ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL, eds. Mark Goldstein and Jaclyn Piudik

 

It must be noted that Hall is one of the most widely and deeply read people I know. Years after he won the Governor General’s Award, he told me that, “It’s very, very difficult to recognize a good work.” Moreover, Hall has a Master’s degree which he completed at the University of Windsor in the 1970s. No small feat, considering Hall was the first person in his family to finish high school. When I asked Hall why he didn’t pursue a PhD (which he’d considered) he said, “Because I didn’t want it to dry me out.”

The idea for this Festschrift was inspired in 2021 by the publishing efforts of the inimitable polymath Nick Drumbolis and his remarkable imprint LETTERS. And though this Festschrift is a gathering of writings for Hall as he turns 70, it is not a birthday party. It is an opportunity to give thanks for the years of steady friendship, mentorship, and work that he has provided. (Mark Goldstein, “Preface”)

I’m not usually in the habit of reviewing a collection I have work in, but recently a Canadian contemporary said they didn’t know what a “festschrift” was, so thought that prompt enough to discuss the recent ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL, eds. Mark Goldstein and Jaclyn Piudik (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024). Unlike the more formal essay series produced by, say, Guernica Editions (another essential grouping of responses), the literary festschrift allows for more of a range of responses-as-celebration, from the critical to the creative and all between, from essays and interviews to small memoir pieces, poems and photographs.

Festschrifts produced by a trade publisher do occasionally (very occasionally) emerge, but over the past few decades in Canadian writing, at least, it had been the journals doing the bulk of this kind of work, with a variety of special issues through The Capilano Review focusing on works by Robin Blaser, George Stanley [see my review of such here], Sharon Thesen [see my review of such here] and George Bowering, among others, or Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (1965-2013), a journal that included special festschrift issues on bpNichol, Steve McCaffery [see my review of such here], Barbara Godard [see my review of such here] and Ray Ellenwood, not to mention a variety of other journals over the years that have less frequently featured special issues on particular writers, whether Arc Poetry Magazine on Erín Moure, Prairie Fire on Dennis Cooley or The Chicago Review on Lisa Robertson [see my review of such here], etcetera. Given how far the festschrift seems to have fallen by the wayside (mainly through a slow decrease of proper publisher funding and that 1990s drop-off in library funding, which reduced their purchasing power), I began producing a series of similar chapbook-sized festschrift publications during the Covid-era through above/ground press (I thought the Covid period could use some increased positive)—the “Report from the Society” series—with more than a dozen published volumes to-date, which also includes one on the work of Phil Hall (a reworked version of Susan Gillis’ piece from mine appears in this current collection).

There might be those who recall A Trip Around McFadden (Toronto ON: The Front Press/Proper Tales Press, 2010), the festschrift produced by Stuart Ross and Jim Smith to celebrate David W. McFadden’s 70^th birthday, or the combined four hundredth issue of 1cent/thirteenth issue of news notes that jwcurry produced on the work of Judith Copithorne (“for Judith with love”) [see my review of such here], but how many might recall Raging Like a Fire: A Celebration of Irving Layton (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1993), the festschrift edited by Henry Beissel and Joy Bennett? There are probably others, naturally, that I’m either unaware of, or simply can’t recall at the moment, but either way, there simply aren’t as many out there as should be. Volumes such as these are important parts of literary conversation and acknowledgement (as are volumes of selected poems, something that occurs far less since the Governor General’s Award declared them ineligible for consideration back in the late 1990s), none of which is occurring nearly enough, so a volume on award-winning Perth, Ontario poet, critic, editor, mentor and teacher Phil Hall, especially one so brilliantly and thoroughly done, becomes an essential commodity.

In many ways, one can’t get much better than the short essay “Landscapes,” by Br. Lawrence Morey, a contributor who lives as a Trappist monk at the monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, that opens: “I first became aware of Phil Hall’s existence when I was in grade 9 and he was in grade 10. I had taken out the book Cariboo Horses by Al Purdy from the school library, which I loved. Those were the days in which you would write your name in the back of the book on a small, pasted-in form, along with the due date, which corresponded to a card in the librarian’s files. In front of my name on the form, I saw the name Phil Hall. I knew Phil to see him, but didn’t dare approach him, since I was a mere 9^th grader and he lived at the exalted level of the 10^th grade.” This particular perspective on Hall’s ongoing work is wonderful (and Morey’s biographical detail, itself, provides a curious insight into Hall’s Gethsemani sequence), as Morey writes, later on:

            Though poetry is Phil’s main medium, he also loves to make quirky sculptures out of found objects, bottle caps, paperclips, and other things. Like the work of Kurt Schwitters, his sculptures grow like living creatures. His journals are a mixture of writing, drawing, and pasted words and images. I think this reflects his working methods beautifully. In everything he does, he takes disparate pieces of things, letters, words, phrases, sequences, and molds them into something new, something surprising and revelatory.

