“waste is a form of devotion”: A Closer Sniff at Joe Hall’s “Fugue and Strike”
Joe Hall, Fugue and Strike, Black Ocean, April 2023, 126 Pages
the garbage man in the morning
knows his own reality
garbagemen never get shot during riots
perhaps they are the real holymen
with an aura of protection
their reality -- the shit in yr
bedroom wastebasket
— d.a.levy, SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM
Published in April, 2023, Fugue and Strike is Joe Hall’s fourth book with Black Ocean, following Pigafetta Is My Wife (2010), The Devotional Poems (2013), and Someone’s Utopia (2018)—the latter two of which I’ve had the pleasure of receiving in book exchanges in the last few years. Hall has also co-authored two books of poetry: The Container Store (Vols I & II) (SpringGun, 2012) with Chad Harwick and May I Softly Walk (Poetry Crush, 2014) with his partner Cheryl Quimba. Additionally, since writing this review, People Finder, Buffalo has been released (Cloak, 2024).
A poet, bookmaker/editor of Hostile Books, teacher at St. Bonaventure University, and co-host with his partner of the Film podcast “Two For Space Jam, Please,” Joe Hall lives, or survives, in Buffalo, New York. In a conversation with Marty Cain, Hall discusses his work history in further depth:
I tried to leave academia twice. I worked at a bookstore and cannabis farm and did landscaping and furiously applied for better-paying, nonacademic jobs that provided health insurance. Nothing. But as I approached forty, with twenty years behind me making less than a living wage almost all of the time, I got an increasingly rare full-time (but not tenure-track and year-by-year) position teaching.
In 2018, he completed a dissertation on the “liquid commons” in eighteenth century literature at the University at Buffalo SUNY.
Though I haven’t read Hall’s academic work, it appears to be a persistent force in Fugue and Strike; it occurs to me that his poetry could be considered an academic endeavor or that his academic work may find its most potent expression in his verse, joining research and communicative exploration into an integrated whole. This approach gains clarity in Hall’s lifelong mission to investigate “the intersections of labor, ecology, imagination, and structures of violence.” In another interview, Hall discusses his approach as a “research-based poetics” in a “devotional mode,” combining the concreteness of historical and journalistic investigation with the search of a spiritual life. As he writes in the collection: “Accuracy without ambition / is all I can ask for / from a poem.”
Introducing Fugue and Strike, Black Ocean emphasizes how the book “unearth[s] histories in which people refuse the systems that designate them as waste” and “takes a long view of solidarity in struggle.” This focus and perspective is evident in not only Hall’s attention to local Buffalo infrastructure and labor, but also in the collection’s lengthy bibliography—an uncommon sight in poetry—covering contemporary journalism and academic articles as well as archival materials.
Without a doubt Fugue and Strike merits more engagement than this review can offer, and it has. Since I began reading and preparing a review, Hall’s book has been admiringly covered in brief commentary, short articles, and, more comprehensively, in a review by Alex Skopic with the Cleveland Review of Books.
In a blurb, Marty Cain notes how the collection interrogates “the infrastructures of the capitalist machine.” In Heavy Feather Review, Zach Savich argues for its importance to “our moment of ecological catastrophe, which makes waste of both specific memory—the history of labor, the tactics we’ve had for survival—and the knot of wrinkles we can feel ourselves lost among.” In a blog post, Matthew Klane plays off the title, writing “Pick a scab, strike a match, write your shit, see what sticks.” Skopic discusses the poetics of Fugue and Strike in critical detail: the musical meaning of the term ‘Fugue’ and how this is transfigured; Hall’s mapping-out and submergence within Buffalo, “the real and unreal city;” the collection’s shift between contemporary and historical perspectives in politics; and, considering its place in literature, how the book may be part of a resurgence in “proletarian poetry.”
So what more is there to say? Well, at the time I first read Fugue and Strike, I had nothing to say, beyond that I felt the collection to be an unrelenting, deliberate stare at the alienation of our labor and infrastructure—a focus often absent or under-articulated in poetry. Until this past Winter I’ve felt unable to fully express what I find significant about Hall’s latest collection, or at least why it has left such a dominant impression on me.
