Joe Hall
“Most often a churn.”
Readings
A book of poetry that was important to you at a specific moment in your life
John Weiners, Selected Poems: 1958-1984 (Black Sparrow Press, 1986)
Brenda Hillman mentioned her love of John Weiners while giving a talk in the summer of 2002. Somehow I got ahold of Black Sparrow’s Selected Poems: 1958-1984 right after, probably from the cramped shelves of used bookstore in Wheaton, Maryland. It was next to a magic shop in a strip mall and run by a guy who knew the Catonsville Nine.
I read Weiners’s collected late at night in a flattened state on the futon I slept on in my freshly divorced mother’s home. I’d just been dumped (rightfully) and was working ten hour shifts at an industrial printing press. I felt like a romantic loser. I was objectively adrift. Some stanzas:
I feel like a jaded movie star
who missed the big-time
and ended up mopping floors
on South Street. This actually happens
for that is what I do in the evening
with my father and I wish
that were good enough for me.
I’m glad I read Weiners like that—while my mind was dilated, receptive—rather than on the job (I sometimes kept a book in my back pocket). Spoken, direct: I thought it was for me, that Weiners and I were pulled by the same strings (incorrect).
In the next decade I’d get obsessed with modernists and would have found Weiners’s poem all embarrassing disclosure. I wanted a thicket of allusion, denotative puzzles with connotative keys. My tastes have slowly spiraled outward. I read the poem again. I love it and the book that holds it.
A work of art/performance/film/album/piece of music/etc.
Myung Mi Kim, Reading at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA; April 12, 2006)
The DC-area anarchist poet Wade Fletcher (author of the Dusie chapbook Snitch Culture) used to listen to a CD of a Myung Mi Kim reading while working at a gas station in Woodbridge, Virginia, after midnight in 2006, 2007. Imagine it among the racks of Lay’s potato chips, the boxes of cigarettes stuffed together behind the counter:
This is the gullet
Helmets make cooking pots
Tin cans make roofs
[sparrow, crow]
Not much left
Not much left
This recording has always stuck with me. I was there for Kim’s original performance. I’m listening to the recording again, on edge, even knowing what’s coming, knowing how rare it is to be there, when something happens. This is partially the precision, these micro-shifts in tone between phrases, phonemes, even, so that each word inhabits its moment rather than sliding too easily into the logic of some larger unfolding (and controlling) semantic current. In my ear, the poems are written and performed by Kim so singularly that the connotative dendrites of each word light up. Part of this is how Kim works the white space of the page into rhythm of silences between utterances. What it does that can’t quite be named may be and may be among and through all those things the book is about: colonization, war, immigration, first-language loss.
A poet you discovered for the first time in a literary journal
Karen Brodine, from “Woman Sitting at the Machine Thinking.” Tripwire (no. 4, Winter 2000-2001)
Karen Brodine, Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking (Red Letter Press, 1990)
That prolific connector of people in Buffalo, Carra Stratton, gifted me a carton of books from her library. In it was a copy of Tripwire 4. In that, among new poems by Rodrigo Toscano, an essay by Herbierto Yépez was a reprint of several poems from Karen Brodine’s series “Woman Sitting at the Machine Thinking.” The sequence led me to Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking, a 1990 Red Letter Press posthumous collection of Brodine’s poems.
In the books’ textual apparatus, there’s solidarity and continuity of feminist, anti-capitalist energy. It reminds us that Brodine was an in-the-world radical socialist-feminist. An aging Meridel Le Sueur, who was part of the ’30s left and had survived McCarthyism, provides a preface. A comrade in the Bay Area scene, Merle Woo, provides an introduction.
Brodine’s poems are about working as a typesetter but, like many good work poems, they’re about more than the act of work—pissing off management, getting pissed off, fighting to preserve oneself against the ways most jobs seize hold of our bodies, minds, and language: “I file jobs under words I like—red, buzz, fury.” The poems can deftly pivot between evoking the cavern of a printshop and kinetic strings of facts about race, gender, and wages. “Casino Window” describes a wind gust wrecking a posh wedding then pans down to “the avalanche of coins below, / flooding down into the depths of the casino / like a million silver fish.” It’s one of my favorite panoramas in poetry. On a rhetorical level, Brodine’s speaker thinks through things, so you’re thinking with her—getting thought as a process that grows from the irrational symbols and strange facts of life.
At the same time, simply representing work does not always do the political work we think it does. What matters as much is what work does to our whole lives—our bodies, language, relations, and imaginations—it’s the struggles work forces us to engage in on work’s terms. The book contains the full compass of Brodine’s life. In this mix are family poems, poems about breast cancer
“Woman at a Machine Thinking” is a great poem; it’s greater in the context of the book as whole. A reprint would rule. So would more archival work on Brodine.
A book of poetry from the past ten years
Janice Lobo Sapigao, microchips for millions (PAWA, 2016)
Janice Lobo Sapigao’s 2016 microchips for millions crosses autoethnography with the tradition of documentary poetry centered on work. At its heart is Sapigao’s mother, who toils as a microchip fabricator at a Silicon Valley plant. The book travels outward from Sapigao’s mother’s life through a dazzling array of materials and formal gestures: maps, erasure, bursts of binary code, diagrams, company documents, snippets of conversation. Through these heterogenous documents, the book connects indelible particulars to larger systemic issues including but not limited to environmental racism, the exploitation of the labor of immigrants, the role of women from the global South in light industrial production, how bad workplaces impact communities and how these communities can relate to and reproduce themselves.
