the house-dog" of the mind. Hall teases the appetite in the early going: "Never do anything except what you want to do." But this is more morsel than meal or, to change the metaphor, more alarum than answer. It haunts the rest of the poem--and it is the haunted poem itself that is Hall's answer, or, to use his more appropriate term, his claim.
       The prospect of meaning diverts the reader so that the poet-burglar can do his essential work, work that does not admit of simple or even complex paraphrase, such as I have begun to attempt here. The essential work involves delight and mystery--moving, not convincing, the reader. And The One Day delights and moves in myriad ways. Hall's great mastery of sound is the first mover, striking the ears first, naturally, but reminding us that the auditory canal courses deep into the skull. Sound vibrates fluid and air in there under the eyes, behind the nose. It fills mouth and throat and lungs. The flesh and bones of even the silent reader feel all this before the mind figures. The body thrills at the crash and trill of "course," "couldn't kill," "rat," and the mounting rhyme of "putter," "shuddered," and "daughter's" in the lines quoted above, which end with the frustration and resignation of the plosive stop consonant of "b" in "crib." The lower lip protrudes babyishly, you can't help it. And listen to the assonance, the nasals, sibilants, dentives, and liquids (one doesn't know these terms offhand, but exhiliration moves him to explication) of "the young women's bodies,/ their smooth skin intolerably altered by ointments." Isn't there something goo-ily intolerable about the word "ointment"? It tastes funny.
       Then the mind has the pleasure of experiencing the great history of poetry that constitutes, in a strict sense, The One Day, which is not to say that it is text-book-ey in the least. It's not about the history of poetry; it is history, an embodiment and extension of tradition, of, as Eliot has it, not that which "is dead," but that which is "already living." Maybe it's best to say that Hall used everything he knows of poetry to write the poem, and he knows an awful lot.
       There is, for instance, the modernist trick of multiple voices with which Hall enacts his epigraph from Picasso, "Every human being is a colony."

(Who is it that sets these words on blue-lined paper?
It is the old man in the room of bumpy wallpaper.
It is the girl who sits on her drunken mother's lap
or carries her grandmother's eggs. It is the boy who reads
the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. It is the middle-
aged man motionless in a yellow chair, unable to read,
daydreaming the house of dying. The colony takes comfort
in building this house which does not exist, because
it does not exist--as I stare at the wrist's knuckle,
idle, without purpose, fixed in a yellow chair.)

       Hall prophesies apocalypse a la Revelations, but is more specific and modern, as in the "looting the shopping malls" lines, or more viscerally horrifying: "Fat will boil in the sacs of children's clear skin." The last lines of the poem fulfill Marianne Moore's request (Hall has published a study of Moore) in "Poetry" for "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."

... Together we walk in the high orchard
at noon; it is cool, although the sun poises upon us.
Among old trees the creek breathes slowly,
bordered by fern. The toad at our feet holds still.

       Vying for Whitmanian sweep, Hall puts even the bathroom, if not the kitchen, sink in front of the reader's mind's eye:

I reject Martha's Vineyard and the slamdunk contest;
I reject leaded panes; I reject the appointment made
at the tennis net or on the seventeenth green; I reject
the Professional Bowlers Tour; I reject matchboxes;
I reject purple bathrooms with purple soap in them.

       Here Hall reveals, even revels in, the Jeremiah in him that Whitman repressed in the later editions of Leaves of Grass--a querulousness, a bitter despair not often associated with the Good Gray Poet. See "Respondez" in The Neglected Walt Whitman:

Let the people sprawl with yearning, aimless hands!
              let their tongues be broken!....
Let all the men of these States stand aside for a few
              smouchers! let the few sieze on what they choose!
              let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey!

       and compare it to Hall's

Because professors of law teach ethics in dumbshow,
let the colonel become president; because chief executive
officers and commisars collect down for pillows,
let the injustice of cities burn city and suburb;
let the countryside burn; let the pineforests of Maine
explode like a kitchenmatch and the Book of Kells turn
ash in a microsecond; let oxen and athletes
flash into grease:--I return to Appalachian rocks;
I shall eat bread; I shall prophesy through millenia
of Jehovah's day until the sky reddens over cities....