Since reading Hall’s book and failing to find the language or experience to comment in a substantive way, a few constellations have come to pass that have allowed and pushed me to press beyond my initial cloudiness. In addition to the ability to respond to existing reviews, I returned to Northeast Ohio and became a service worker for my hometown. There, I performed sanitation work, including garbage collection, recycling, and hydrant and road maintenance. I also had the pleasure of meeting Hall over dinner as I traveled between Rochester and Cleveland, where I now live and have taken up work at a union printshop. Only growing my personal interest in the themes and aspirations of Fugue and Strike, my own father participates in what could be described as the “waste economy” of the Midwest, reselling antique tools leftover from Northeast Ohio’s prominent manufacturing industry at the turn of the century.
Now, here—having thrown my fair share of trash into the truck packer, crushing all couches into a singularity with deer carcasses, diapers, plastic crucifixes, and smart TVs—here, beneath the silver cesspool of Lake Erie, I will attempt to articulate my thoughts on Fugue and Strike, beginning with a discussion of how Hall’s collection has been covered, transitioning via digression on the epigraph, and resting with my own reading of the collection. But first, can you tell me…
How many proletarian poets does it take to start a revolution?
While I do not have specific issues with the responses to Fugue and Strike, I cannot help but feel a general resignation from them, a resignation to capitalist relations or to the ecological crises they birth. I see this surrender tucked within a larger acceptance of our inability to not only change the circumstances of our own lives dominated by work, but also the privatized environments we live within. What the late Marc Fisher explains in Capitalist Realism through film criticism, we could explore as well in poetry. In literary criticism, this takes the form of admiration of how we are able to aesthetically express the decay of environments and ecosystems in relation to humanity’s own striking imbalances of poverty and opulence. If this literature does not condemn economic or social structures, it may sneer at humanity itself as the impetus of its own destruction.
Still, though Hall’s collection may capture the rust of the Midwest’s industrial decline—and it is difficult to find any cities more devastated by owners displacing production than Buffalo, or its Great Lakes neighbors Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit—I do not admire Fugue and Strike for how it captures the indifference of the city razed for the automobile. I do not admire it even for how it expresses the exhaustion in the long durée of worker exploitation, disinvestment, and privatization. If this was all the collection accomplished, Fugue and Strike would be nothing more or less than a mirror: a fragmented piece of journalism, an echo of the material and social needs we may lack or, at worst, an artful whisper, calling after you to purchase an illustration of the daily cruelties of our own and others’ lives.
While I can understand impulses to rally around terms like “proletarian poetry” as Alex Skopic does in writing of Hall, ‘proletarian’ is a class term, not a descriptive term for literature, and I’m doubly uncertain of the use in categorizing Hall’s work or enshrining works of literature or their authors in a pantheon of revolutionary writers. Rather, I want to take up Hall’s poetry as an act of reaching out to hold another’s hand in firm understanding and solidarity because, for me, collections like Fugue and Strike are tethers: lifelong commitments and deep-sea cables connecting our disparate lives. What the collection impresses is that writing can stem from simply a poetics of place or working-class identity, fanning out as a literature that recognizes, explores, and engages with the material realities of making and publishing books, the social or often anti-social relations of daily life—a literature that realizes itself to be a part of the struggle for a classless society and more harmonious relationships with the land. Not only a piece of political education, Hall’s work is a rallying cry for the substance of living as a constitutive element of history, a history not resigned to destruction, though conscious of decay, aimed at its own abandonment and transformation.
Yet, to what history or tradition does Hall’s work belong? Skopic places Hall’s collection alongside contemporary “proletarian poets,” such as Wendy Travino, Darius Simpson, Kyle Lorenzo, Noor Hindi, and Brendan Joyce of Cleveland’s own Grieveland. Without disputing his account of these poets, his review only illustrates Hall and these authors as the distant children of early twentieth century labor writers like Max Eastman and Kenneth Fearing. To comment on Eastman alone, Eric Arnesen in his essay “The Passions of Max Eastman” argues that, while he early on gave life to the journal The Masses, Eastman would later define himself as a “libertarian conservative” and participate in the Red Scare, writing rationalizations for McCarthyism in William F. Buckley’s National Review and providing information on Communist Party activity to authorities. If this is the best labor writing poets have to offer, it may be more skillful for there to be none at all. Additionally, Skopic references Langston Hughes, much of whose revolutionary writings are collected in Good Morning Revolution. However, even Hughes proves to be a less than central example of labor-focused or otherwise revolutionary writing. Though Skopic notes how Hughes’ explicitly revolutionary poems were largely barred by publishers from anthologies, editor Faith Berry in the preface to Good Morning Revolution discusses Hughes’ own self-censorship, which he exercised to preserve his livelihood as an author, not to mention his safety in the country during the Red Scare when he was called to hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Even last year, Congress passed a resolution to condemn the “horrors” of socialism.)
