Of Donald Hall, who reads at Ulster Community College next Wednesday, it has been said that poetry is his day job. Hall, the author of 10 nonfiction books including two baseball classics, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball and Fathers Playing Catch With Sons, of numerous children's books, left a professorship at the University of Michigan in 1975 to return to his ancestral farmhouse in New Hampshire, along with his wife of three years, Jane Kenyon. There, until Kenyon's death in 1995, they led twin lives devoted to poetry. Now Hall continues that life alone, if anything, even more intensely: "Since Jane died," he said in a recent interview, "I haven't been able to be a general writer. I've written only poetry."

What is the life of a full-time poet? It says in Hall's bio that he has given over 4,000 readings at colleges, schools, arts centers, libraries, prisons and other institutions. "That was a few years ago," Hall says. "It's probably more than double that by now. "

Close to 10,000 poetry readings. This is a career in itself, and an impressive one. It means a lot of work at reading, a lot of attention to the relationship between poet and audience, between poetry and audience. The performance artists still talk about freeing poetry from the musty confines of the academy, but anyone who's come to the UCCC spring readings over the past few years, who've heard Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forche, Maxine Kumin, knows that it's this myth that's musty, not the combination of subtlety and dynamism an audience can get from a fine poet who's also a fine reader.

"Reading poetry aloud makes a difference in one's relationship to one's words," Hall says. "When I started writing, I thought of poetry exclusively on the printed page, though I was always very much aware of the sound of words. Poe was my first influence, at the age of 12 - then Stevens, at 14. Even when I was writing with no sense of words to be spoken out loud, my throat would move as I wrote

"But reading one's own poetry out loud to an audience was unheard of back then. Frost did it. But Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore - they virtually never read out loud.

"So I was writing for 'sounded print,' not for the spoken word. Then one day when I was about 27, an agent for lecture tours called me. I was flabbergasted. He wanted to me schedule a tour of reading poems to people--on stage--in public?

"I started out by reading with my hands at my sides, in a high-pitched monotone. Then I started to think more about what it meant to read poems aloud. When I was young, I'd thought about being an actor-it was between poetry and acting for me-but acting is only a part of it. As a teacher, teaching other people's poems, I had always tried to implant a voice in the poems I was teaching. Now I started to think about that voice. I started to think about how poetry sounded out loud. What was at one time writing theoretically for voicing, has now become writing actually for voicing.

"This can do good things for your poetry, but it can do dangerous things, too. I remember a time-it was in 1959-when I was working on a poem, and there was a key word that I knew was wrong. 'Ah,' I heard myself say, 'but in a reading I can make it sound right.' And, fortunately, I caught myself. 'Uh-oh,' I remember thinking. 'Watch your ass. This can be dangerous.'

"There are other dangers in thinking about reading poetry aloud. You don't want to be writing for the applause of college students. You don't want to limit yourself to writing poems that can be understood in hearing, although there's nothing wrong with writing some poems like that.

"On the other hand, there are ways it can help. I go through many drafts in writing a poem. I write every day, but an individual poem may take me a year or more to finish. I don't start reading a poem aloud until the late stages of revision, so all of my initial relationship is to words on a page, but when I do start reading it aloud, sometimes I'll find my voice will drop when I get to a certain word, as if I subconsciously didn't want anyone to hear it. That's a good signal to me that I should be taking another look at that word."

An audience at a reading, Hall notes, should remember that "it's different from reading a poem. Basically, you want to listen for pleasure - pleasure in the sounds of the words, pleasure in the moment - with no thought of interpretation. Just take it in, and let it flow through you.

"I compare listening to spoken poetry to learning a foreign language. At first you hear words and translate them into your own language. Then, you get to the point where you can make that leap to thinking in the other language. To get the most out of a reading, you need to make that leap - to turn off the translation machine, and just listen to the flow of that spoken language. You don't want to be writing a critical essay in your mind as you're listening."

Hall writes every day, from 6 a.m to noon. "I never begin a poem knowing exactly where I'm going to go. At one time, when I was younger, I felt I had to know just where I was going before I started. But I outgrew that. All writing is action writing--when you cross out a word, you open yourself to all sorts of alternatives, and things become really dynamic.

"Robert Bly, who's my oldest friend, was here to visit not long ago, and we got to talking about how when you write in longhand, and you start writing quickly, you may find that when you come back to it later, you can't read your own writing, and in trying to decipher it, you make up a new word. I have a phrase in one poem, 'You are clear to me.' What I had actually written was 'You are dear to me,' but I realized that my misreading of my own writing had brought me to a better, truer line.

"Other times, you find things by instinct, and you don't know why. 'Letter at Christmas' (from Without), ends: