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.

J-T Kelly : A Conversation with Poet Kyla Houbolt

 

 

 

 

Houbolt and Kelly met on the old bird app and keep up their acquaintance on bluesky. Sometimes they send each other poems. And sometimes they send each other their opinions. Kelly in italics.

 

Hi, Kyla! Thanks for being willing to do this email interview with me.  I want to start with one of my favorite poems of yours.

Lead Pipe Cinch

inch by inch
the calendar absorbs
that ectoplasmic gloss
of old photos
but also that old timey
time when everyone
was a flower

There's a lot going on in this short poem, but I want to focus for a second on the vocabulary. Cinch, calendar, ectoplasmic, old timey — This is not the sort of text prediction that AI does. How do you think about where your mind goes next? Word to word. How do you think about where your eyes go next?

I don't recall how I did this, but I must have started with the title phrase (which is a weird one in itself, what the heck IS a lead pipe cinch? Probably a plumbing tool, not a foregone conclusion but never mind that). Then went to the easy rhyme of "inch" and then from spatial measure to time measure... and then the thought of the calendar absorbing time as it passes; ectoplasmic is a lovely old fashioned idea about what exists of living things just "outside" the physical apparent. Gloss goes first, in the erosion of time, like the top layer of emulsion on something as ephemeral as a photograph. Ectoplasm already invoked for me "old timey" and when I asked Poet Self "old timey what?" the notion of each human being having a delicate tender part, a flower, that we used to acknowledge (in my romantic imagination anyway). What flower are you? Time passing absorbs memory, consumes it.

Poet Self, hmm... I know a bit of your biography but not much: in and around college where you got some suspect advice about not using big words out of solidarity with the working class; some time in Kentucky where you posted poems on the trunks of trees; more recently in the Pacific Northwest, moving frequently, tending goats and flowers; and in the last few years publishing poems in journals and a string of chapbooks. How did old Poet Self get her start? And what does she think of where the path has led to?

First off, it was North Carolina, not Kentucky, where I put poems on trees. But I understand; my wanderings are hard to track, even for me. Before there was old Poet Self, there was young Poet Self, who put in a decades long apprenticeship of a kind. I don't know where I got the idea, initially, to write poems, but in my early 20s I made a concerted effort to learn how, by reading a lot (great gulps of Emily Dickinson) and doing many revisions of what I wrote. The single workshop I took in those years (though there was one later, in San Francisco, run by Bob Gluck...) was a weekend offered by Judson Jerome, then poetry editor of Writer's Digest, on his land, in Maryland I think it was? -- a communal living situation called Downhill Farm. The Mason Dixon line ran through it unless I am remembering some other place. Anyway, that was fun. I did get one poem published in those early days, in a newsprint tabloid called Cedar Rock. You'd think that would have been exciting for me but in fact it put me off sending out work for many years, because when I received my four contributor's copies I realized no one I knew would ever read this poem in this publication and I had a deep "so what's the point?" feeling. Instead I managed to find a series of really low key situations where I could read and share poems. I dipped a toe in the slam movement when it first started but then veered off that pathway in order to do some environmental activism, which consumed most of my creative juice for a while. During that time I made collages and after for a while wrote a few fabulist short stories, which I did try to publish but was daunted by the whole process and set those aside. I did keep trickling out poems ("can't stop won't stop") and found my way much later onto an online writers forum where I put in some serious work but didn't write anything worth much. There was one poet there whose work I admired a lot. He left and went to Twitter, and I went there after a while also, because I wanted to read more of his work. He wasn't posting much at all by then, but you, J-T, surely remember what a rich field it was for a while, for poets. I found it liberating, and consumed poetry there, and my work became orders of magnitude better, just by means of my seeing what was possible. Still, given the really sort of unregulated process this poetry journey has been, it's rather amazing to me that I actually have five chapbooks in print. I continue to feel the movement of learning from what I read and seeing how I might grow what I write into -- here I lack the word -- improvement of a kind.

This is that first poem I published, an ekphrastic inspired by a photograph, though I didn't learn that term for years:

Apart

Sheets and shirts
are hung on the line with pins.
The one shirt on the hanger
walks into the house.

It's up there alone
in the dark under the porch roof.
The back is bent, elbows swing
invisible hands perfectly.
It's easy to see the legs follow
in the black space underneath.

Apart,
it has put back on its body.
Oh god for a face
before the back door opens

Originally published in Cedar Rock, sometime in the mid 1970’s, probably 1974. This is the first poem I ever published. Cedar Rock was a small newsprint tabloid edited by David Yates.

That poem's a real gift. Thank you.

What poems have changed you along the way? You mentioned Emily Dickinson. Are there others? From back then, from today? A poet or a poem that got under your skin and affected how you approach writing? Also, what places have similarly gotten to you and changed you? A city? A house? A highway?

Everything. Everything has gotten and gets under my skin and changes me. I can't think of anything that has not! This to me is the appeal of writing poetry (in part, always in part): to document, to express that relationship with the world and existence, which is a process of awakening.

