“Awkward, Boring, Cranky, and GG-Winning”: A Review of Phil Hall’s Killdeer
Phil Hall’s Killdeer is awkward. That makes much of this book bad, but sometimes the poet makes it work by squeezing emotional effect from an overwhelmingly flat presentation. When Hall manages that effect in “She Loved the Ocean,” you are pleasantly surprised by the sudden tenderness that emerges when a lover’s separation appears near the end of what—typically for Killdeer—reads mostly like a bit of personal history meant to be passed down to someone with a pre-determined, vested interest in the characters. Like “Becoming a Poet” and “Twenty Lost Years,” most of “She Loved the Ocean” chronicles one of Hall’s rambles through Canadian Literature, and it is, at first, difficult to understand what the point of the piece is.
Those earlier pieces mostly recount Hall’s history with writers Margaret Laurence and Bronwen Wallace, and both fail to justify their existence beyond the basic remembering they do. Both Laurence and Wallace are interesting figures, for sure, but it’s hard to tell what Hall intends to add to our understanding by writing so extensively about them. That is, we come away with an idea of how these writers affected Hall, but it’s unclear what we are supposed to do with that knowledge because the effect on the poet fails to translate into an effect on the reader. If these were student essays, I’d be writing in the margins: “so what? What’s it matter to me?” “She Loved the Ocean” begins the same way. Having read a few of these personal histories already in the collection, the reader wonders, again, why Hall thought we’d be interested in this story of him and another poet, Libby Scheier, going to New York. They’ve gone, we’re told, “to face down the basement/ where she had been abused as a child.” We’re also told that “enough of what had happened to Libby had happened” to the poet as well, and that as a result, “I felt frightened down there with her.” Already, there is more tension here than in the pieces about Laurence and Wallace, but not much. Then, suddenly, you realize this isn’t just a poem to let us know what it was like to be a poet in mid-to-late twentieth century Canada. Instead, it is about love, the dissolution of a relationship built on tension, and it is told with clarity and subtlety. We see the lovers break apart before our eyes: “Libby had felt the beach moment give way too.” There is real emotion at stake here, and the flat, anecdotal tone that dominates the poem and book serves that emotion by keeping the tension at bay until the last moment, when a real break, a real sadness, can no longer be held back. The poem ends with, “Pathetic at trust—we bullied from each other what final affections we got/ Two crouchers.” Instead of a flat narrative, “She Loved the Ocean” becomes a tense evocation of helpless romance, with the poet and his subject being both irrevocably tied through their shared trauma and ultimately separated by the lack of trust that trauma has caused to emerge. When that happens, all the built-in awkwardness of these “essay-poems” falls away because the hybrid form has brought the poet, at long last, to the heart of his intention. In fact, the essay-poem is the perfect vehicle for this story: meditative enough to gain perspective, but personal enough to convey immediacy. Sadly, that balance is hardly ever achieved elsewhere in the collection. Clearly, Hall wants to tell stories, and he wants to make some arguments, but he also wants to constantly interrupt both impulses. Thus, the essay instinct, bent on the prose argument and/or narrative, meets the poem instinct, which would rather wander off. The result, to put it nicely, is uneven. There are marvelous moments, such as in “She Loved the Ocean,” but they are far too far between. For the most part, these poems fail to leave the trap “She Loved the Ocean” so miraculously escapes. Instead, they wander indeterminately between the essay and poem instincts. Too many of these pieces are simply memoirs or loosely corralled thoughts that are often interrupted and sidetracked. “Dubious” is probably the most lost of any of these pieces, but neither poem nor essay, most of what fills Killdeer rarely manages to take adequate advantage of either form. One never quite knows what is animating the poems beyond the need to criticize or to let us know what it was like to be a poet “back then.” And let us know Hall does, to a fault. But arc-less and tension-less narratives are not Killdeer’s worst attributes. The book also stumbles into the realm of literary and/or historical criticism, much of which is cranky and obnoxious. One suspects there is humour intended as well, but it fails to register. Hall even has venom for the work of poets for whom he professes his personal affection. For instance, “Twenty Lost Years” is largely a testament to his affection for Bronwen Wallace. We get a sense of how close they were (although I’m not sure we need to know some details, like that they once shared a house in Windsor), and you might choke up a bit when he writes, “I write poems so that if she were to knock again—I’ll have some.” Yet a few pages later—right after claiming Al Purdy doesn’t matter now that he’s dead and “isn’t around to sustain his poems with the legend of his personality”—Hall claims that “Wallace’s poems too have begun to ring hollow.” It’s unclear if Hall believes this himself, or if he’s blaming Wallace’s newfound irrelevance on the materialism of the online generations, who have fallen prey to “a redefining of citizens as consumers.” Nevertheless, it doesn’t really matter if Hall finds Wallace irrelevant, or if it’s just that the kids don’t get it and only want to talk “marketing & easy on-line return policies.” The more important thing to note is the tone in those lines. In his criticism, Hall comes off as crotchety, bitter, and antagonistic. That doesn’t work in poems or essays unless you can back up your points, which Hall doesn’t bother to do. You might argue that these are not straight essays, so one need not defend one’s points as if they were, but if that’s the case, one probably shouldn’t levee such criticism in the first place. Clumsily-leveled vitriol is the worst kind of argument, and the fact that these pieces are meant to be at least part-poem—suggesting some kind of aesthetic aim—makes such ugly sentiments shine all the more glaringly. Most of this