Format: Chapbook
Size: 5 ½ x 8 ½
Pages: 28
The Ogre
by Phil Hall
Phil Hall has lived in Windsor, Vancouver and Toronto, and now lives near Perth, Ontario.
In 2011 he won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in English for his collection of essay-poems, Killdeer, which also won Ontario’s Trillium Book Award.
He has been writer-in-residence at Sage Hill Writing Experience (Saskatchewan), Berton House (Dawson City, Yukon), Queen’s University, University of Ottawa, and University of New Brunswick.
While in Vancouver, he was a member of the Vancouver Industrial Writers Union, and the Men Against Rape Collective.
He is the founder of Flat Singles Press, and of The Page Lectures at Queen’s University.
In 2015, Wilfrid Laurier University Press published Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall—A Selected Collage.
Most recently, Pedlar Press has published Niagara & Government (2020), and Beautiful Outlaw Press has published Toward A Blacker Ardour (2021).
Waking
Revived or revised blugh
I am always walking through a lost city
alone the day after a writers’ festival
unpublished pedantic a mutterer
it is early grille gates are down & locked the legends
have returned to their islands remaindered
between the cartoon & the operation
my dreams agitate the nitrates
I coordinate these sustaining routines by
but sleep is also a stall cud hobble
pasture loading ramp & bell
using what I forget I dreamt
or jokes I compose in my head half awake
I wander & am told to myself as gossip
I pick up & read bits of celebratory litter
a fossilized fiddle hopium Dusseldorf
décolleté fuller’s teasel Coughka
the really good books I carried got wrecked
Tremor Zagajewski 1987
a painting of the fight with the angel on its cover
I thought Zagajewski raw & infectious then
a translation even so it got to me
too bad how in recent books he sounds like tenured nostalgia
a B-side Miłosz
is this change him or me