JOE HALL

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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.

J