However, I'll choose some specifics. First, Gary Snyder has been a major nourishment for my writing. It's like I got permission to write in ordinary speech from his poems, which all feel in a way intimately human, like someone sitting in the room with you talking about things -- the most mundane and the most sublime. Well, before that though, in high school I felt joy to discover the Beat poets for that permission to free up language. e. e. cummings experimental ways were similarly a source of permission. Then much more recently, the existence of the New York School of poets, especially Frank O'Hara, who for some reason claimed two birthdays and the fake one is also mine! Ha! I began my writing journey with the intention of aiming for poems that are easily accessible to anyone who can read English, which also upon closer reading contain depths that sort of go on forever. A goal I shall never reach of course, and lately that "accessibility" wish has become less important as I enjoy taking more risks and pushing the language. (For instance, at this time I consider John Ashbery to be the single greatest American poet.) Sometimes writing a poem feels like pushing the language away from its enclosing structure, pushing it out of shape so that there is more room inside. And here's something else: This question of yours came in just as I was unpacking my books, which had been stored for me by a kind poet friend, and I was reminded about Spencer Holst! whose book The Zebra Storyteller came into my hands in a magical way. It was in a wonderful bookstore in Santa Cruz CA, Logos, which had a huge selection of everything, used and new books both. I was browsing the section of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and The Zebra Storyteller had been mis-shelved there. It didn't literally fall on my head but it might as well have. I read a little in it and immediately thought "I can do that too!" which was a delightful boost to my writing.

"A city? A house? A highway?" What a delicious prompt that is! But at this moment I have to leave my answer as it stands: everything has changed me. 9/11 which finally spurred me to get on the internet was most definitely a watershed event. Via the internet I learned about Dean Young when he died! I immediately bought a copy of Shock by Shock, and it fed me. And how can I not mention Han Shan, otherwise known as Cold Mountain? The old Chinese poets....

I am always aware that my list of poets I love is heavily male. Re: the New York School, I intentionally sought out Bernadette Meyer and Alice Notely -- Meyer I have not warmed to so much; Notely I have been really inspired by, mostly by seeing her online reading her work, which I believe she still does. And this is a terribly almost painfully incomplete answer! I have to end here though; day has come.

[I woke to the news that Trump had taken Pennsylvania overnight and then Wisconsin at 5:34 AM, giving him the electoral votes to become the next president. I closed my news app and opened my email thread with Kyla.]

Well. Let's talk about poetry.

I wonder how you approach revision, Kyla. And has your approach changed over time? I know that you've been in the habit of writing short pieces and sharing them online. Do you go back to those poems? Are the poems in your chapbooks from a different process? How do you think about a poem being finished?

My approach has changed and I hope will keep changing. In the early days I really had no idea how to revise or polish or make it better, but I just chipped away. I picked up clues here and there. I read an article (forget by whom) about "getting off the subject", meaning that what you start addressing needs to go somewhere else, or else you don't really have a poem. Much later I learned that this is called a turn, or volta. (I do not believe this is an absolute; in fact the one absolute I believe in about poems is that there are no absolutes.) If I have a good metaphor I can't just let it be, oh, that's a good description of x. I have to take it somewhere, and I try to take it somewhere unexpected, something that's not signaled to the reader until, boom!, it happens. Another clue I picked up -- I think it was a YouTube video of a talk by, maybe, Jane Hirshfield? who said "don't embarrass yourself." What I have to guard against there is a kind of emotional over-sentimentality. Sometimes, years later, just reading my own poems can bring me to tears but I labor not to have that be obvious at all.

When I started out trying to be intentional about poetry, in my early 20s, I studied metrics and I knew all the feet and rhythmic patterns. I could not even identify them now, but some of that took root I guess, because a big thing for me is that the poem has to sound right when I read it out loud to myself and a lot of that has to do with rhythm. As for the short poems I post online, those posts sort of became my "trees" when I stopped posting poems on trees. I do go back to them but rarely change them. Sometimes. Many of the poems in my chapbooks first appeared as posts online. Longer poems usually take longer to write and more steps to the process. A few shorter poems sit around for a long time before they get finished. Ha! I am thinking of one poem I wrote many years ago that I still have not found an ending for. I keep hoping I'll come up with something! This has been known to happen in a few instances, after years go by.

Finished is a combination of 1, it sounds good to my ear; 2, I can't come up with any way to improve it; and 3, I'm no longer interested in working with it. It's really, in the end, a matter of intention. I have to feel that every element of the poem is there intentionally. If I discover I have repeated a word, I usually have to find a substitute for one instance of the word, but sometimes the repetition is useful. Line breaks are important. Often I will fiddle with where I place them until it feels right.

Boxes, huh? Maybe you're right. Come to think of it, I have a poem about living in a box. That's for another time. But, Kyla, I want to thank you for your candor and for sharing your poems and your mind with me. Would you wrap up this interview by telling us what you are reading now? I have the idea you read many books at once, and I'd love to have a peek at what you're in the middle of. Thanks!

Thank you, Hyphen, for inviting me to this conversation, it's been stimulating. As for multiple books at once, I used to do that much more than I do now. As you know, I just returned to NC after two years wandering and looking for a better place to be, which I did not find. And my books were being hosted by a kind poet friend and I have most of them unpacked now, so I'm greeting old friends. I am reading Kenneth Koch's Collected Poems for the book club currently underway, celebrating the 100th year since his birth. I am also dipping in to my old friend Cold Mountain (Han Shan) and a little book of poems called Understander by N.W. Lea, given to me by rob mclennan (thanks, rob!) Visiting again with The Water Engine by my friend Ankh Spice, and in the middle of a collection called The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, by Denis Johnson. I am awaiting delivery of I Remember by Joe Brainard, too, and will no doubt be reading that soon as it arrives. It's a joy to have my books around me again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kyla Houbolt writes poems and occasional reviews, and makes gardens. Find her on her website at https://kylahoubolt.us/, on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/luaz.bsky.social, and on her Linktree, https://linktr.ee/luaz_poet

 

 

 

 

J-T Kelly is the author of the chapbook Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023). His poetry appears in The Denver Quarterly (upcoming), Bad Lilies, and elsewhere. He is an innkeeper in Indianapolis.