Alongside Eastman and Hughes’ relevance to Hall, we should expand the context of the “proletarian poetry” that preceeds us. In his reevaluation of the principles and goals of literary history, scholar Cary Nelson recalls labor poets, such as Joe Hill,[1] Anna Louise Strong, Robinson Jeffers, and Edwin Rolfe. Keen to the publishing spheres these poets operated within, Nelson discusses journals of the time, including Solidarity (IWW), The Little Review, The Left, The Rebel Poet, The Anvil, New Anvil, Blast, Il Proletario, The Masses, The New Masses, Liberator, Dynamo, The Latin Quarterly, Challenge, Morada, Midwest, and the many “John Reed Clubs” of the CPUSA, before they were dissolved by leadership at the outset of the ‘Comintern’ in 1935: Cauldron (Grand Rapids), Hammer (Hartford), Left Front (Chicago), Leftward (Boston), The New Force (Detroit), Partisan (Hollywood), Partisan Review (NYC), Red Pen/Left Review (Philadelphia), Midland Left (Indianapolis).[2]
[1] Hill is infamous for his “Little Red Songbook” published by the International Workers of the World, which continues to be printed to this day. I also can’t help but note the resemblance between Joe Hill and Joe Hall…
[2] Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry & Politics Of Cultural Memory. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)
To put it bluntly, I find this history of “proletarian poetry” in which Hall’s Fugue and Strike has been contextualized thus far to be disjointed, not just chronologically but geographically—especially since Buffalo itself and nearby Great Lakes cities have such vibrant histories of small press publishing. This isn’t to disregard New York, North Carolina, or San Francisco as literary wells, but only to set them aside as one would a worn down pencil and, thereby, begin to bring these geographies of poetry into balance.[3] For example, during the latter half of the twentieth century, there were writers and publishers such as Russell Atkins of Free Lance (Cleveland), d.a.levy of Renegade Press, Seven Flowers, and his periodicals The Silver Cesspool, Marrahwanna Quarterly, and the Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle (Cleveland), Douglas Blazek of Ole & Open Skull (Chicago), Dudley Randall and Naomi Long Madgett of Broadside Lotus (Detroit), Fredy Perlman’s Black & Red (Detroit), James Sorcic and Ed Burton of Gunrunner (Milwaukee), Judith Kerman and Judith Treible of Earth Daughters (Buffalo), and Allen De Loach of INTREPID (Buffalo). Beyond the U.S. Great Lakes, one could include bpNichol of Ganglia et al. (Toronto), Will Inman of Kauri (Washington D.C.), Ian Hamilton Finlay of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse (UK) and many, many others working in what we could call an extended “proletarian” tradition of small press publishing.[4] From there, we could add to this group writers dedicated to revolution—some more biting than others—such as Chernyshevsky, Chekov, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Federico García Lorca, George Orwell, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Octavio Paz, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Patchen, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Diane DiPrima, Audre Lorde, Jackson MacLow, Leslie Scalapino, and many more.
We gather writers and writing close to us that aids in confirming and challenging our own commitments, but let us always remember that this is an effort to make intelligible our own paths of understanding. No, we cannot simply return to the “proletarian poetry” of the early twentieth century, but we should not let it rot and go to waste. We can return to their urgency and principles, but we cannot repeat their demands. There is no Soviet Union and there are no Communist or Socialist parties as there were in the early twentieth century. Collaboration with unions remains a possible through-line. As Cary Nelson asserts, although “proletarian poetry” passed away, “what did not come to an end, despite the virtually canonical claims to the contrary by literary academics, was the whole range of traditions of social and political poetry in America.”[5] However, even if there were no principles we could draw from the editors and writers of the period, we can still learn from their activity as publishers who pursued their own values and operated on their own terms: small press publishers.
