Phil Hall’s [photo credit: Paul Elter] most recent books are Vallejo’s Marrow, The Green Rose (with Steven Ross Smith), and Devotion (all in 2024). He has also recently published, with Margaret Miller, the art book Searchers (2025). Guthrie Clothing—the Poetry of Phil Hall (2015) is available from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. He is proud of the poets he has collaborated with, and of those whose editor he has been. He lives near Perth, Ontario.
Phil Hall reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 28 as part of VERSeFest 2025.
rob mclennan: I’m curious as to how your poems have evolved, working these days in what could be termed “essay-poems,” attending elements of the catch-all around various thoughts around your reading and writing practice. Basically, how did you get to The Ash Bell (2022) from where you poems were, say, during the days of The Unsaid (1992) or Hearthedral: A Folk-hermetic (1996)?
Phil Hall: I have worked to modify the sequence poem, as developed by Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, in an attempt to avoid magazine verse—the set poem with its controlling title.
This has involved a mistrust of common metaphor, which is the simile’s shadow. Instead I rely on what I might call historic or hermetic metaphor—its warrens inside the etymology of each word.
Most words, sat with long enough, exude an aura of bewilderment that has evolved from the routes it has taken to be a word. And accident—even error—are important too.
I have developed a mistrust of the poem as heightened experience or precious performance, in favour of a plain-saying that has folk roots, but wants its own private language.
Thus, I now favour the notebook entry, for it is obscure by being acutely specific, and flourishes because it has no audience—I am not interested in the high hat of the poem as poem.
And
I favour collage instead of rhetoric. These elements (absence of common
metaphor / folk roots / notebook entries / collage) have brought me to the
essay-poem.
Where I can say contradictory things abundantly, and less “artistically”. Also, I make baroque (accumulative) sequences that are revised to appear random.
At least this is what I think I am doing. And these tendencies have also led me, unexpectedly, to trust more and more the sacred logic of dreams.
In my latest book, Vallejo’s Marrow, there are dream-trusting sections, but also daily notebook entries.
My process is a search for honest and complex extended forms. I disagree with “catch-all”.
rm: Curious. I meant “catch-all” only in terms of how your poems allow for an expansiveness that can contain multitudes, even contradictory ones. I mean, the density of your poems is quite incredible; you manage to cover a wide slate of references, ground and thought, far broader in scope, it seems, than most of your contemporaries. Do I make too much of this?
Ph: Sorry, I guess I’m defensive about “catch-all” because it can be an excuse for laziness. I work at sounding like Stein meets Carl Sandburg, then at getting home from both...
The accidental is not lazy. The incidental is not lazy. Mouthy-earthy is good. To be as inclusive as soil.
And when I speak of the baroque it is the organization—the form of over-doing it—that attracts me, not a glinting hodgepodge.
There are poets whose catch-all precociousness says: Look at the diverse items I can juggle at once. This doesn’t suit me because the emphasis is on the poet’s skill.
The poem should not be a venue for showing off, and only beginning poets mistake the poem as a way to garner praise.
It is not easy for me to be casual or random—when I am actually casual or random in my writing, I can’t stand what I’ve written.
My natural affinities want control. But the obviously controlled poem disappoints me too.
In such a poem it seems someone is pulling a number on me. Or worse still, if I’ve written it, I am pulling a number on myself: the sinkhole of many zeroes.
I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ve been trying for years to do whatever it is—and sometimes it works out! (Can I say this in an interview, after poet-splaining so much!)
When I am satisfied with the poem’s syllable texture I leave it alone and make another, then fit them together, if that might suit them...
I say in Vallejo’s Marrow: “Doubt is form”. Surety is a killer—the poem can wear a wise costume, or a dunce costume, but its birthday suit is doubt.
Doubt, and a ranging, gathering curiosity. Plus, I find that what the poem brings when invited is a hint of slyness that doesn’t come from me...
but from an accumulation of momentum and pressure—from where? Maybe from Tradition, centuries of compulsion, the folk-ways, a multilingual lyric urge...
My favourite explorer is Viola da Gamba.
rm: I am quite fond of the sense of not knowing what one is doing, as that, as I’ve heard, is when one actually explores. It is those that act certain of what they’re doing I’m always wary of. Through such, how do you see your current work? Do your books remain separate, self-contained projects, or steps in and across a wider continuum? How do your books, seemingly each composed with and through a singular thought-line, find their shapes in comparison to each other?
Ph: I want to put this question in context—it is March 1st at Otty Lake, it is snowing, and colder weather is due tomorrow.
Yesterday that dangerous pig in Washington revealed himself to be Putin’s secret weapon. He attacked Ukraine like a schoolyard bully with a bomb.
Meanwhile, I had breakfast in Perth with John Steffler, and later went for a hike with Chris Turnbull into an abandoned mica mine near here. There were deer on the road. We are all scared.
At Home Hardware they are selling Snowball Molds! Get a perfect snowball every time!
I am re-reading Janet Malcolm’s book Reading Chekhov. And so have written a poem called “Chekhov”. Here it is, my latest, still cooling:
While I hold it open
this book I am reading
has a long shadow
down its inner spine
where the pages curve
& are held awhile by glue
I worked in a book factory once
I saw the folio beheaded
my father is tracing & cutting
a gasket out of a cereal box
my mother is sewing & braiding
a rag rug worse for wear
what Boxer the old dog is saying
to the groundhog stomach
between his front paws in the yard
sounds dire & expeditious
to find my next poem
I will have to walk away
from even the glow
of the nearest town
past the last farm light
into illiteracy again
Like Tom Raworth, I like to take a day’s accumulated interest-bits and allow them to be one poem. So John and Chris will recognize elements of our conversations from yesterday in this one.
If what is needed is defiance, where is it in this poem—I suppose it suggests a defiance by retreat, away from electricity and civic shame, into silence or a growl or privacy. The defiance of reading!
I accept what doesn’t seem to fit or work together, and I see what I can make from it all.
As Paul Metcalfe says: “The only real work is keeping things from falling together too soon.”
The news is not good—from outside and inside, my poems respond, despite themselves. And my books change necessarily too.
They each represent a period of focus. Preoccupations. Heal awhile here, hide awhile there.
When I finish a notebook, I put elastic around it so that all the insert scraps can’t fall out, then I find another and keep going...
If I repeat myself it is in the way of refrains in old ballads. My spleen calls to a scrub cedar, then the scrub cedar answers in its own language. Then they sing the chorus together...
We might say that each of my books is a series of field recordings in the tradition of Helen Creighton and Mike Seeger.
I have been listening to what seems to need listening to...no great claims. Attentiveness.
What I hear is despair and resolution, defiance and panic, avoidance and misguided trust. In me, and out here.
But also—a communal belief in daily routines that have always been welcomed as love.
--
Born
in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [photo credit:
Marc Perez] currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two
wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade
books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the
poetry collection Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), On Beauty: stories
(University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best
of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing,
2023). This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry
collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller
(2022). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International
Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as
writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
