After watching the video on poetry with Donal Hall, I definitely started to think way more about the sound/shape/cadence of poetry and a type of musical connection that I haven’t been thinking about as much, but listening to him read his poetry really stuck with me. I thought many of the things he spoke of regarding his early life and the beginnings of writing poetry were so cool. I loved how he described feeling at ease in the right university atmosphere and how much the cultivation of a fantastic writing community can be for someone’s craft – the seriousness surrounding their work and a type of competitive push for each other to excel. I loved listening to that and connecting with our class, and how much I think we strive to be professional, take each other’s work seriously, and be helpful in our environment. Another aspect I took away from this video was how beautiful his poems about his grieving process with his wife are – one thing he said that stuck out for me was, “It was not grief and horror to write them; it was making grief and horror into poems.” I thought back to our class discussions on the shadow/bag we carry with us, the idea of writing from the scar, and how to remove ourselves from all that unhelpful venting to truly make something out of the less-than-ideal aspects of life. Both his insights surrounding defining poetry and his advice were just so reflective and appreciative of the way of life poetry can cultivate in us – like in his focus again on sound as both an entryway into defining poetry but also in how we as new poets can listen to and read aloud the work of great poets before us and get an ear for the meter. He also brought up such an interesting concept that all good poems should have this opposition and tension built into it, and the phrase where he said ambivalences are characteristics of every human mind and that it should be mirrored within the poem was a truly compelling moment for me in this interview.