Skopic and others even fail to mention Hall’s own efforts as a bookmaker and publisher through Hostile Books. Within the contemporary publishing landscape, it isn’t difficult to recognize Hostile Books as a part of a network of imprints working toward a revolutionary or more human publishing ecosystem, including, among many: RE/SEARCH, Bottom Dog Press, Temporary Services,[6] Barba De Abejas, Above / Ground, Action Books, Ethel Zine & Micro Press, Dead Mall Press,[7] No Press / House Press, Further Reading, Inside the Castle, Issue Press, NONMACHINABLE, Prolit, Aaron Cohick of NewLights Press,[8] and, the publisher of Fugue and Strike itself, Black Ocean. This scattered list is only the surface of contemporary publishers who publish radical material and interrogate press practices.[9]
[3] Skopic also notes Carl Sandburg as a figure of working-class poetry in Chicago, but I’m more concerned here with regional literatures as they form through the efforts of local publishing.
[4] To this limited list, we could scavenge the pages of Dustbooks editor Len Fulton’s Small Press Review or more closely investigate the publishers of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP). k.a.wisniewski, “A Tribute to Len Fulton” (2015)
[5] Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 165.
[6] Half Letter Press, an imprint of Temporary Services, published Artist Publishers Reflect on Book Waste, otherwise known as the “Book Waste Book” because it includes two overprinted RISO sheets. Half Letter press itself is named for the utility of making books from letter stock and without any cutting. “Book Waste Book” features artists sharing methods and resources for limiting and using book waste across printing processes. For further Half Letter publications on press practices, see “How to Prepare for the Collapse of the Industrial Publishing System,” “What Problems Can Artist Publishers Solve?” & “Towards A Self-Sustaining Publishing Model.”
[7] DEAD MALL PRESS Founded by R.M. Haines, Dead Mall Press is a part of the largely defunct Poets Union, which organized a boycott of Small Press Distribution in solidarity with Damaged Book Worker’s efforts to expose abuse and exploitation at SPD. Although I plan to write further on the boycott and its dissolution, I will have to leave that for another time.
[8] Join Aaron’s Artist Book Conversations, where publishers and bookmakers across the world hold monthly discussions on topics voted on by all members.
[9] Much of this list is gathered from my ongoing project to form an encompassing directory of publishers.
Omission of small publishers or bookmakers should not be surprising given how artists are often dependent on academic institutions, private and public, for support or a livelihood. Though crowdfunding, social media, and enduring local scenes have provided conditions for the maintenance and perhaps resurgence of small publishers and bookmaker communities in the past decade, economic conditions are constraining; artistic elders cannot remain social pillars of fire and cloud forever; new methods of patronage and “community” such as crowdfunding and social media are tenuous. This is a topic I’ve broached with Hall and many editors, yet there is often little alternative. Legacy institutions that have historically provided some material support for revolutionary and subversive literatures such as Small Press Distribution, PEN America, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and Poetry Foundation continue to face increasing criticism and fall into disfunction. Even confronted by the beginnings of organized opposition, as in the case of the Poet’s Union boycott against SPD, non-profit boards change face and remain structurally the same. Recognizing this, I look to truly independent arts organizing—or as Aaron Cohick puts it: interdependent organizing—as a more hopeful front, with examples like the late Daniel Thompson’s Junkstock[10] and Hall’s own reading and interview series green_space.
Still, the dominance of academic and cultural institutions for poetry can be felt in most major cities. While colleges, universities, and non-profit centers may allow for otherwise impossible interchanges between artists as well as opportunities for resources and public spaces, these institutions must be considered historically as ones that displace local artistic traditions and communities, drawing from them parasitically and regulating them into their recognizable forms. Here, poetry is professionalized, and once-social relationships become commercial, sheltered behind admissions, tuition, and residency, which often means uprooting. In my experience, writing programs also dislocate writing from bookmaking and publishing, though there are certainly exceptions such as editor of Bull City Press Ross White’s “Writer as Publisher” course at The University of North Carolina. This relationship between writing and bookmaking is fundamental, and, even in subtle expressions like the structure of Fugue and Strike itself—which would be illegible or at least unmarketable to many contemporary trade and non-profit publishers alike—Hall’s experience as an editor and reader of small press literature is a legible dimension of his poetics. Commenting on the development of his book projects in an interview with rob mclennan, Hall writes “The poem iterates from some energy that has a coherence beyond the poem and wants to animate and bind more poems—each poem a variegation of the larger distinct wave that is the book and the book itself an expression of the smaller patterns it contains.”
