from Report from the Hall Society, Vol. 1 No. 1
Some of my best poems were written by Phil Hall. Here’s how come …
In 2009 I was living in Perth, Western Australia, when a Canadian friend rang and asked me to his place for an informal gathering to welcome a fellow Canadian, a poet by the name of Phil Hall and his wife. The poet was from Perth in Canada but that was all we had in common. I had met and liked Earle Birney and George Bowering when they had travelled Australia in years gone by so I was interested and went along.
We met and got on famously, as they say. One of our touchstones was Bernstein’s book Poetics. Someone quoted ‘Poetry is like a swoon / with this exception: / poetry brings you to your senses.’ Others drank wine – we talked poetics and various poets. And our friendship began.
Some weeks later, I had a heart attack necessitating open heart surgery – but, as a public patient, I had to wait my turn. Phil had travelled on but by email correspondence we decided to deepen our friendship (and keep my mind off the operation) by co-writing a poem. Andrew was thinking of renga and the Japanese poet Shikibu. Phil was thinking of Ornette Coleman’s two jazz quartets improvising together. So we started trading 5-liners to be shuffled and written into 10 liners. I can pick out who said what in our first hand:
Whistling without charts
I praise all swoops and calls
old red-throat has come back
gentle violin-maker to the countryside
a left footer’s choir
all language metaphor
I air my tongue
and dream placid jaws
bawdy songs once belted
grace
… but when we had finished 15 we had meshed so well we couldn’t hear our own voices but a minichoir of two-as-one.
A perceptive publisher saw the complete SHIKIBU SHUFFLE and liked it enough to publish it as a chapbook: rob mclennan of above/ground press . Phil wasn’t finished with his creative input! So for a run of 200 copies Phil stuck individual art pieces on each copy! And, because he had them, he stamped each individual copy fore and aft with rubber stamps – on my copy there’s a seahorse and four trapeze artists – each copy is a collector’s edition!
I’ve since acquired some of Phil’s titles and read them with more understanding than when we first met! I love some more than others and have tried to ape his style – but came a cropper. Here’s one I quote from as guide to Phil’s stance –
first
– my first language – nonsense – over-hugged my second language – sense
later
my first language – sense – dampened my second language – nonsense
on the first day of deer season i rode a cock-hearse
until an actual poem came brandishing its turret key – but no language
… and it finishes with this indicative line so I had to find one
from page 15 of WHITE PORCUPINE (book hug; Toronto 2007)
Phil Hall has taught me so much by his example and his productivity that my lazy bones must salute him – and, I might add, his publishers.
Andrew Burke (MA, pHd)
If you want an influence in Burke’s poetry, it is probably more the concept than the syntax, etc. For example:
THE WHEELIE BIN NOVEL
As domestic duty would have
it
I went outside with the
recyclable rubbish,
staring down at how many
newspapers,
cereal boxes, tissues and
cosmetic containers
we chuck out – and all the
words with them.
There’s a good novel in
there, I thought, as I threw more
into the wheelie bin –
nouns, adjectives, adverbs,
prepositions, conjunctions,
weights and measures,
imperial and decimal. It’s a
variety show or
a beehive of human
communications, mixed up
with a denouement - a dollop
of yoghurt
and some dregs of wine.
