Former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall's last poem was about Scott Brown
By Felice Belman GLOBE STAFF AUGUST 01, 2018
You’ll be forgiven, perhaps, if you don’t recall a brief moment of poetry in the 2014 US Senate race in New Hampshire between incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican challenger Scott Brown, who had recently moved north from Massachusetts.
Donald Hall, the former poet laureate and one of the Granite State’s most beloved public figures, wrote a poem that summer aimed squarely at Brown. It was just three lines long but packed a punch: Get out of town,/You featherheaded carpetbagging Wall St. clown,/Scott Brown!
Brown’s staff, needless to say, was not amused and dismissed Hall as a “partisan poet.”
Hall died in June. His last book, “A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety,” was reviewed this week in the New York Times, and the reviewer revealed this sad and unlikely fact: The Scott Brown poem was the final poem of the prolific writer’s career. The reviewer noted: “Not one for the ages, perhaps, but The Boston Globe reprinted it.”
The review also included Hall’s own memory of the Brown poetry episode: “Somebody put it on the internet and it went bacterial.”
###
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/08/01/donald-hall-last-poem-was-about-scott-brown/9wgahpCkBtpHgfKDb0sIWI/story.html