While the institutional reorganization of U.S. literature’s artistic traditions and practices may be primarily identified with the Iowa Writers Workshop, Universities and Colleges in the industrial cities of the Northeast quickly developed after World War II and through the vicissitudes of the Cold War. Highlighting Dr. Eric Bennet’s arguments in Workshops of Empire, Annie Levin in a Current Affairs article titled “How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction” discusses how the creative writing discipline sheltered writers from engaging in history and political theory, or, more overtly, Communism and Socialism. Still, whatever their origins and incentive structures, Levin concludes that writers who emerge from the stranglehold of these institutions can found new groups and publications aligned closer with labor and socialist principles. Beyond Iowa, other programs emerge at Cleveland State University, Columbia University, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and Boston University. Instituted in 1962, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center stands as a primary example of this institutional turn; succeeding from the Fenn College Poetry Center founded by Lewis Turco (a friend of Russell Atkins) the CSU Poetry Center was able to form from the same soil that bore a vibrant mimeograph scene in Cleveland at the time as well as predecessors like the Free Lance Poets and Prose Workshops started by Russell Atkins, Helen Collins, Casper L. Jordan, and later, with Atkins, a magazine co-edited with Adelaide Simon.[11] These gatherings developed into one of the most enduring literary magazines, named the Free Lance after the workshops, which were frequently attended by budding poets and publishers Kent Taylor and d.a.levy, which returns me to the epitaph I used to introduce this review…
[10] Daniel Thompson organized a poetry reading and performance series in the Cleveland area called “Junkstock.” Playing off of Woodstock, the series was held at Pearl Road Auto Wrecking junkyard.
[11] For more Russell Atkins, see World’d Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins, edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough. (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). Atkins’s only full-length poetry collection Here In The (CSU Poetry Center, 1976) is out of print, but a scanned digital copy can be accessed at Craig Dworkin and Danny Snelson’s Eclipse Archive.
garbagemen never get shot during riots
Giving this quote from Cleveland publisher and poet d.a.levy as a parting gift to my hometown Service Department, I realized the need to return to his SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM to see how it may shed light on Hall’s work. Written in 1968 during the Hough riots, levy’s long poem shares more with Fugue and Strike than a discussion of waste workers. Beyond championing garbage men as the saints of riots or condemning the violent police response (see CWRU’s brief account in the “Encyclopedia of Cleveland History”), levy uses the figure of the waste worker to comment on the structural position of academic poets in relation to labor and how that may affect the content and perspective of their writing.
Opening up the final section of the poem—“PART SIX – a small funeral”—levy insists, contrary to how they may be portrayed or portray themselves, poets do not flirt with madness: “the poet just eats & sleeps & pisses / & farts & shits & writes / poems.” Rather, he argues it is “the businessman, the salesman / who gambles with insanity.” Here, he also begins to interrogate the poets for how they use the luxury of time to question their existence, while many workers can only “put in day after day / in the same / meaningless / dance routine / without even time / to ask why.” Though patronized artists, commercial artists, and academic writers have or once had the time for reflection, levy stresses how they do not see, ignore, or wave away the undignified conditions of many people. As opposed to illuminating the insanity of our working lives—our lives of work—and their “hopelessly identical day[s],” the role of poets is now to “beat their head against the wall” and help us dream. However, levy has a simple answer for poetry: garbage. In its own way, Hall’s Fugue and Strike also answers with garbage.
Rather than a poetry of “beauty in the garbage heap” or “emotional garbage,” levy compares his approach to poetry to how garbagemen know their reality: along their routes, the trash we bring to the curb; the rust of our city’s bridges; the asphalt cracking from ice and blooming with gasoline; the incessant traffic with its engine exhaust; and the familiar, sagging houses—encompassing realities unavailable or distant from many professions, such as the stocktrader—“the soulless men / bullfighters of insignificant stockrooms”—or the police officer, “playing war games” and “proud of their insanity.” levy places the “academic poets” alongside these livelihoods. However, similar to Hall, his poem doesn’t conclude with a condemnation, but rests with a sketch of his daily effort and some redemption in beauty and dreams:
& everyday i sit here
trying to become one of you
after another
trying on those highschool dreams
for size
it doesn't work
you don’t fit me
as a poet i try to learn
how to remain human
despite technology
& there is no one to learn from
i am still too young to
be quiet & contemplative
my wife & i
take an evening walk
around the block
(are we that old)
there is something beautiful
about her something
some dream thing in the cloudless sky
i know my dreams are unreal
but they are my dreams
sometimes
on hot summer nights
we hate each other
& it is beautiful
note:
peace & awareness are
like two small birds
trying to leave the planet
because they are tired of dying
i’m not advocating anything
Here, levy explicitly states his goal to inhabit and speak from the perspective of the whole community. Writing as a poet born in an industrial society, when production and manufacturing reached its apex and began declining in Cleveland, his poetry strives to express the entire labor of a city; and, unsatisfied with available work, levy sought the path of a publisher and poet to guard a more human existence. Though he rejects the things of beauty and dreams of the “academic poet” because they may obscure our daily realities and struggles, he himself returns to assert the beauty of passing hate and the persistence of his dreams. Languishing on levy’s final note, I’m reminded of Hall’s poems because, for me, they rise above condemnation and call out with unhindered endurance like levy’s departing birds of peace and awareness.
