Donald Hall's and My Obituary

     
Donald Hall's NY Times Obituary

"Donald Hall, a Poet Laureate of the Rural Life, is dead at 89,” said the New York Times. I wouldn’t have realized it if my friend hadn’t sent me an obituary about the guitarist made famous to him and me in Blues Brothers, Matt Murphy. I guess I was, like Hall, influenced by Auden, unknowingly. A death of a poet is the opportunity to read the work you missed while he was being recognized by critics that took him seriously. As a non-compromiser, I will never have that chance to be commercially heard, but you can read my poems anyway, for free; I don't need a New York Times obituary. I could imagine my obituary, though not printed anywhere but here in my journal:

          Mr. Temple was an applicant for no awards and received no recognition outside of a few jealous-less peers and Facebook poetry fans, though he was a participant in the 32 World Congress of Poets; a vanity gathering in Tainan in 2016. His unwillingness to compromise or hobnob with bourgeois sorts left him peacefully in his pursuits and self-entertainment, fancying himself a blues singer. For the record, Mr. Temple wrote four unpublished novels, a children's book, The Castle on Waterview Street, a pet 'autobiography', The Cats Journey to Taiwan, and hundreds of articles on politics and teaching English to speakers of other languages, as well as life as an expat in Taiwan. He was the creator and editor of Wobbly City for the NYC IWW and wrote many of its bylines under assumed names. His forty-thousand views on Trip Adviser put him in the top 3% of Taiwan writers about restaurant and scenic spots. His photo blog articles, shared on Facebook, were collected in two volumes, Forgotten People of Taiwan and Taiwan Blog Transmissions A prolific poet, he wrote hundreds of verse and self-published a chapbook in the late 1970’s (Temple End) and in 2015 (Han River; Poems of Taichung), and 2018 (Unnatural Beauty) with time in between spent for earning a living and raising a family of four. He is survived by a daughter from his wife of 27 years, and two daughters and a son from a previous marriage. 
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