book is about poetry, and much of that discussion is decidedly negative, especially with regard to modern day work. About halfway through the book, you start to wonder, “when’s the shot at poetry workshops, and how they’re ruining everything, going to come?” Sure enough, in “The Small Sacrifice,” it does: “the thousands of poems that get pared down to thin polite/ columns of memory in writing workshops every summer.” This is meant to describe (apparently) the “false politics of honesty,” which (apparently) is exemplified by Irving Layton, Jones, and their (apparent) support for “a campaign to dummy-down the/ complexity of impression/ expression.” “Apparent” appeared three times in the above sentence because that’s about as far as I could get in deciphering Hall’s argument. Actually, I’m not sure there is an argument. That said, these pieces fail to live up to the title “essays.” Essays, generally, are coherent arguments, but “The Small Sacrifice” is more a jumble of incoherent negativity, the target of which is moving and vague. Daniel Jones is, apparently, guilty of being too Orwellian in his clarity, and this, apparently, contributes to “realism” becoming “emotional fascism” because “Plain English is now just another propaganda/ costume.” Right. Problem is, Hall completely fails to explain what any of that means. I guess: the over-dependence on realism has become a crutch to produce some kind of false-authenticity based on an over-inflated “I” at the same time that it has been co-opted by the powers that be to control those who think they are dissenters. I cannot be sure of that, but I can be sure that the piece is not enriching in any way. The failure of “The Small Sacrifice” is the failure of most of this book, especially when it attempts criticism. To make criticism, one should be clear. So why try to be critical of other poets, or of the poetry world as a whole, in a form that disallows you to be clear? Instead of following a line of argument to its conclusion, Hall rambles about in his own negativity, leaving the reader not informed, not entertained, and certainly not moved. Like so much of Killdeer, “The Small Sacrifice” is a rambling mess, only held together, if it is at all, by Hall’s crankiness. The worst example of this is “The Bad Sequence.” It’s well titled, but not for the reason I suspect Hall intended. It is unreadable, as in I could not read it; like, my mind rejected it like my stomach rejects spoiled milk. I guess the point of “The Bad Sequence” is to complain about sequences Hall doesn’t like, but what’s the point of that? If you don’t like a sequence that much, why are you spending so much time thinking about it, let alone writing a bad sequence in response? And, to boot, Hall pretty much admits the piece is pointless when he ends it with, “The bad sequence isn’t so bad/ Who cares—it’s not evil.” Exactly; who cares? Why spend nine excruciating pages on something not worth complaining about? Hey, here’s an idea: just write something good instead. “The Bad Sequence” is the worst kind of poetic naval gazing. Sure, most literary poetry is inward and cloistered in a small niche community. But most poems at least have the potential to escape the vacuum; they at least speak to the human inside the poet and not just to the poet in the human. This is what “She Loved the Ocean” achieves, but “The Bad Sequence” hasn’t an ounce of escape velocity. In fact, it bores into itself until it dies of boredom. It’s also mean and nasty. Who has time to read that? Strangely, people seem to like this poem the most. I utterly don’t get it. If you get a kick out of “The Bad Sequence,” it would seem to me a kick grounded in your own sense of superiority, because if this piece has humour in it, it is based on the belief that it—and its writer and audience—is superior to these straw-poets who write such “bad sequences.” What makes these supposed sequences bad are the usual complaints: over-reliance on what traditionally earns government funding, an over-reliance on graduate workshops, an over-blown sense of self, being too much like T.S. Eliot, etc., etc. Those are all well treaded and, frankly, bullshit criticisms. Hall’s book, somehow, has won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, so he can hardly claim independence from government’s pleasure. And traditions, workshops, even Eliot’s influence, are incapable of being bad in and of themselves. It’s how you use them that matters. Meanwhile, Hall’s work reeks of insider influences, making his criticism more applicable to himself than the straw-poets of whom he writes. At one point, Hall asks, “If poets clap for themselves—so what—only pets get enough attention/ But then who claps for the reader.” A good poet claps for the human in the reader, not the poet in the reader, whether or not that reader even exists. It’s hard to imagine, on the other hand, anyone but a poet clapping for, or even reading, “The Bad Sequence.”As a poet and a reader, I have no use for Phil Hall’s cranky wisdom. If I had to choose a grizzled veteran poet to learn from, I’d take someone like Dennis Lee instead. I happened to be reading Lee’s Riffs and a few of his essays while I fought my way through Killdeer. The contrasts between the poets, in both style and attitude, could not be more pronounced, at least from my limited experience. For one, Lee’s poems are dense sonic devices that drive straight for the poem’s blood vessel, while there’s hardly a line worth scanning in Killdeer, aside, perhaps, from an entire poem he lifts from Daniel Jones. And Lee has a vaguely mystical idea of the poem that persists through the cynicism he somewhat shares with Hall. But Hall has an almost scornful attitude toward his art, taking opportunity after opportunity to spurn its merits and practitioners. For a collection very closely focused on poetry (a dicey proposition however you slice it), such negativity is especially ugly. Again, it’s hard to see the point of writing a poem about not liking things about poetry. Now, let me correct myself from the top: Killdeer is bad and awkward, and in a few places it works. Or maybe just in one place. My advice: borrow the book. Read “She Loved the Ocean.” The title poem and the lyrics that open and close the book might be worth reading as well. But then return the book. Pretend the whole book was like “She Loved the Ocean.” I’ve read the rest so you don’t have to.
