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.

Stan Dragland (December 2, 1942 – August 2, 2022)

Sad to hear, via Toronto poet Ronna Bloom, that novelist, poet and literary critic Stan Dragland died earlier this week, half-through his eightieth year. As Stephen Brockwell responded to the news over email: “He was instrumental in shaping my perceptions of Canadian poetry. An open hearted, curious reader and writer.” Most probably already know that Dragland spent his teaching career the English Department at University of Western Ontario, where he remained until retirement (becoming Professor Emeritus), during which he was a co-founding editor and publisher of Brick Books (with Don McKay), a position he served until not that long ago, as well as a founding editor and publisher of Brick: A Literary Journal (with Jean McKay). After retirement, he relocated to St. John’s, Newfoundland and built a home with the writer and Pedlar Press publisher Beth Follett. He also published a stack of incredible books: if you look at his Wikipedia page, you can find a list of his titles, any and all of which I would highly recommend (I’ve even reviewed a few of them here and here; and mentioned him and his work in essays here and here).

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve always envied Stan Dragland’s ease with literary criticism; how he articulates the interconnectivity of reading, thinking, literature and living in the world in terms deceptively simple, deeply complex, and incredibly precise. I’ve envied his sentences, and how his prose connects seemingly unconnected thoughts, ideas and passages into highly complex and intelligent arguments that manage to collage with an almost folksy and deceptive ease (a quality his critical prose shares with the poetry of Phil Hall). If the 1960s and 70s saw George Bowering as one of the most prolific reviewers of Canadian poetry, and, as many have said, Frank Davey was our finest literary critic during the same period, Stan Dragland would emerge out of those years as a literary critic with an open and inviting heart, displaying a deep and abiding love for the materials he chose to explore. It was through Dragland’s eyes that I first understood just how wide-ranging criticism could be, as he brought in a myriad of thoughts, references and personal reflections to craft a criticism far more astute, and more intimate, than anything else out there.

I caught a second-hand copy of his Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages (Coach House Press, 1984) rather early in my twentysomething explorations, and was struck by his depth, composing perfect sentences of pure craft. It was through Dragland that I was allowed a further view into the work of writers such as Robert Kroetsch, Elizabeth Hay, Phil Hall, Lisa Moore and Margaret Avison. I’ve probably read through that collection a good dozen times, even taking it with me as part of reading tours, rereading his thoughts on Kroetsch, for example, some twenty years ago on the overnight passenger Via Train heading west beyond Winnipeg. Given how often I’ve picked it up over the years, it’s never where it should be on the shelf, and always takes forever to unearth. I can’t even figure out where it currently is, now that I want to look at it again. Instead, I offer an early paragraph of his more recent The Bricoleur & His Sentences (Pedlar Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]:

            Even casual reflection shows that the business of character, biography or autobiography, is a lot more complicated than a person might think. I got to thinking about this when Michael Ondaatje asked me to send him my bundle of sentences, because it’s personal and quirky and not meant to be shared without commentary. I began to think of it as a kind of postcard taped to the fridge. What would Michael and Mary Oliver and the barbershop dog think of it? I foresaw scratching of the head. Then I began to think about the word “bricoleur” as regularly applied to me by Don McKay. Might it fit not only my gathering and making of odd things, but also my puddle-jumping mind? Does it describe me all too well? This is not modesty. I think better sideways or in circles than straight on, so I hand my best attempts to others then do what I can to fix the flaws they spot. Do not imagine that this comes direct from me to you.

Dragland was kind enough to offer a reworked excerpt of The Difficult (2019) for my recent festschrift for Phil Hall, which included information in his author biography about a forthcoming title. As he wrote: “James Reaney on the Grid: An Essay will appear in 2022.”

Already some other tribute pieces have posted as well, such as over at Book*hug, and two poems by Ronna Bloom.

Condolences to his friends and family, including his children, and to Beth.

Phil Hall, NIAGARA & GOVERNMENT

The latest from Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall is the volume NIAGARA & GOVERNMENT (St. John’s, Newfoundland: Pedlar Press, 2020), a suite of meditations carved from lyric fragments (alternately: lyric fragments carved from a suite of meditations). Notwithstanding his Governor General’s Award win and Griffin Poetry Prize nomination, I always think there should be larger attentions provided Hall whenever a new volume of his poetry emerges, given how solid his centre remains, how collected his lyric collages, and how pervasive his wisdoms that tun through these myriad threads of reference, articulations, pauses and speculations. Phil Hall weighs, considers and stitches together a myriad of disconnects, excising the white noise from a potential overload of information into something uniquely coherent. The poems concurrently shudder, and remain sleek. At the end of the poem “Ars Poetica,” he writes:

I work toward an intimacy    an intricacy     approaching absurdity
  spielraum

from eked notes    of self-loathing    & affinity
  I invite a discordance

that cherishes    & defies

Through more than a dozen trade poetry collections, Hall has mined further and deeper into the complexities of language, his histories of abuse, addiction and recovery, and his attentiveness to mentors, contemporaries, tokens and folk art. As he writes in the sequence “Stan Dragland’s Wall”: “So folk art   & fine art   are one // folk   in its shed materials / fine   in its poetics of   amodal   disrepair // as with the first papier collés  by Braque 1912 / we must bring to this wall   a multiple perspective [.]” He stitches together a whole cloth out of scraps, and something valuable out of what others might easily discard, or overlook, allowing for a perspective more humble, and more democratic in scope. He writes Roy Kiyooka, Dolly Parton, Stan Dragland, Nudie Cohn, Lorine Niedecker, Emily Dickinson, Robert Duncan and Eugene Mcnamara. He writes of “the legendary Joe Junkin,” “the goalie for the Bobcaygeon Ti-Cats [.]” He writes of rude songs, typos and the bottom of the seemingly bottomless bottom. 

Increasingly, Hall writes an unbroken, elegiac line composed of lyric fragments, cadence and the pregnant pause, moving further along a path he constructs as he walks, following bpNichol’s “poem as long as a life.” In NIAGARA & GOVERNMENT, more than he has done with his other recent works—including Conjugation (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016) [see my review of such here] and My Banjo & Tiny Drawings (Toronto ON: Flat Singles Press, 2015) [see my review of such here]—he writes as though his life depends upon it; how recovery is a process not a goal-post. He writes with the perspective that the true way, or at least his way, through and potentially past the far end of trauma is through language: “without a mask I am no past / without a past I am an amalgam devoid of loyalty // except to the presenting moment / its deep accordion sigh // the next word has / my true ancestors within it [.]” (“Bottom”).

As Hall’s friend and contemporary Stan Dragland offers in his essay “DIFFICULTIES,” from The Difficult (Pedlar Press, 2019):

“I guess to be sincerely, honestly difficult,” says poet Phil Hall, “a poem has to be heard by the poet who made it as merely the clearest possible talk its maker could come up with.” Difficult English poet J.H. Prynne has a related thought about poetic responsibility. He differentiates “post-modernist playfulness, where meaning is allowed to skim across a surface in a deliberately arbitrary way” from something that goes deeper. “[T]he use of difficulty as a method of poetic thought is different both in intention and effect from difficulty as a playground or a funfair.” I offer my own “clearest possible talk,” realizing that it’s difficult to avoid a certain amount of difficulty in writing about the difficult. However, part of the pleasure of writing this, for me, has been just to tell some stories about writers, writing and readers. About the stories there is nothing difficult.