       Yet violent as the imagery is, as much as it rejects, we find that rejections become formations, that prophecy itself is left standing. Destruction constructs, in the words of the author's note that follows the poem, "ten-line bricks which could build the house and remain whole." It is this paradoxical phenomenon of building by wrecking and wreaking that gives The One Day much of its momentum.
       This is especially true of the middle of the poem. In the section titled "Pastoral," the poem suffers and parodies mid-life crisis.

Phyllis: My Hermes, you sit with your pipes pocketed at committee
             meetings and eat nonbiodegradable donuts and drink
             whitened coffee without protest. You play sets of tennis
             with the director you dislike, and laugh shaking your head
             as your baseline shots fall continually past the baseline.
             You make rules, piper, by which you cannot be fired.
             I cheat my employer; I quit and take unemployment
             because I deserve it. You exploit your employees.
             My friend in the city attorney's office reduces the charges.
             You weep, my love, chained to the trireme's oar.

Marc: I fly with my family to San Juan for a week attended
             by Moriscos. Drunk after the party, I fumble to embrace
             the babysitter, taking her home, who will not sit
             for my children again. I choose a girl from Records
             instead, who is twenty-three and thinks I am rich.
             Later when I am bored I disengage myself,
             sending her presents. Ingratiating to boss, insulting
             to employees, I endure my days without pleasure
             or purpose, finding distraction in Rodeo Drive, in
             duplicate bridge, in gladiators, and in my pastoral song.

       Some pastoral. Hall perverts the form to effect what he calls "dreamlike monstrosity." Monstrosity helps clarify choices, and "never do anything except what you want to do" haunts because it requires incessant choice. Something monstrous is easier to reject, and, because there is so much not to do, rejection is the first business of doing what you want to do. Though not the last: abjuring purple bathrooms may be a start, but where does one go from there? After such irony, what engagement? It takes Hall forty pages to earn earnestness, to muster the wherewithal to overcome irony, but he most unmistakably does.

Gazing at May's blossoms, imagining bounty of McIntosh,
I praise old lilacs rising in woods beside cellarholes;
I praise toads. I predict the telephone call
that reports the friend from childhood cold on a staircase.
I praise children, grandchildren, and just baked bread.
I praise fried Spam and onions on slices of Wonder Bread;
I praise your skin. I predict the next twenty years,
days of mourning, long walks growing slow and painful.
I reject twenty years of mid-life; I reject rejections.
The one day stands unmoving in sun and shadow.

       It takes the entire poem to show that the way to meaning lies not in rejection of all but the self, not in self regard, not even in "each other," but in "a third thing:/ a child, a ciderpress, a book." Recognition and acceptance of the necessity of death replace distraction and denial. "From burnt houses and blackened shrubs, green rises/ like bread." The house of dying and the house of living, it turns out, are one, and our true lot, Hall proclaims, is to "Work, love, build a house and die. But build a house."
       He is as emphatic as Whitman in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: "This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy...." Whitman goes on, as you may recall or imagine, while Hall is not as specific or exhaustive (who is?). He lists less. But Hall's example of combining bitter rejection with hopeful proclamation argues better than any critical essay could against Whitman's (and the Modern Library's) decision to elide the darkest shade of the Good Gray Poet, for the extreme negativity of The One Day intensifies, even as it qualifies, its eventual affirmation.
       Still, one may be impressed with Hall's language, the sweep of his vision, the ingenuity with which he shapes bricks and puts them together, and yet ask, what do you mean, "build a house"? Bravo that you lived through your mid-life crisis, that you have a nice home, with old lilacs and all, but what good does it do homeless me? To put it in the most dreaded way, who cares? This is the 20th century. I don't have time for anything more than a McPoem, if that.
       Yet Hall has noted that more American poetry and poets happen now than ever before, and the phenomenon of the "sensitive poet" is prevalent enough in the U.S. to provoke a cartoon from Matt Groening.

CARTOONCARTOONCARTOONCARTOONCARTOONCARTOON!!!