Over the past decade, Toronto poet, editor, critic, publisher and book designer Mark Goldstein has evolved into one of Hall’s most thoroughly-considered supporters and critics, having now produced three full-length collections by Hall through his Beautiful Outlaw Press—Toward a Blacker Ardour (2021), The Ash Bell (2022) and Vallejo’s Marrow (2024)—as well as a chapbook (Essay on Legend, 2014) and postcard (Rampant, 2022) in small editions. Produced and co-edited by Goldstein, ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL may be wonderfully expansive and even exhaustive, but it should be noted that his own contributions include the essay “A Maker’s Dozen: from Eighteen Poems to Killdeer,” a whopping sixty-six page essay that examines, as he writes at the offset, “Phil Hall’s published body of work from 1973 to 2011. With a focus on form (as well as syntax and subject), I will investigate Hall’s line through thirteen trade editions and how it changed over the nearly forty-year span since he first saw his work published.” Living writers, especially those still active and engaged, are rarely provided such thorough, thoughtful examination, and Goldstein should be commended for not only this piece, but his ongoing critical work, which itself is provided not nearly as much attention as it deserves [see my review of his 2021 Part Thief, Part Carpenter: SELECTED POETRY, ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS ON APPROPRIATION AND TRANSLATION, produced through Beautiful Outlaw as well, here]. As Goldstein writes as part of his lengthy essay:

            To be clear, by employing the term poetic form, I am pointing to the structural and organizational patterns of a poem, including its (subtle or more obvious) rhyme scheme, meter, stanza structure, lineation, sentence structure, and other elements that shape its overall configuration and design on the page. In light of free verse, poetic form has played a significant role in the development of contemporary poetry, as poets like Hall have experimented with new forms and pushed the boundaries of traditional structures to create highly readable yet neoteric and innovative styles of writing.
            As I’ll show in this essay, Hall’s sense of form was first influenced by both traditional and modern forms of poetry found within the canon, and later it was increasingly written in concert and conversation with contemporary and postmodern poetry itself. Hall is a careful reader of all types of poetry (and literature) and has thought deeply about form. He has considered his own use of free verse and, rather than adhering to accepted rules or anti-rules of meter and rhyme – whether outmoded or contemporary – he has, over time, experimented with myriad structures and patterns in his poetic line. This has likely afforded Hall a greater flexibility in expressing his ideas and emotions in poetry. This has also pushed him to develop new poetic forms of his own design, as well adapt or redeploy older ones – such as the prose poem and the haibun – to his own unique use. Moreover, Hall has slowly gravitated toward an expansive use of his own idiosyncratic forms and sub-forms which are drawn from the dictates and necessities of his own poetry’s deployment.
            Against a more prescribed approach to form, Hall has said, “What are we making? Sausage?”

At more than three hundred pages and twenty-six contributors, ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL includes poems, essays, reminiscences and interviews by George Bowering, Erín Moure, Don McKay, Sandra Ridley, George Stanley, Steven Ross Smith, Tom Dilworth, Cameron Anstee, Br. Lawrence Morey, Mark Goldstein, Susan Gillis, myself, luke hathaway, Nicole Markotić, Fred Wah, Louis Cabri, Karl Jirgens, Arthur Craven, Chris Turnbull, Ali Blythe, John Steffler, Pearl Pirie, Donald Winkler, Ronna Bloom, Andrew Vaisius and Angela Carr, as well as an array of photographs of Hall over the years—including an early 1980s photo at Michael McNamara’s apartment on page 272 where he looks the spitting image of a late 2000’s former Ottawa poet Jesse Patrick Ferguson—and a healthy bibliography of Hall’s published work. The responses run the gamut from the personal to the intimate to the critical and the celebratory (with most incorporating most if not all of those features), many of which I’m still working my slow way through reading [the video of the zoom-launch for the collection, which included readings by Hall, Moure, Blythe, Ridley and myself, is now online]. As Angela Carr writes to introduce the first of two interviews she conducted with Hall: “Phil Hall is to poetry in Canada what style is to reason.” The essay by Pearl Pirie is easily the strongest critical work I’ve seen by her to date, and both Moure and Blythe offer pieces that delight in their scale and intimate scope. The collected pieces offer such appreciation and delight, attempting to share or discern the shapes of how Hall reacts, presents and writes, and both the generosity and curiosity of a writer decades-deep into an appreciation of how the poem moves, or might move, or could move. It becomes hard to highlight much in this collection without wanting to reproduce whole pages, which I won’t do here, but I shall leave the last words to Hall himself, out of one of those interviews conducted by Angela Carr, where he speaks of the late Stan Dragland in such a way that it could be applied to Hall and his work, as well:

