Now I can’t reckon my own
maelstroms
without a pen this pencil bump
these two grown out but silent banjo nails
especially when I’m now
of
& un-of / unlit &
up late
revisiting deference revising defiance
looking at one hand writing with the other
.
No work ‘til maybe spring
ambition a full tank of gas (“AnyWord”)
There is an increased density to his work with each succeeding collection, one that also allows his attention to the moment, minutae and intricacies of language and experience to linger. He lingers, there. He lingers, as much as he might carve away through revision, a suggestion he has referenced multiple times, pulling his language back towards a “silence” he never manages to achieve (or can’t possibly avoid). Each thought, through his lyric, turned and turned over, so as to catch a different side of it, possibly; a different angle of light. Structurally, there is something of the accumulation of short stanzas of dense lines and couplets, alternating slight indentation, that Hall has latched onto as his best thinking form, and this, in many ways, allows for a sense of ongoingness between his published collections. One poem, one might say, to paraphrase Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” must immediately and directly lead to a further poem; each book, as well, leading directly to the next.
Above the horizon tree design
this spring’s cursiveface
Bookman Old Style Hydra #62
.
Mis-drawn fate allows uncooked elequentia
the foreign word seems riper for italics
foreign as curlier lighter smarter
but if there be no foreign
words anymore
no foreign anymore only repetition
to use no italics means
the end of Other
the end of
over there
welcome Overe
.
Christopher Dewdney’s spelling of their
as theiyr
(theirs & yrs & i combined) is apt (“Italics”)
According
to the notes at the back of the collection, the bulk of Toward a Blacker
Ardour was composed while he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of
New Brunswick in Fredericton, “during the fall & winter 2018-2019 during
which much of this was revised & balanced.” The book is structured as a
decalogue of poem-sequences, strung as along a clothesline in a cool breeze: “AnyWord,”
“Italics,” “Territories,” “Grim,” “Varve,” “Landline,” “Concatenations,” “Nature,”
“Calendar 2017” and “Addendum.” “I build this now,” he writes, as part of the opening
sequence, “from my stupid journals [.]” Toward a Blacker Ardour utilizes
Hall’s ongoing concerns, attentions and readings as an exploration on form
itself: writing so that he may better understand the mechanics of writing, and
the possibilities of what that writing, and the furthering of his silence,
might just shake loose. “The reluctant retreat / towards silence,” he writes,
as part of “Calendar 2017,” “in each revision // unproven unimproving // shakes forth improv [.]” There is something of the
self-isolating monk in Hall’s lines, how his narrator-self presents throughout—“I
am making small adjustments to the forme // forme refers
to anything you have looked up in the chase” (“Italics”)—an idea
not entirely foreign when you consider that his small collection Notes from
Gethsemani originated from time he spent at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 2012, or even the fact of his multiple Writer-in-Residence
positions at a variety of Canadian universities over the years. The late John Thompson,
a poet Hall has referenced previously, might have begun the ongoingness of his
own infamous lyric, Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1976)
with “Now you have burned your books: you’ll go / with nothing but your blind,
stupefied heart,” but Hall assembles the loose, scattered fragments of his life
and his enthusiasms in an isolation that depends upon his reading, his
memories, his family, his friends, his books and his interactions with the
world, which in the end, isn’t really isolation at all.
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