       "Write a poem about a fleeting emotion unique to you," the cartoon instructs, "using a complex and private system of symbols that no one else can possibly understand." So many poets and poems, so bafflingly little communication. Eliot wrote that "the uses of poetry certainly vary as society alters, as the public to be addressed changes." In the late 20th century, then, does poetry serve to pad solipsism, to aid the escape from modern reality by modern reality's spoiled, somberly clothed (as Groening has it), over-sensitive and under-employed children? The poet's greatest pride and achievement is his miraculously intact sensibility, the elaborated beauty of his isolation--therein the preciosity of much of what currently gets called poetry. Recall Hall's recipe for McPoems: "they do not extend themselves... they connect small things to other small things." Many poets aren't men speaking to men, but men speaking to themselves, consigning the reader to the dubious pleasure of eavesdropping on a solitary mumbler.
       But maybe this is for the best. Maybe modernity has so thrown us back upon ourselves that we have no common ground, only our separate, "complex and private," incommunicable systems. At least one psychologist has suggested that the "sensitive poet" type, detached from the outside and elaborately connected inside, might be the ideal model for contemporary identity. In Love and Will, Rollo May writes that such a "schizoid character" is necessary in a "schizoid world... in which, amid all the vastly developed means of communication that bombard us on all sides, actual personal communication is exceedingly difficult and rare." Only a schizoid character, focussed inwardly on his complex and private system, can "stand against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and... not let himself be emptied by it." Only such a character can "live and work with the machine without becoming a machine."
       Well, Hall does coopt modern technology as analog for the structure of his poem. "If I succeed" he writes, "the surface of the poem should look smooth but, like the great console radios of my youth, when you look behind this facade you see a maze of tubes and wires to connect everything with everything else. And there is something faintly smug about the "third things" he esteems in The One Day. It is easy to write

The one day speaks of July afternoons, of February
when snow builds shingle in spruce, when the high sugarmaple
regards the abandoned barn tilted inward, moving
in storm like Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic under sail.
The one day recalls us to hills and meadows, to moss,
roses, dirt, apples, and the breathing of timothy--
away from the yellow chair, from blue smoke and daydream.
Leave behind appointments listed on the printout!
Leave behind manila envelopes! Leave dark suits behind,
boarding passes, and souffles at the chancellor's house!

       If you live, as Hall does, on an ancestral farm in New Hampshire. Such a landscape makes for Hall a lovely background for "an instressing of his own inscape," to use Gerard Manley Hopkins' phrase for Lucifer's treasonous song, and indeed there is much inscaping in The One Day. The devil makes him do it, maybe--or the bombardment of modernity. Colonize yourself, or your self will be colonized for you. Poetry, obviously, helps in this endeavor; and so it can lead to the sensitive poet phenomenon. But the third things Hall esteems counter this tendency. A child, a ciderpress, a book... the history of poetry--these things we hold in common, and in communing over them we find value outside ourselves, beyond the limits of our space and time. The very nature of poetry recalls us to these third things. While in prose, words are means for the message they are deployed to convey, the words of a poem insist that they are ends in themselves, that we feel them with our senses and hearts even as we manipulate them for some purpose. Each brick has heft and texture worth the moment's measure. Thoreau reminds us that home-building is (if you'll forgive a pun) an edifying occupation.
       Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! We do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?
       Hall has published poetry since The One Day and has plans to publish more soon, but this book stands as his central achievement. It is ambitious. It makes a great claim. It backs it up. "Work, love, build a house and die. But build a house." Reading the poem we feel the "pleasure of construction."
       Hall has observed that

In the act of reading, the reader undergoes a process--largely without awareness, as the author was largely without intention--which resembles, like a slightly fainter copy of the original, the process of discovery or recovery that the poet went through in his madness or his inspiration.

       What are we to do when necessity's discipline no longer obtains, when milk magically flows from the plastic udder, when nothing need be done? If Hall's equation of reading to writing is true, and certainly poetry, of all literary forms, inspires and requires the most active engagement on the part of the reader, then in reading The One Day we exercise the poetic faculty, we cultivate our capacity for poeisis. Reader, in other words, becomes poet, and a poet, to paraphrase Thoreau, is someone who, having nothing to do, finds something to do.