Phil Hall
Biography
Phil Hall was born in 1953 and raised on farms in the Kawarthas region of Ontario. He attended the University of Windsor in the 70s, where he received an MA in English and Creative Writing. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published in Mexico City in 1973. Since then he has published 13 other books of poems, four chapbooks, and a cassette of labour songs. He is also a publisher of broadsides and chapbooks under his Flat Singles Press imprint. In the early 80s he was a member of the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. In the early 90s he was Literary Editor at This Magazine, and also edited a shortlived literary journal called Don’t Quit Yr Day-Job. Among his titles are Homes (1979), Old Enemy Juice (1988), The Unsaid (1992), Hearthedral—A Folk-Hermetic (1996), and Trouble Sleeping (2000), which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. In 2005, Brick Books (celebrating 20 years as Hall’s publisher) brought out An Oak Hunch, which was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006. Hall has taught writing and literature at the Kootenay School of Writing, York University, Ryerson Polytechnical University, and many colleges. He has been poet-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, the Sage Hill Writing Experience (Sask.), the Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, and elsewhere. This fall, 2007, BookThug has published Hall’s long poem, White Porcupine, and also a revised second edition of his essay/poem, The Bad Sequence. Over the years, Hall has collected two full decks of random playing cards from the streets, and numerous albums of found photographs. He calls all of this ephemera his “Pedestrian Archives.” He is learning to play clawhammer banjo.
Poet's Note
A long poem is the easiest way to bend I into We, thus to get away from the hothouse of the lyric, toward the essay & the sonata, perhaps the essonatay;
because any poem that continues beyond the opening of the moment necessarily includes History, which is not private, or pretty.
White Porcupine is a self-portrait between the ages of 50 & 54. It is in 6 sections; each section has 9 parts: 6 X 9 = 54.
A long poem composed of autonomous poems: a fractal.
A straddle of confession & confusion. (Aren’t we all?)
I am increasingly working from a number of epigraphic precepts (discoveries):
1. Error is Character.
2. Rhythm is Knowledge.
3. Words are interchangeable.
4. Letters are interchangeable, but less so.
5. Letters: as in—go ahead, spit it out!
6. The rhetorical architecture of the sentence is opposed to revelation.
7. I should have shot my father.
8. Posterity is Poetry on Steroids.
9. A line desperately wants to be its own poem.
10. Drawings are gods to words.
11. Blood means nothing.
12. Bravity!
Sample Poems
"The Little Seamstress" and "The Brunt" (pdf)
External Links
Griffin Poetry Prize page
Writer's Union of Canada page
University of Toronto Canadian Poetry page
12 or 20 Questions
Ulterior Thule: Compulsion