rob mclennan : Doubt is Form : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Phil Hall

  

 

 

 

 

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 1^st 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.

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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.

Conyer Clayton : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Chris Turnbull

 

 

 

 

Chris Turnbull is the author of cipher forthcoming from Beautiful Outlaw Press in spring 2024, [ untitled ] in o w n (CUE Books 2014), and Continua (Chaudiere Books 2015). Her poetry chapbooks, collaborations, and installation pieces are in print, online, and within landscapes. She curates a footpress, rout/e, whereby poetry can be found on trails (www.etuor.wordpress.com).

Chris Turnbull reads in Ottawa on Saturday, March 23,2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.

Conyer Clayton: You have a new book coming out, cipher (Beautiful Outlaw Press) — very exciting! Can you tell readers a bit about it?

Chris Turnbull: cipher considers landscape refashioned by disaster and cyber, including the adoption of words used to refer to tangible/physical experiences and realities. Several figures — The Curator, the kids, “we” — flicker in and out. Duration is difficult to pinpoint.

I’ve been working slowly on this manuscript for several years — and over this period considering seeming societal withdrawals ‘from’ the outdoors. I wonder how other generations might mediate their experiences of, or limit fears of, various elements of our physical worlds. I think this conundrum is important — there is no conclusion, but cipher presents possibilities. How do these generations relate to or make world(s)? Land does not take precedence, screens, networks, are central and unbound: the marsh is ripped at corner.

CC: I’ve been following along your project rout/e for a while now, where you place poems along trails. On the website, you say, “Language is visual, sonic, and kinetic. When I return to the poems in rout/e, they’ve usually changed in some way — a crease in the paper shifts a line’s interpretation; condensation may obscure the clarity of how a word is visualized; the branches from a fallen tree might cause difficulty in reading the poem or navigating a trail, or someone may have taken the entire poem away.” In your new forthcoming book cipher, you say, “the kids refuse the forest.” Is there a connection in the poetics of rout/e and cipher?

CT: No, not really. rout/e was initially a small press publication that I had started in Vancouver and, eventually, didn’t want to continue publishing it in paper format. I am outdoors a fair amount — rout/e started as a result of my experiences outdoors and some thinking about how poetry (language) can be experienced. I started placing/planting poems on trails with an idea that discovering a poem on a trail might enable access, in a way, to poetry outside of a school or scholastic setting. It was a way to get poems off the shelf and out of archive — to try to enable a different form of encounter. Outdoors, a poem might (like the landscape folks walk through/with) not be in a form that’s expected. rout/e and cipher aren’t that much alike in form or impetus.

CC: Can you speak to what change or loss is being mediated throughout your book? What surrounding is cipher attempting to navigate through language?

CT: Our surroundings and relationships are mediated through language and through our senses. Language itself is a surrounding — how a sentence is ordered, or what is left out of a line — organizing syntax to make “sense” or present perspective. Change and loss are different things. cipher presents possibilities of both, experienced through forms of absence and forms of focus.  In cipher, continuities are disrupted by eco-disasters; the figures in cipher are intermittent and from different periods of time. How do they describe their experiences, what they feel, what is remembered? Maybe none of cipher is grounded in ways we understand, maybe experience is best explained by wearables and augmentation — if so, can language adequately describe our sensory and cognitive experiences, such as love? When I started writing cipher, what I wanted was a different lexicon for a changing, curious, time…and as I thought about it, I saw that the language (in English) that we use to describe our environments and the interactions within those environments, have become transposed.

CC: I am really intrigued, as someone who has worked so deeply with the natural world as a collaborator in your poetics, with this movement into deep consideration of cyber realities and virtual environments in your new work. Can you talk a bit about this shift?

CT: We live in a very wired environment; it’s just not obvious, or perhpas is understated. I think humans are very adroit at inventing and creating environments for short term benefit, although the long term effects can have multiples of negatives and positives. I think we’re also very adroit, and invested, in creating stories about our realities and our experiences of our surroundings. I see an enormous investment of time for many of us in online, cyber mediated, realities and wonder about how we might be evolving, or how online environments affect our abilities to inter-relate or understand the varieties of interactions that occur invisibly, minutely, or obviously in a “real” world. I have been involved with a lot of kids in outdoor environments and noted symptoms of agitation and mood changes when away from their devices for a few days; I have noted the same with adults, although adults can mask a bit better. I’ve noted that the “sense” of time — typically aided by getting things done, moving around, interacting — is disrupted too. Things that should be firmanent, in cipher, aren’t. What is being navigated?

CC: Why a long, sequential poem?

CT: It just worked out that way, probably because it’s an exploratory piece. I don’t often write single poems — partially because I prefer not to title pieces and like the open nature of a sequential poem. The other component of writing a longer sequence is that pacing can be modified in ways that, in a shorter poem, is limited. cipher can be very slow in its pacing — this is deliberate — some lines clusters can be, if read out loud, related to the pace of particular movements (e.g. walking).

CC: Your work is often very visual, with ample white space. What is your method for translating your work to performance? 

CT: Well, I come to write/perform from off the page — and continua and [untitled] in o w n — are spatially oriented in ways that cipher is not. White space is an invention for paper. It’s not just visual, or seen by its contrast with the shape of letters or images: it can be represented in performance by breath, time, physical action/gesture. It contributes to the “platform” that is the page. continua, particularly, for example, is a poetry-play — a multi-voice/polyphonic poem. The white spaces are as much prop as the language or the photographs. The page is a dynamic: you can’t avoid white space — so what does that mean for the placement of words on a page, and the movement of the eye “across” or “within” the page?—the focus of one’s eyes…we’re not just reading letters into words. [untitled] is more tightly constrained, in terms of its white space, and acts as a conversation/meditation on environmental policy, degradation, and beauty, among other things. In the past, a few friends have assisted me to read continua, and we marked passages and practiced the pacing, interjection, pauses, and harmonies. The same could be done for [untitled].

Another way to perform them is via videopoem — which is a form I really enjoy developing. continua, [untitled[ in o w n, and cipher are all on vimeo in whole or part form. cipher is here: https://vimeo.com/923378242

 

 

 

 

 

Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer and editor from Kentucky now living in Ottawa, whose multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, addiction, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens. Their latest book is But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award, Anvil Press). They are a Senior Editor at Augur, Nonfiction Editor for untethered magazine, and guest edited issues of CV2 and Room Magazine. You can find their nonfiction and poetry in Best Canadian Poetry 2023, This Magazine, Room Magazine, filling Station, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Capilano Review, and others.