Canadian dynamo Rob McLennan asked me 20 questions for his ongoing interview series. I try to range, wide. Easter egg at the end.
And also wrote a short piece on Fugue & Strike. From it: “Hall’s poems are playful, savage and critical, composed as a book of lyric and archival fragments, cutting observations, testaments and testimonials.”
Rob also included me in his small press writing day series in 2018. Rob: a gem!
S.T. Brant interviewed me on In The Fire Garden. We cover a lot of ground. I read poems.
Zach Savich wrote a review of F&S w/a delightful genealogy of poems starring garbage. Feeling very seen in this paragraph, in particular: “As in Hall’s 2018 collection Someone’s Utopia, which combines documentary preservation with attention to the “amnesias” that can result from work and its conditions, the sequence moves between choreography and cacophony. It sheds precise, essayistic light. It also highlights what might get shed (outrage, startling connections, insistent fragments) by a less capacious mode. Among its capacities, “Garbage Strike” makes slick use of the registers of “shit.” The word becomes close to a unifying, globalizing drone. It stands in for what’s closely of the body, what the body might leave behind, and what we’re forced to carry: “City residents could ignore protestors but not their own piling shit”; “Hired to take a bunch of shit from her acerbic boss”; “If we can’t / separate ourselves from shit.”
Hey, if yr reading this and want to review the book, it’s not too late.
Buffalo’s literary journalist (rare breed) Bob Pohl selected a poem from Fugue & Strike, “Fugue 47 | Some Kinda Grail Problem.” Bob was going to pick another poem but when Canadian wildfires filled Buffalo lungs full of particulates he picked this one for the final lines “great honeyless planet / great planet of smoke.” You see folks, without more militant climate action, we’re fucked (tho that “we” papers over radical asymmetries in the making vulnerable to climate pain).
&, awhile ago (updating this blog is, rats, low on the list of things I have to do to get by, tough much higher on what I’d like to do), Mercury Firs featured “Fugue 41 | Laid Off At a Cannabis Grow, Upstate New York,” also from Fugue & Strike. The weed industry is, well, meh on worker rights. So will all the business run by psilocybin capitalists! Anyway, Mercury Firs is rethinking ecopoetics, and this is something that urgently needs to be done.
That’s all for now.
7.16 Update: Tom Weaver was kind enough to send his substack’s mentions of Fugue & Strike. I love how the book is winding in and out of posts.
JOE HALL 