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John Witte's Poetry Month Pick, April 8, 2009
Two Sewing
by Hazel Hall (1886-1924)
The wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.
Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.
John Witte Comments:
Beginning with the materials at hand – her limited mobility, her isolation and loneliness, her gifts with needlework and words, and her exquisite grief – Hazel Hall fashioned in the short span of her career a poetry of remarkable originality and durability.
Born in St. Paul on February 7, 1886, Hall moved with her family to the bustling young city of Portland, Oregon as a small girl. She was an exuberant and unusually sensitive and imaginative child. But at the age of twelve, following a bout of scarlet fever, she was confined to a wheelchair, and, like Emily Dickenson on the opposite end of the continent, would live out her life in an upper room of her family’s house. To help support her mother and two sisters, Hall took in sewing, and gainfully occupied herself embroidering the sumptuous fabrics of bridal gowns, baby dresses, altar cloths, lingerie, and Bishop’s cuffs that would figure so lushly in her poems.
In “Two Sewing,” from 1921, as in so many of her poems, Hall escapes her confinement into the fertile refuge of language and imagination. As both seamstress and poet, she enjoyed the fortuitous coincidence of two activities that ingeniously referred to and informed one another, the interplay of stitch and song.
After seventy years out of print, Hazel Hall’s poems have been rediscovered and her Collected Poems republished in 2000 by Oregon State University Press.
About John Witte:
John Witte’s poems have appeared widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review, and been included in The Norton Introduction to Literature, among several anthologies. He is the author of Loving the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), The Hurtling (Orchises Press, 2005), and Second Nature (University of Washington Press, 2008), and the editor of numerous books, including The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall (Oregon State University Press, 2000). The recipient of two writing fellowships from the NEA, a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and other grants and awards, he lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches literature at the University of Oregon.
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