12 or 20 (second series) questions with Joe Hall
Joe Hall [photo credit: Patrick Cray] isa Buffalo-based writer and reading series curator. His five books of poetryinclude Fugue & Strike (2023) andSomeone’s Utopia (2018).He has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms,squats, and rivers. His writing has appeared in places like PostcolonialStudies, Poetry Daily, Best Buds! Collective, terrain.org,Peach Mag, PEN America Blog, dollar bills, and an NFTA busshelter. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workersthrough Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center. Get in touch with Joe: Twitter, Instagram, website.
1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How doesyour most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
2008: I’m sitting at a desk in a sub-basement in Indiana. In frontof me is a candy jar. Behind me is a particle accelerator. My official jobtitle is Secretary. I get an email from Black Ocean. They’re going to publish PigafettaIs My Wife. I get the hell out of there, and I am still getting the hell outof there: my poetry leading me out of the big abyss of bad jobs to the frailextent art can, which is only ever to contribute to a constellation of momentsof momentary escape.
Like my first book, Pigafetta Is My Wife, my fifth book, Fugue& Strike, grows from historical research. PIMWdrew from primary and secondary sources surrounding Magellan’s circumnavigationof the globe and attempt to claim the Philippines; it attempts to turn thesesources inside-out into a self-implicating, anti-imperialist sequence. Fugue & Strike draws on researchsurrounding sanitation strikes and the uses of waste in militant politicalaction. Fugue & Strike departsfrom the mysticism that animates stretches of PIMW, embracing absurdity, humor,and the polemic. It’s tonally rangier and includes prose.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fictionor non-fiction?
I came to poetry through song, and I came to song through therhythmic boredoms of work, singing while I was mowing strip after strip oflawn. Rapture in repetition. Soundgarden melodiesmutated into my own.
And I came to poetry through evening prayer. Performing a nightlyself-inquiry before an omniscient being transformed into the devotion togetting some thing right on paper. Iwrote my first book in bed—at night until I fell sleep then immediately when Iwoke up, notebook and pen sometimes tangled in the sheets.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do firstdrafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?
The process is a two-minded mess. I often toggle between apatient, research-based poetics, building up notes, slowly secreting atheoretical framework—and just going for it: freewheeling, intuitive, ecstatic attempts totranslate a whole emotional-intellection moment into the world.
So I write multiple projects at a high volume and get lost in andbetween these modes, often. I have to hit the brakes in order to figure outwhat I’m actually doing and if these different modes make sense together. Sometimesthey really do not.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author ofshort pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working ona "book" from the very beginning?
It’s almost always a book. The poem iterates from some energy thathas a coherence beyond the poem and wants to animate and bind more poems—eachpoem a variegation of the larger distinct wave that is the book and the bookitself an expression of the smaller patterns it contains. That said, whateverRobert Duncan referred to as Life-Melodies, well, usually I mistake thebeginning of a year or two of this iterating energy as a life-poem. So I mostoften feel continuity more than difference when I first draft then must finddifference and silence in retrospect.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creativeprocess? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Ideally, I think about the context that a reading is then reshuffleand sometimes rewrite my poems for that context; sometimes that rewritingsticks and becomes the printed version. Readings are creation, what the scoreeach written poem represents has been waiting for. I owe it to those pieces toperform them in a way that demonstrates this.
But because of the investments I have in readings, they are also abig outflows of energy. That can be dangerous and not enjoyable. And I wishthere were more expansive formats for readings. 10-15 minutes just doesn’t fitmuch work or many readers. There are so many poets I would listen read for anhour who will never get the chance to read for that hour.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? Whatkinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you eventhink the current questions are?
Three hauntings:
1. From Marxist ecology: what is apoetics, in this long moment of climate crisis, that can account for (notlandscapes but) ecologies as open-ended, dynamic systems of human and non-humanactors involved in the circulation (and extraction and hoarding and etc.) ofenergy? What is a poetics that can account for the dynamic, open-endedco-evolutionary and thickly contextualized relations between natures andcultures?
2. How might post-2020 theories ofracial capitalism speak to a white writer (Joe Hall) living in a mid-size city(Buffalo) in the imperial core (the United States) to inform municipalpolitical action and the production, distribution, and reception of art withinthat context?