Hall says as much when he remarks how he could have concluded the collection with a fantasy of revenge against capitalists, instead describing them from the standpoint of a time where wealth ceases to prevail as “the mute and frustrated ghosts of a savage time.” On seeing a seedling bloom in the drain of his shower, he recalls how his own consumption and waste-making ultimately fails to result in destruction. Here, Hall records “if life didn’t last, what endured was its medium: soil”—the accepting ground that will bury the conflicts and personalities of history.
Got Fugue?
Although I didn’t grasp or appreciate the structure of Hall’s Fugue and Strike on my first read, the relationship between its two distinct sections is what keeps me returning. Though there exists a through-line on labor, the first section “Fugue” seems to accumulate from personal experience, while “Strike” is largely the fruit of expansive research. And yet, despite differences in approach, style, and form, it is the double motion between the restless “Fugue” poems and the historical, measured (Garbage) “Strike” essays that prolong my interest. Despite how Hall and his readers must trudge through the deep snows of Buffalo, political paralysis, our fatiguing fugue, we press on and, together, are able to guard our revolutionary commitments, strike up a light across this “garbage world,” and give witness to ordinary, necessary labor—to all ongoing struggles toward a time of solidarity where we are no longer simply workers or owners. After all, as Hall writes in the final poem, if we remain in the labor relations of capitalism and do not achieve “a revolutionary time (or maybe we should call it solidarity time),” our cities will continue to deteriorate into “geologies of human residue”—or what he later names, “our final purgatorial vessel.”
While Hall gives language to this potentiality, Fugue and Strike does not take it as impossible to resist or alter. No matter what fugue, what historical moment of defeat, what zones of demobilization “where our life devours our lives [from the] inside,” these poems insist on our ability to comprehend our situations within a larger historical context and act on this understanding. Without Hall’s explicit focus on labor, in his Tombstone as a Lonely Charm #3, levy speaks as derisively and definitively on the deteriorating conditions of our lives:
if you want freedom
don’t mistake circles
for revolutions
think in terms of living
and know
you are dying
& wonder why
I often return to this poem when traveling to and from work. My morning and evening bike rides unsettle my routine and put me into contact with the world’s harshness—roadkill, Cleveland weather, unhoused people, indifferent or even hostile drivers. In these intermissions between work and study, I am able to question what devours my life from the inside. Recently, I’ve come to understand it is a lack of control and decision-making in our work that makes our labor a fugue zone; and not only our working hours, but also the travel to our workplaces, which also populate much of Hall’s poetry. As pedestrians, it isn’t any wonder that both levy and Hall’s work is suffused with the public spaces of streets and transit. Though there could be an essay devoted entirely to how Hall’s collection deals with transit infrastructure—BUFFALO FREE RAPID TRANSIT acting as a refrain, carrying us into and out of the alienation of work—I am particularly interested in how Hall drags poetry into these zones and performs the labor of a poet who attempts to see and share the whole of our daily experiences, our many small, stirring dreams and accompanying deaths.
“Fugue” is Hall’s way of sharing the language of his movement through Buffalo, a speech striving to overcome the city’s cruelty—blasting like the Angels’ trumpets on the day of Judgement—with merely his own soft-shelled phrases from “A LANGUAGE FOR EXHAUSTION.” Yet, Hall writes far beyond this exhaustion. As he maneuvers through “this work that…is all we have between us,” I begin to understand how encompassingly “Fugue” holds within itself the second section “Strike.” Just as levy writes about how the garbage man knows their reality, elucidating the poet’s mission to realize the concrete conditions of not only our own lives but those of our communities, Hall’s writing exemplifies how one’s life and work can inform their research and writing; and, in this dialogue between our daily lives and grasp of history, Fugue and Strike does not easily justify the poet’s occupation or practice. Perhaps recalling and turning over his former collections The Devotional Poems and Someone’s Utopia, Hall explains:
if i have said I’ve wasted
my life in poems, I meant today . . .