It is a style (one thing reminds me of another) that can easily go wrong. If a writer seems to be padding, if a writer seems to be flailing or name-dropping, if the examples seem too carefully or metaphorically fetched. But Stan makes in his essays each step of his argument seem inevitable, so that we say, “Of course!” Then, at the end of an essay by him there’s that feeling of having participated in a dance – & having gotten somewhere unexpected, wider.

It has a lot to do with texture. And character. And with a widening of community. During the time I knew Stan, from 1984 until this year, he moved toward an on-rush of critical herding & gathering that can be breathtaking to read. Breathtaking in its humility & faith. He had a deep faith in us. He believed that we, his friends, were worth it – worth every quirky added bit – and worth every word.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Allison Thung

Allison Thung is a Singaporean poet and project manager. She is the author of Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) and the forthcoming Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified ‘you’ (Hem Press, 2025). Her poetry has been published in ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, Cease, Cows, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Allison reads poetry for ANMLY. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @poetrybyallison, or at www.allisonthung.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Although it’s only been a little over a month since its official release, Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) has been several years in the making, plus I’ve known since I was fourteen that I wanted to someday see my words in print, so it’s definitely felt like a longtime dream fulfilled. More practically, it is tangible assurance that my words have a place in the world; a reminder to keep writing.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I actually started writing prose before I found my way to poetry. Growing up, I mostly read short story collections, young adult novels, and comic books, and so I naturally tended towards fiction when I began writing. It wasn’t until I returned to the written word after a hiatus of eight years, saturated with emotions I couldn’t fully access via prose, that poetry became my genre of choice.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It really depends. Reacquaint took me maybe 18 months, but that’s because it started as standalone pieces that I later brought together to create a coherent manuscript and narrative. Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified 'you', which is forthcoming with Hem Press in 2025, as well as two other chapbook manuscripts I have out on submission, were each completed within a few months; the poems for those were written with the inherent understanding that they were meant to be part of larger manuscripts.

Save for two or three, I don’t think I’ve ever significantly changed any poem between their first and final drafts. Most of the time, my poems appear close to their final form, and editing focuses on flow, grammar, and specific word choices.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Poem: Often from the middle of a sentence I am saying to someone else, which I imagine is kind of annoying for the other person, because then I stop talking to make a note. Sometimes from a longtime rumination suddenly become coherent and distinct from the rest of the noise inside my head. Occasionally from a dream.

Approach: These days I prefer to work on a “book” from the start, though it’s important to me that the individual poems can stand on their own. That said, I do still write standalone pieces that don’t fit into a larger theme if I think them necessary to exist.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy readings, but it’s something I reserve for after the work has been officially published. My creative process is mostly an exercise in solitude, save for the very occasional times I share pieces about which I have doubts, or for which I have particular affection, with trusted individuals.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

At its core, my poetry seeks greater meaning in the mundane, and to finally put into coherent sentences the many ruminations and emotions that bounce around inside my head.  I spent much of my life worrying that I had lived too underwhelmingly for me to have something worth writing about, and every poem is a much-needed reminder that it’s less about what you’ve experienced, and more about how you perceive and process said experiences.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I don’t know if “role” is the word I’d use. Maybe concerns? But to answer the question, I think it would vary greatly based on the type of writer you are. A journalist, for example, would have very different concerns from a novelist.

At the personal level, I write to tell stories, make sense of my interior and exterior worlds, and defy mortality in some small way.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential and appreciated. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Forgive yourself”, specifically said to me. It’s not something I’m good at.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I tend to alternate between phases of unshakeable writer’s block and intense creativity, and my writing practices—I wouldn’t use the term routine—differ accordingly. In the former phase, I focus on taking detailed notes whenever ideas or lines come to me; in the latter, I try to draft something daily, even if it’s just a few words.

