JOE HALL

10.03.2025

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.

27.01.2025

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A Big, Beautiful Essay About Fugue & Strike, d.a. levy, & Waste by Alex Benedict

It’s really rare to be read capaciously, for one’s work to be presented with a thick sense of its context–and for the reader to make their own idiosyncratic constellations with parts of the work. While seeking something like the truth of the work, reviews should have the fingerprints of their reviewer all over it. At least that’s how I like to read them. Anyway, all the way back in September, Community Mausoleum published Alex Benedict’s essay/review of my 2023 book Fugue & Strike, and I’m finally finding the time to say how gratified I am for the deep attention and insight Benedict brought to it. & I learned a lot more about d.a. levy, Cleveland, and Meagan Day’s “Ode to Sanitation Workers.”

Now I want every review to be this attentive, to include history, biography, politics (and trash), for these to be at play but to not over-determine readings.

P.S.

Benedict is the publisher of receipt-tape books. You should probably check them out.

P.P.S.

Check out this victory march by City of Gaza workers, including sanitation workers.

16.12.2024

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Post-Semester, Pre-Holiday News Dump

Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide Anthology Release

It’s here: Infrasonic Press’s Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide, a multimedia Palestine solidarity publication based drawing heavily from artists in Erie, PA and Buffalo, NY, w/all profits going to the Doctors Without Borders Emergency Relief Fund and the Palestine Youth Movement. Since the Lebanon Peace Deal, the entity’s attacks on Gaza have continued, starvation continues, the [worst thing] continues (you know this, right?). Heartening to see artists adapt their work to the circumstances. It can be a fraught process yeah, but linking our culture-making to material support is better than silence. Lv seeing friends, artists new to me, and activists from across the Rust Belt sharing this space–& foregrounding our own regional settler-colonial context. & being weird, & wild, & pungent, & thought provoking. I got a piece in there too. A lot of the material is free online – but you can purchase too, if you wanna redirect some of those culture $s or donate directly to these orgs. Free Palestine (should be common sense).

3 New Poems in The Dialogist

Snow healing the cracked blocks of Buffalo //// 3 new poems at The Dialogist //// (actually published awhile ago but getting to post in the post-semester hangover) //// Thx thx thx to eds. Angelo Mao & Timothy Ashley Leo //// OR My great love is walking around Buffalo, getting to know it cracked block by block its life, entropy and repair & then to think of my friends among this & see the yellow smudge of memory in the light: futures refracted into the cataclysmic & ordinary each an itinerary through the real & imaginary memory & expectation, as if the city could change in light of our being, could change in spite of the whorling, centripetal force of all the $ & dividing & organizing of the ruling class, a normal, slow rolling disaster & the make-do of everyone else, getting by, taking care thru it all: night classes, feeding strays, plotting gardens while on call. &, yeah, snow. This particular sequence is snow-flooded. I love the snow when it evens and levels and brings us out talking to each other over our shovels.

Entering the Dread: A Close Reading of “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed”

Sometimes a poem comes flap and claw out of you, weird child, sticky & burning. That’s how I felt about “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” (published in Oversound 9) You hope that poem gets some kind of life, as it streaks out, gross and glittering, because it took with it half of some kidney-like, two-lobed organ that you didn’t know you had but now feel it’s partial, unsettling functioning. Metaphor–straining! But, you see, it’s the kind of thing I, as a writer, hope to look at again, through someone else’s eyes because it distends under my gaze.

Anyway, I’m grateful Kent Shaw took the time to give “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” a close read. It’s a poem whose mesh tries to hold several of my most painful years in returning to Buffalo and painful years for Buffalo and recreate an experience of time as recursive and piling w/o release. And Shaw does marvelous work examining its threads and working in a way that refuses to reductively thematize the poem. His series “Spectacular Poems” does a difficult thing. While many close-readings sterilize their subject, these seem to animate the readers’ own reading of the poem with possibility while also up while making some larger, thoughtful point about poetry.