JOE HALL

25.06.2025

New Gone Ephemera ~~~

Picture of Shit, Slips: poems on receipt-tape paper on a toilet paper roll on an orange piece of paper. — Ephemera

I just read a zig-zagging set of stanzas conveying the prismatic ecological vision of Jennifer Howard (I’ll include them at the end of this post) in Toward Some Air, ed. by Fred Wah & Amy De’ath. They bowled me over, and I hung out somewhere between procrastinating and giving myself what I needed in the post-anesthesia haze of a medical procedure before realizing this post is too late. It was supposed to be about ephemera and now that ephemera is gone. So I guess it still is.

Thom at Blue Bag Press asked me to send some poems late in 2024. I figured they might like something rowdy and less classifiable, so I took up a snarl of poems about my body breaking down (see above medical procedure), disability, imperialism, waste, rage (some are titled “hatred”) and fugitive desires and sent them along. I like the poems but they’re challenging, the kind of poems where you let it all hang out and that become your favorite because most places wont give them a home. Thom took them–a real gift. Now they’re a print object called Shit, Slips. Thom had them printed by Alex Benedict of betweenthehighway on receipt tape paper. If you have one, please wrap them around a toilet paper tube cut to size while watching Zend’s toiletters revolve.

They were released Saturday at Rust Belt Books. The party included readings by Rachelle Toarmino (fantastic, layered piece about Love Canal) & Thom Eichelberger-Young, whose documentary poetics are incorporating the twists and turns of this grotesque moment at lightning speed and at compelling analytical angles. There’s a lot more to say about surveillance poetics right now and some that get said in a conversation hosted by Rachel Myers between Thom and R.M. Haines

Ah, yeah, & Diego Espíritu gave a wildly generous introduction that grounded the poems in a poetics of the body. As happens in Buffalo, it was more than an introduction but a portable theory of poetry that exceeds what it describes, opening doors for people listening closely to their poems.

The dank poems got read. Afterward, all but two of the fifty copies were spoken for. & that’s it. Ephemera.

We raised about $70 for the Sameer Project. Just a drop in the ocean of what’s needed in the face of the heinous U/./S./-I/s/r/a/e/l siege, slaughter, and starvation, in the face of their perverse “aid” distribution plan [& if that’s “aid” then the people got fed in Pinochet’s dungeons before being disappeared were also in aid distribution centers and cemeteries are hospitals and bombs are instruments of compassion].

Anyway, if you donate $30 to the Sameer Project and send me the receipt, I’ll mail you one of the two remaining copies of Shit, Slips. Though maybe Alex still has a few?

In hopes you pursue the whole poem, here are the lines from Jennifer Howard:

in any opiate moment

unlatch the skull of a lake zaagai’igan

from its trophy of red snow

we’re in this

for the killing jaaginazh fields

of every biome

our prosperity zhawendaagozi

a glimmering clusterfuck dryad

felled into the horizon

19.03.2025

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Lemon & Asbestos, Duct Tape, Willow Bark: Hostile Books Lives

Institutions betray us. Free Mahmoud Khalil.
Several friends have lost or are afraid of losing their jobs. It’s war. Don’t want to ignore that. A lot of stuff in this post:
Hope ppl get behind AKG Workers United. The AKG has the name of a weapons manufacturer profiting from g***c**** on its ticket desk. It also just retaliated against its union by firing 13 union members. You don’t have to be a nz-fancying billionaire to be an anti-worker p.o.s. You can just run a museum like one.

@doublecrosspress ‘s poetics of the handmade series is featuring my essay “Asbestos, Duck Tape, and Willow Bark: 8 Notes on Heading Toward Hostile Books,” published in conjuction with the long lost Hostile Book Lemon by Ryan Kaveh Sheldon. My essay thinks about art economies, making problems, and feeling like an idiot injecting lemon juice into a printer cartridge. It’s also an account of what led me to work with the collective Hostile Books. Included, is an interview w/ @the_deeps / Ryan Kaveh Sheldon, a Hostile Books collective member. Ryan is wickedly smart and funny in interview. @mc.hyland is incorporating sandpaper into the cover so it’s unpleasant for everyone (her, my bookshelf, your hands).