waste is a form of devotion (49)
Instead of affirming poetry in the face of productivity, Hall relinquishes literature to capital and its ruin of abundance. In an economy governed by profit, writing is assigned little to no value because its substance is the social, particularly revolutionary writing. And why would large publishing houses or academic and literary institutions champion one of their most faithful adversaries, who speaks past a narrow view of history, moral character, and social ills? Rather, Hall’s poetry gives glimpses of an alternative contemporary poetry, which raises up common social values, grapples with a future without domination, and envisions the limitless relationships to pursue in this regained and yet untraveled freedom. So, in a bewildering manner contrary to Black Ocean’s own publicity for the book, Fugue and Strike actually models and brings about a poetry of devotion to waste, a literature of waste that reclaims the exhaustion and abandonment of our social, creative lives. Later, Hall aligns this vision with a statement by Mexican author Heriberto M. Yepez: “Art must be destroyed in order to not become merchandise or an institutional icon.”
Does this destruction not also entail the destruction of the poet? In “Fugue” Hall seems to abandon the occupation of the poet when he writes that “to become a poet / is to kill a poet, cling to a poet / in the last hour, before slipping into the drift”—an image that returns transformed in the poem “I HATE THAT YOU DIED:”
the angel of this waste dumper is not the an-
gel, I am the angel
sweeping
this plaza
by 7 am moonlight
sick w/ drowning angels
Deliberate or otherwise, this evokes a familiar scene from levy’s “PARA-CONCRETE MANIFESTO” where he discusses how poems take on the form of angels dredged from the polluted Cuyahoga River and how poems must act out these deaths, even the death of the poet. Where the abstracted role of the poet dissolves, the labor only begins for levy and Hall. As Ben Burgis concludes in his article “Even When Times are Tough, Keep Socialism as your North Star,” we may not be angels, so we need to be socialists. Yet, across the Fugue Zones, Hall suggests how even angels would need to form a union. In a conversation at a CVS, Hall strikes at the crux of worker alienation—the separation of our lives and labor—and the difficulty labor presents to poetry and literature in general:
you say who counts these hours and I do not know I do
not think anyone counts these hours, we all just know each other’s
lives are mostly lost to the fact that each day
they start over, down similar paths, we know this
that whatever we are can’t be counted, is inexplicable and strange
The Mutants Are Revolting[12]
In “Garbage Strike,” Hall gives language to our days lost to labor and the inexplicably strange, yet completely ordinary way work is measured and imposed on us, dividing our days, each other across varied tasks, and our own sense of self. Composed in contact with archival material at the Industrial and Labor Relations Library at Cornell University, this second half of Fugue and Strike focuses even more closely on labor, particularly waste or sanitation work.
Beginning with the statement “The United States war machine…murders even when idling its engine”—a truth felt intensely as ever during the ongoing displacement and decimation of the Palestinian people—Hall’s labor history uncovers inborn and continuously shifting issues in waste work, such as racial hierarchies and privatization. Here, he shares an early history of racialized waste work in New York City, which traces the development of wage structures to the maintenance of racial hierarchy in undesirable labor. Further, approaching the history of privatization in city services, Hall illustrates how, following the early victories of sanitation workers in forming unions, police forces created formidable unions of their own—the Fraternal Order of Police being one of the strongest to this day—and began to undermine not only the efforts of private workers, but also of their fellow public service workers. Unsurprisingly then, in response to these organizing victories, “Garbage Strike” emphasizes how significantly sanitation labor, and much of public work, has been and continues to be privatized. This is justified openly as an effort to cut government budgets, but silently remains a means to make labor militancy among public workers fragmented and, therefore, more difficult to organize for better work conditions, control, and compensation.
Illustrating another side of militancy in “waste relations,” Hall calls attention to a garbage strike by residents of Oaxaca, Mexico. Here, he draws out how their refusal to accept further waste into their community from surrounding, wealthier areas forced those more privileged residents to “live with their own waste” rather than to leave it at someone else’s doorstep. This example is fascinating for how it points to the potential for solidarity between community members and sanitation workers in coordinating waste strikes for particular residential areas or businesses. It would, however, require well-organized labor unions and their ability to communicate with not only membership but also the communities they serve. Still, the pressure exerted by these strikes would be immense, confronting owners with the detritus of their own system as well as halting both production and distribution.