Generally, when I can write, I prefer silence, solitude, and to be at my desk on my own laptop.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Talking to other people, exercising, and getting out of the house can be helpful with idea generation, but I’ve come to accept that there isn’t very much I can do to affect the larger cycle that I mentioned in my response to the previous question.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Homemade lotus root or watercress soup, bubbling away in the slow cooker until its aroma permeates every inch of the house.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Neither nature nor music feature heavily in the work itself, nor do I tend to create in their midst—I’m very much a poet who prefers to write indoors at my desk, in absolute silence—but both are primary sources of inspiration.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I consider the work of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Richard Siken, and Chen Chen to be utterly essential. And then outside of the literary world, I have a lot of love and respect for Hozier’s lyricism and how he’s able to embody an entire world in just a few lines of lyrics.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d love to travel through Europe for a year or so, and then settle down in Ireland for a couple. Less ambitiously, I’d like to meet and hang out with a capybara or a wallaby.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Realistically, I’d probably still be a project manager, which is my current day job. Unrealistically, I’d be an architect, lawyer, or singer-songwriter.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It’s just what came most naturally to me whenever I needed to express myself or make sense of the world, and brought me the most satisfaction/fulfilment. Throughout my life, I’ve tried and enjoyed various forms of creativity, including art, craft, and music, but none of those have felt entirely “right” the way writing does.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book: Kerry Trautman’s Irregulars.

Film: I’m less a film and more a series person, so let’s go with Grace and Frankie.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a hybrid chapbook manuscript, and I’ve also got two more completed poetry chapbook manuscripts out on submission.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kim Trainor, A blueprint for survival: poems

 

327.45 ppm

I begin with 1972, year 11,972 of the Holocene era, the year The Ecologist published A Blueprint for Survival to warn that we were running out of time. My mom in a yellow tank top and bell-bottom jeans grips my sister by her left hand, me by the other. We’re dressed in identical play suits, apple-green sleeveless tops and sky-blue shorts. I’m barefoot, with a turquoise floral kerchief. I can feel the heat baked into the granular sidewalk, grit under my toes. From the front door of our house on east 56^th, an entrance we never use except for guests, there’s a clear view of Mount Baker. We always take the side entrance—through the mudroom where my mom stands for hours by the hinged window, pinning laundry with wooden pegs to the line, reeling it out to flap in the breeze, reeling it back again, sterilized by the sun. The snap of white sheets folded into squares. A fresh scoured smell of earth and wind. This is my earliest memory.

Writing from and through Delta, British Columbia and wildfire season while “charting a long-distance relationship,” Kim Trainor’s fourth full-length collection is A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), a book-length poem around climate crisis, fires and long-distance love, following her collections Karyotype (London ON: Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Toronto ON: Book*hug 2018), and A thin fire runs through me (Fredericton NB: Icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Furthering her examination of the book-length lyric suite, A blueprint for survival seems comparable Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] for their shared book-length British Columbia perspectives around climate crisis and wildfires, but with added layers of emotional urgency. As Trainor’s poem “Iridium,” set in the first section, includes: “I can’t read anymore. / There is no clear way. I will venture out along white tracks. Mark ink / on green-ruled numbered pages. Lay down strips of black carbon. Scatter / signals of plutonium and nitrogen, Tupperware, chicken bones, lead. / Absorb radionuclides. Take shelter. Mourn. Make fire. Write poems. / Conserve. Despair. Decay.”

There is a thickness to her lyric, writing undergrowth and foliage, of trees and scientific names. A few pages further into the first section, as the poem “Paper Birch” begins: “These are notes for a poem I meant to write in August, but poetry / seemed very far away then. The BC wildfires smudged the shoreline / of the Saskatchewan—everything ash on the tongue, like cigarettes / or coffee dregs, and the sun a smoked pink disc. / I had not seen you for weeks except by Skype (I’ll strip for you, / you said, and you did) but now in flesh meandering, / now talk, now silence, now climate change and / your research on the Boreal.” There is something of the long poem combined with both the poetic diary and book-length essay that Trainor offers in this collection, articulating crisis and climate but expanding into an agency of archival research and illustrations; she writes asides and footnotes and prose stretches through a lyric framework in an impressive book-length package. This is a highly ambitious and heartfelt collection, one that even provides echoes of the detailed lyric researches of one such as Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris, attending to the big idea through an accumulation of minute details. The scale of this volume is incredible. I don’t know how to begin.