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).
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
9th grader and he lived at the exalted level of the 10th
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.
