Review: Someone's Utopia by Joe Hall

Tell Me What You Don't Remember

Someone's Utopia by Joe Hall

The hardest part about critiquing poetry is understanding its purpose. More than any other art form, poetry is born out of a need to bend, break, or ignore the rules altogether, so whether a poem is poorly written or very well written in a way you can't identify is objective. I know what I think of Joe Hall's fourth poetry anthology, but I'll present it to you both ways.

BRILLIANT

If we were to remove all nuance from Hall's work, we could say it's broken into two parts: work and love. Incoherent and coherent. Life is messier than that. The collection opens with a section called Greetings: A Play for 2 Voices, and a concise 7-line poem that welcomes the reader into the purgatory-like state they will be in for the next 162 pages. It lulls the reader into a false sense of security, making them believe the rest of the poems will be easily digestible. The reality is quite different, hinted at with sporadic dashes and words only found in first-edition thesauruses. It's no coincidence that this section battles with childhood. Everything seems larger than life, like the poem Tantrum, which repeats the line "Here's the ball. I don't want it." five times. Call and response.

    The following section, $∞/hr, marks the start of the breakdown. Lines become rambling, compiled from years of manual labor by Hall and his friends. The deeper the reader gets into his industrial-themed poems, the less sense they make. Complete sentences only reappear in interviews with Hall's father, when he has regained his center and sense of purpose. Working shift-to-shift makes the rest of the world seem hazy, and as the collection continues, and Hall flips back and forth between subject matters, his moments of lucidness (and human connection) become few and far between. Lines stop mid-thought. Entire interviews are crossed out.

    Instead, in Oneida: Tirzah's Journal, Hall begins to filter his experiences through the writings of a young woman's diary in the late 19th century. His sense of self has been lost to his machinations, and the closest he can get to regaining it is through the other; even then, the diary entries are riddled with code and missing letters. The age of the entries adds to the sense of grief that settles over the collection. Where earlier poems shy around it, defaulting to talk about the last shift, Hall accepts Tirzah's future death. Or maybe he doesn't. The third to last poem jumps from week to week, but it moves backwards. Hall hasn't outgrown his fear of what comes next--during his shifts, his problems may seem endless, but that also means he has endless opportunities to change. Purgatory is worse than heaven, but a whole lot better than hell.

BLOATED

It's very easy to create reasons why this collection was good: I missed something, I can't see the forest through the trees, I've been looking in the wrong place the whole time. The entire collection feels like it's shifting beneath my eyes, changing form every time I think I have a grasp on it. At a certain point, I have to accept that the meaning I'm finding may have been intended, but it wasn't executed. Hall and I are playing telephone with tin cans and string, but he keeps saying the same inside jokes that he always does. The way he's communicating has nothing to do with my correct guesses.

    Big words poorly hide Hall's desire to been seen as great. He writes about the working class and their struggles to retain their humanity, yet it's written in a way that only yuppies will understand. To be a great writer is to give every word a purpose, whether that furthers a narrative or creates a feeling, as long as there's always a reason. Hall throws in extra words for the hell of it; it feels almost malicious, like he wants the readers to work harder than he is. Perhaps it would work better as slam poetry, which Hall has been known to dabble in, with words washing over the reader instead of staring at them through the page.

    My criticisms are shorter than my praise, but that's because they form the foundation, weakening any meaning I can create. Rather than a gun, this collection kills you with a pillow to the face, and you go out with a whimper. All dignity is striped because you didn't have a chance to fight back. Your lack of conviction doomed you. That's part of the reason this section contains first-person pronouns; at the end of the day, every person has their own taste, and I can't deny that my dislikes are deeply personal. With the help of my favorite poem, and least favorite excerpt, form your own fucking opinions.

I don't kiss you. My oils spill into the night, the tone

of so much successful self lubrication seeping

under the door, the tone of a dead white guy

putting tobacco in his face holes,

Rating: ★½

Available from Black Ocean