3. What are the answers when we askthese questions together?
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in largerculture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer shouldbe?
Current? Outside of the big prize-winning Iowa and Ivy-League circle-jerk club and all the people outside thesenetworks bending their best energy toward the delusional goal that they’ll beable to join that club, I think there are a lot more poets than we might thinkwho have, in the last ten years, hooked up with social movements, grass rootsgroups, unions, etc. They’re organizing, being organized in the crosswinds of aprofound post-2020 backlash and proposing through that activity relationsbetween writers and culture. But how to exactly define that relation betweenartists and culture, what’s going to come out of it, part of that is alwaysgoing to be subterranean and part of that, in this moment, is still germinal.That’s cool. We’ll see. But we may not see without more literary journalismgenuinely curious about the full scope of writers lives and theinterconnections between poetry scenes and social movements. So I guess whatI’m saying is that cultural production and political practice should informeach other and we should represent that in non-naïve terms. We should do thatwhile also being skeptical of universalist claims of the politics of any aestheticsoutside of considerations the specific networks a given work circulates within.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editordifficult or essential (or both)?
Essential and desired.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarilygiven to you directly)?
I was tempted to quote one of my first teachers of poetry, Lucille Clifton on the necessity of bringing one’s whole self, including their hatred,especially their hatred, into a poem. But since I’ve been seriously ill lately,here’s part of a parable of Chuang-Tzu in the translation I first received itin 2001. In it Master Yu is dying and is attended by his friend:
All at once Master Yufell ill. Master Ssu went to ask how he was. "Amazing" said MasterYu. "The Creator is making me all crookedy like this! My back sticks uplike a hunchback and my vital organs are on top of me. My chin is hidden in mynavel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. Itmust be some dislocation of the yin and yang!"
Yet he seemed calm atheart and unconcerned. Dragging himself haltingly to the well, he looked at hisreflection and said, "My, my! So the Creator is making me all crookedylike this!"
"Do you resentit?" asked Master Ssu.
"Why no, whatwould I resent? If the process continues, perhaps in time he'll transform myleft arm into a rooster. In that case I'll keep watch on the night. Or perhapsin time he'll transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet and I'll shoot downan owl for roasting. Or perhaps in time he'll transform my buttocks intocartwheels. Then, with my spirit for a horse, I'll climb up and go for a ride.What need will I ever have for a carriage again?
Recognize everything is change (Epicurus, Lucretius, Marx).Approach that change with delight and curiosity as to its possibilities. Thenride your butt-bike into the darkness.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetryto essays to music)? What do you see as the appeal?
At first poetry and song where the same polysemous ball of stuff.Now that the boundaries between poetry and essay can be thin when I’m writingsomething I’ve learned a lot about. A long piece in Fugue & Strike, “Garbage Strike / 🗑️🔥,” crosshatches poems striving for agarbage-compacted density of materials (to create an unpredictable connotativeleachate) with essay—sometimes, elliptical, sometimes not—on histories andfutures of waste and militant actions with waste or by waste workers. An essayI’m writing now on the implication of canonical sonneteers in the earlyformation of English settler-colonialism and racial-capitalism actually grewfrom footnotes on an anti-sonnet a friend suggested I grow into somethinglarger.
The relation between poetry and essay is easy when the subject isthe same. The appeal there is that essays can provide a rich contextualframework to inform a poem’s play.
Okay, halfway through. Take a breather, reader.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do youeven have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Age, entropy: no words arrive without an hour of body work after Iwake up. Exercise, stretch the damaged bits, prepare a breakfast that fits mychronic illness. A bit of reading. Then I write. But C.A. Conrad argues writingshouldn’t be like working in a factory (or as an on-demand worker for a taskapp company). I’ve been there. It sucks. So my writing routine only works when Ialso carry that writing beyond the boundaries of that routine and am receptiveto how the messages of the larger world unfolding around me must shape thatwriting. This is why I’m most productive when I go to sleep in thecross-currents of thinking about my days in the world and what I’m going to writein the morning.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or returnfor (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don’t know how to answer this question. Sometimes I avoidinspiration and embrace being stalled. There are crucial times I need to avoidother poetry, especially poetry I love, and sink into my life. I wait forfriction with the world to intervene—the social ecologies of my house, myblock, my neighborhood, growing outward. Or sometimes a friend lovingly kicksme in the ass. That’s probably what I need—someone to keep me from revising mybest work into particles.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Burning wood.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, butare there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music,science or visual art?
