JOE HALL

01.03.2013

BOOK TOUR LAUNCH! Putting in trucker hours to see you

I’ll have a tent, a sleeping bag, four boxes of my new book, and all the love my heart can carry. I’m coming to you; meet me there. And also probably: Chicago, Denver, Omaha.

Jon Rutmozer made this here poster, thanks Jon! Thanks to all the people on the poster. Thanks to all these series organizers who accommodated my ridiculously acute time frames and some last minute requests from me: Donald and Jamalieh, Megan Williams, Tim Shaner, Feng Chen, Mark Cugini, Wendy in L.A., Gerald Ma, Holly Coleman, Al Abanado, Aubrey Lenahan, Dottie Lasky, Peter Johnson, Joel Craig, Wendy & Kit, Matt H, Brandon S & TC, Jeremiah Gould, Tim Johnson, Janey, Jeremy Springstead. Your creativity, energy, and patience is amazing. America, you are amazing for having so many people dedicated to live poetry. Except South Dakota. I can’t figure out what’s going in South Dakota.

This is being done on an epically shoe-string everything. I’ll post more on the preparation for and the tour itself as it happens/catches on fire outside of Tempe.

22.02.2013

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Mnemoship #1/Breaking With Books

Breaking With Books

I rip up Julie Choffel’s book, The Hello Delay. I take the cover and pin it to the wall. I take the first page and pin it to the wall. When I read that page I will unfasten the pin and turn the page over. When I read that page I will pin another on the wall next to it. When all the pages are on the wall I will wait a day and when that day is done I will take down all the pages and remove them from my life. I try to remember with discipline.

“spores in the skies my memorabilia” — Even though lines like this fold me up.Make me want to hold on to them.

I am destroying/rememorying books to make them precious. To make each page a once in time. To remember. St. Augustine said of time “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.” This is becoming my library, my language. I feel something is known because it is near, physical or digital, and I forget it because it is near. I don’t even read when reading it because I know it will be there to come back. I do this thinking about Cecelia Vicuna’s menstrual quipos, her knots to remember what is not visible. It is not the same but I am trying to learn. From Choffel’s first poem, “Serenade, or After Others”:

Here, from a fake rose

I’ve made you a real one

my poetry has no camera

By the time you read this, there will be one less Julie Choffel book in the world.

By the time you read this, I will have tried to remember the work outside of the book.

If you have The Hello Delay then it is more precious. If you see me, quote me a line.

21.02.2013

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Civil Rights Poetry

My friend and mentor Jeff Coleman had been working on his anthology of American Civil Rights Era poetry, Words of Protest, Words of Freedom, for so long I stopped asking him when it was coming out.

I also stopped asking Jeff partly because there was a “time problem” with this anthology: there was no other anthology like it in print and every delay seemed to exasperate Jeff an account of this. There have already been several anthologies of anti-Iraq/Afghanistan war poetry published in the last decade and yet in 30+ years after the height of the Civil Rights movement, no major publisher had bothered to recognize what was a vibrant, sizable body of work. And because I stopped asking, I missed when Words was published–last year.

I’m glad it’s here now and that Jeff was the one to bring it into the world through his incredible energy and patience. Still waiting for Jeff’s anthology in the mail, but the ToC reads as generous–bringing together writers who dedicated their energy to the movement and members of the movement who expressed their political energy through writing. It reveals threads to follow toward the reconsideration of facets of the work of major writers and the rediscovery of writers whose output was tied to the movement. Here’s a slice of the ToC–poems in response to the assassination of Malcolm X:

“Prophets were ambushed as they spoke” The Assassination of Malcolm X, 21 February 1965 155

A Poem for Black Hearts / Amiri Baraka 158

For Malcolm: After Mecca / Gerald W. Barrax 159

Malcolm X (for Dudley Randall) / Gwendolyn Brooks 159

Judas / Karl Carter 160

malcolm / Lucille Clifton 161

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz / Robert Hayden 161

Portrait of Malcolm X (for Charles Baxter), Etheridge Knight 163

Malcolm X—An Autobiography / Larry Neal 164

At That Moment / Raymond Patterson 166

If Blood Is Black Then Spirit Neglects My Unborn Son / Conrad Kent Rivers 167

malcolm / Sonia Sanchez 168

For Malcolm Who Walks in the Eyes of Our Children / Quincy Troupe 169

For Malcolm X / Margaret Walker 171

That Old Time Religion / Marvin X 171