It’s easy to overly abstract these issues, like I have. The poems don’t! From, “the connections” (p. 34):
my homegirl lily
created a short film
about her mother,
also a fab operator.
as soon as i saw photos
of her mother smiling
in her bunny suit, i cried.
tears really do swell,
a blanket of water
falling from the bed of my vision
and onto the classroom table.
Or from “the praise” (p. 37):
my mother
[...]
is a labor force is vertebrae is a staircase
The poems remain rooted in a time, place, and set of relationships while text-excerpting and hard-juxtaposing. They establish a careful fidelity and scope to the work rather than smashing the world into fragments and reconstituting the kibble into a spectacular whole—what Herbierto Yépez would call a pantopia.
My biggest vote of confidence is that my students like it. Archive-diving, travel, extensive interviews and research—documentary poetry can seem imposing. Many of my rural state-school students didn’t have time for these intensive processes. They had to work at Tim Hortons, survive four other classes, take care of family in crisis, and worry about accumulating debt. In my final Covid-shaken semester, not much docu-po clicked with the class until they got to microchips. It made an alert, investigative poetry make sense to the world many of my students shared.
A work of fiction
Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Bantam Books, 1984)
Before Samuel Delany would move on to a urine-drenched odyssey of care, pleasure, and excrement in The Mad Man, he published one last science fiction masterpiece, the relatively overlooked Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Part of the novel’s inquiry is into interspecies social relations: living together and what love and care, as it can be accepted/received by an individual, might look like. A character allergic to touch is hurt: “One, and another, we went to my crouching white sister, stooped to pat at (but not touch) the ivory fists bunched on her bony chest, to lick at (but not touch) her lightly veined ears, to rub at (but not touch) her knobby human back.” The horizons in this science fiction are ones in which intimacy is front and center while also being imbricated in things like municipal government, architecture, non-capitalist economies, and encounters with difference. Characteristic of Delany’s middle period, there are sentences, paragraphs, and pages upon pages in Stars that are gorgeous cinches of sound and sense: “I saw her up close as ten seconds’ history made synchronous by its multiple shadows” (268). Stars is the first book in a diptych, the second of which hasn’t been published. The narrative is incomplete. It does not dissipate the desire for change it inspires.
A book by a poet in another genre
John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)
On Tuesday, January 30, 1649, a man wearing a wig and a mask put down his ax and raised up the severed head of Charles I to the crowd. Weeks later, in February 1649, John Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, defending the beheading of the former king. On revolutionary timing: “Who kills a king must kill him while he is king.”
With The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton thought the unthinkable, gave it voice, and helped maintain a space where the proto-communist and anarchist ideas of groups like the Diggers could make their way to print for the first time in the history of the English language.
How decisive his propaganda campaign was in maintaining that space for radical discourse is debatable. Under Queen Elizabeth I, England was heavily invested in the slave trade by the 1590s, looting and burning down towns in West Africa and aiding Morocco in the destruction of the Songhai Empire, the strongest centralized state in sub-Saharan Africa. Francis Bacon formulated a theory of justified genocide in his 1622 Holy War. England was well on its way to becoming an empire feasting on the slave trade; the subsequent Cromwellian regime accelerated this. Milton’s politics didn’t run entirely counter to the Cromwellian program and certainly he’s sorting out imperial fantasies in Paradise Lost.
Yet Milton is one of my obsessions, leaning in the doorway to the first half of my life, and I think often about how often his partisan writing is left out of consideration of his work. Milton probably didn’t start writing Paradise Lost until the late 1650s. He’d write his final political pamphlet in 1660. Writing polemics didn’t ruin Milton’s ability to write poetry. As a “poet,” I think of Milton and think it’s ok to stop writing poems. It’s ok to start creating whatever the movements of a moment demand.
Writings
Fugue 43 | The 4 Rivers of Eden
Vetiver, retweeted lavender, truly
spreading flock of colors on the
tender spring hills, I walk naked
with the tax exemptions of the lord
retweeted rotten with honey, log stuffed
w/music, chamomile and flax
it cost me zero to walk with
the stream as someone plucked a string
strapped against a wood comb
retweeted lavender, tax exempt
under a chevron of clouds
and totally chill covenant
Fugue 98 | Rotating Harmony
& met the nether flood, silver sands and liquid plain
met the thirst, soft water sharpens light before the pubic curl
of negation pearling the river’s flanks
or Nicky handing out donuts to drivers stalled by a crawling train
or “the Politics of Buffalo was business” from the head of police then mayor, a ghost
stinking molar turned into a street name
I slipped west toward Main, the fog resolved into a kind of copper phrasing
to hold a kindly thirst look into the smooth lake
or is the Niagara, the canal, deposits of capital
abrade this thirst w/police and see multitudes, like yourself
in the figure made of water around the Broadway Market Riot
1898, fighting them and the crime of being unemployed, the ring
in the fire, the fireplace burns the forest, the cup of flame in the boiler
splits the mountain, against misery
among the vining grape, the wandering streams
shedding pictures of theories, sex, and memory glowing
in the palm of a leaf, people assembling
Joe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, including Someone's Utopia (2018) and Fugue & Strike (forthcoming). He studied with Lucille Clifton at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Susan Tichy at George Mason University, and Judith Goldman and Myung Mi Kim at SUNY Buffalo. His poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Poetry Daily, Best Buds! Collective, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Postcolonial Studies, terrain.org, PEN America Blog, Poetry Northwest, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and, recently, Snail Trail, Anvil Tongue, and Ethel Zine. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers through Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center in Buffalo, NY.
Joe also recommends Kenning JP Garcia. and Marty Cain.