Forms: I can’t help but think of Bernadette Mayer’s exercise towalk through a city and, on each new block, write a single line of a sonnet. OrMei Mei Berssenbrugge’s idea that the line is generated by the body’s sense ofextension, or periphery in a particular environment. I have the sneakingsuspicion that pandemic-era long aimless walks through Buffalo’s empty,pot-holed roads and uneven sidewalks may be expressing themselves in the longlines of many of the poems I’ve written in the last year. As did a bike path inBuffalo alongside the Niagara River. In stereo: the river flowing and the 190’swhip-sawing traffic.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work,or simply your life outside of your work?
Samuel Delany: The Mad Man,The Motion of Light on Water, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; John Milton’s Paradise Lost and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; a whole world of documentary poetry from Rukeyserand Reznikoff to Susan Tichy, Mark Nowak, and Craig Santos Perez to Janice Lobo Sapigao.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a book while not worrying about money or time, but, hey, whodoesn’t want that?
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what wouldit be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had younot been a writer?
When I was in middle school in Western Maryland I was asked towrite about a future self I hope to be, and I said I hoped to be working in andoffice and living in an apartment in Ohio. I fucked up. Work sucks. I hate it.Get me cultivating a big, big food and flower garden and doing somebio-remediation in a city with a new, more functional body. I’ll do it withfriends. I’d love that. Is that a job?
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Where to start? A deeply felt incompatibility with the socialworld. A huge gap between I and thou. In the words of Karen Brodine: "All my life, the urgencyto speak, the pull toward silence." I came up in a disciplinaryenvironment and my parents giving each other loudly and at length the woundsthat would cause them to split. I had weird dreams—a whale corpse, itsmoldering eye looking into my bedroom window, a planet made of condensed, heavystatic, bearing down through a void that couldn’t be more complete.
And alot of time alone as a kid, to roam in the woods we lived beside.
And aninfinitely patient grandfather who lived next door, through these woods, who Icould interrupt, say, while he was splitting wood, to sit down at the kitchentable and talk while he smoked.
Whocan say if this explains it? For a long time it did. How about I was painfullyshy? If I could be alone with language and that would still connect with otherpeople? That would be nice.
Otherthings happened to change the reasons I wrote, thankfully. Then, a sort ofmomentum kicks in.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the lastgreat film?
Book: Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, Samuel Delany’s 872 page door-stop about the lives ofpartners Eric and Shit in a black, queer commune on Georgia’s Gulf Coast. A lotof labels have been applied to this novel (like a pornotopia) but the point ofDelany is that none of them quite stick. It’s a novel as ferocious, unsettling,gently, steady, and terrifying as the ocean that is it’s backdrop.
Film: Congratulations, you’ve made it this far, so you get tolearn a secret. For over a decade, my partner Cheryl and I have been recordinga hardly ever advertised podcast about movies. We watch a movie. Wetalk about it. We like the excuse it provides for us to talk at length and withintention about something. Through the podcast, I’ve found myself thinking moreand more lately about Bi Gan’s 2018 LongDay’s Journey Into Night. It’s a mysterious, trance inducing poem in a noirshell. And a great piece of Chinese cinema that slipped by before as theboundaries erected by the U.S. against U.S.-Chinese cultural exchange growharder and harder. Try watching The Battle at Lake Changjin in the U.S. It’s the highest grossing Chinese filmof all time. You can’t watch it. Also, Bacurau rips.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Thesequel Fugue & Strike. It’sprovision and likely to change title:Fugue & Fugue & Fugue. It’s shaping up to be a big book of poems.It goes full Buffalo, inspired by Samuel Delany’ssentences, radical municipalism, and the knot of rage and despair that was andfollowed the people of Buffalo trying to topple the dangerous, centristDemocratic machine here—and losing, for now. The poem, I think, is, in its way,about most small and mid-size, post-industrial cities. Not New York or SanFrancisco: most cities. Help me if I don’t finish it this summer.