Pre-orders are here. It’s just $10. I hope you read it and turn a brick into a book into a problem.

Also, Apr 5, a non-union-busting arts institution, Squeaky Wheel, presents a poetry reading by Carolina Ebeid and me as part of the public programs accompanying their exhibition, The Image in its Absence which features an installation by Ebeid. Catering from Ali Baba Kebab, with vegetarian options, will be available to attendees. Very good.

Carolina Ebeid’s work is fantastic: “Carolina Ebeid’s poem, She Got Love: A Circle of Spells for Ana Mendieta, focuses on the testimony and lack of witnesses to the death of the singular Cuban-American artist; its circle is both protective and repellant, seemingly circling Mendieta herself. In the context of the exhibition, the work dives into what is hidden in recorded, official testimony, and what exists beyond it.”

The larger exhibit: “The works in the exhibition [by Azza El-Hassan, Crystal Z Campbell, and Noor Abuarafeh] and public programs focus on several different historiographic approaches to how artists address the absence of archives”

10.03.2025

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Letter to A Documentary Poetry Roots of People Finder, BuffaloThe Boomerang in Mad Max 2

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Hey, my internet friend Alex, a great poet, asked abt what documentary poets were kicking around my last book, People Finder, Buffalo. Giving credit where credit is due–here’s an edited version of that email.

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Well, 24 hours post-twitter under my belt. Still itchy.

Rukeyser & Sharif great pillars. What Sharif did you read? I feel like I’m missing something from her that I need to read.

People Finder came from a stew of documentary stuff — today I’m reaching for Ed Sanders’ Investigative Poetry (killing me I can’t find better link) (Sanders got arrested for Fuck You) in early 60s. Particularly the passages where he references the surveillance/harassment of the romantic poets, pointing to a long history of state surveillance & his impulse towards a counter-surveillance and then other ideas of counter surveillance swirling around post-Ferguson through and past 2020.

Took gap writing it of about 2 years somewhere around there. Influences also include the journalism of social-worker writer turned investigative reporter in Buffalo Aaron Lowinger and the work he did to visibilize the ways similar abuses and violences by cops were happening in Buffalo (but ignored, muffled by other local outlets) and later Buffalo’s Investigative Post.

Mark Nowak’s Shut Up/Shut Down: labor, steel mills, Buffalo.

Somewhere in the root mesh is Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States 1885-1915 b/c of how direct/lightly treated the documentation is & that he’s dealing w/the gilded age, which the ruling class seems to want to recapitulate + greater powers to spy on and beat (differentially) our asses. I’ll never forget the poem in there (all from legal records, I think, he had access to) about a worker falling into a vat of boiling fat, killing them.

Then on the other far end of the spectrum, Brandon Shimoda’s work, especially his essay Curse for the Guard, (which I think everyone should read and cite!) [below—sorry ex-librarian impulses taking over here].

Also, you know, Hieronymus Bosch, hell, eye for eye.

Shimoda has a great bibliography of documentary poetry he compiled, which I have sadly misplaced. He may know almost everything.

Way back there is also Phil Metres abu ghraib arias, which Flying Guillotine made a chap of w/cover paper made from combat uniforms which may be incredibly toxic? & the idea of those molecules is in there too, perhaps. Boomerangs.

The boomerang in Mad Max 2.

And then there’s some 30s writers who were also labor journalists I had read in the archive like Irene Levine Paull—the way they’re working with their localities, the specificity of communities, reporting, documenting but in a voicey way. In a way that felt alive. And that’s the last thing: there’s a real fuck you/love you swagger to a lot of 30s movement writing that I respond to, that revealed the way that reporting, investigation, documenting in poetry has sometimes gotten a little arid or overly clever for my tastes. But that’s another discussion.

Ok, hope yr well. Don’t feel like you need to respond to any of this. I just had a little time and a little energy while waiting for my plate lamp housing to get fixed at the shop so I don’t have to go to pay a fine or go to court.