As Hall notes, waste work is “the distribution chain’s double image: the disposal chain”—or, as he writes earlier, “a weak point in capitalism’s metabolism.” And so, if poets are to take on the role of the waste worker, the devotion of their poems and lives in their boundless waste must choke the disposal.
[12] The title of S6E12 of Futurama, where the mutants who maintain New New York’s sewers revolt against being forced to live underground with revolting tactics, such as flooding the streets with sewage. The mutants of Futurama satirize theories of “the underclass” with a literal underclass who gain consciousness and say “What comes down must back up!”
An Ode or an Elegy to the Waste of Our Lives?
Now, searching for a clean closing, I’d like to rest with an article that Fugue and Strike prompted me to read: Jacobin editor Meagan Day’s “An Ode to Sanitation Workers,” which could just as well serve as the title for Hall’s collection.
Following a one-day strike by Atlanta sanitation workers in August 2019, Day reflects on the significance of sanitation work and the workers, without whom “the factories would stop, the cities would empty, and civilization itself would collapse.” Though “the labor performed by sanitation workers is all but invisible to people going about their daily lives,”—just as Hall’s history in “Garbage Strike” demonstrates—she argues waste work is not only essential for residents, but also for public service departments themselves and all forms of business: offices, hospitals, and construction as well as agricultural and industrial production. Barring the collapse of civilization from food and water contamination, further ecological disaster, pandemics, and mass movements of people, sanitation work is integral to the functioning of our capitalist economic relations, and likely to any future social order.
However, despite this social and mortal significance, Day remarks on how sanitation workers and their labor is devalued, both in the public sphere through budgeting and in the private sphere through the suppression of wages as they seek to gain competitive profit margins at contractors such as Republic Rumpke and Waste Management. This is not a new development, and has been the case since the beginning of modern sanitation work. Following the deaths of garbage collectors Echol Cole and Robert Walker in the Spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in support of the Memphis sanitation workers striking against the inhuman conditions that led to Cole and Walker’s deaths in the back of a packer. This would be King’s final speech before his assassination a day later. Referencing the event in “Garbage Strike,” Hall’s history builds on Day’s analysis to form a vision of waste work which at once recognizes how capital considers everything waste and, in accepting this imposition, treats waste as a means to overcome our alienation. As Hall declares, there is “no place that waste does not eventually escape.”
Ours is openly an era of waste, a result of misuse and the structural inability in our economy to plan for excess. Literature or poetry may act as a point of escape for some, but Hall’s work demonstrates how accepting poetry as waste allows us to see its potential role in class struggle. It is this terrifying act that leaves open the potential for waste to either pile endlessly in the landfill and leach into the water, or for that waste to be redirected at its own dissolution, for our labor wasted within systems of exploitation to be put to social and environmental use. By focusing on waste work and waste itself as a critical part of the labor struggle as well as a critical point of conflict in the overall production and distribution cycle, Hall’s Fugue and Strike avoids seeing waste as a horror in itself or as the driver of economic crises. Afterall, as Day points out, in a social system sanitation workers, and all workers, would be more closely aligned with the public benefit and realized “as [the] guardians and sustainers of civilization. And for making the world run, they would receive the world in return.” We don’t need a “proletarian poetry” any more than we need to convince ourselves that we are workers.
Though Hall explains elsewhere how “we overestimate the political efficacy of most poetry in the United States because most circuits of distribution and reception are separate from those of meaningful political struggle,” his collection places poetry into intimate contact with labor history and enduring labor organizations; and devoting its poems to waste, workers, waste workers, and environments of waste, Fugue and Strike directs us to a confrontation of writing and publishing practices, municipal political action, and the rethinking of our transportation and production systems within a larger ecology.
After Hall’s “history of lurching waste flows and accumulation, the labor of carriage and decomposition, the production of intensified difference and hierarchy among workers, and the rebellions of those laborers,” I’m left with questions rotting like food in a restaurant dumpster. I’m left with a reinvigorated determination to apply labor history and ecology in my writing. I’m left with a fraying, dog-eared, scribbled-over book. I hand it to Joe Hall, so he can reply:
At the factory I put defective books into a crusher
I put this in the crusher
∩
From the Cuyahoga Valley, Alex Benedict nested in the Cleveland area. He operates offset printers for a living and publishes books on receipt paper through betweenthehighway press. Currently, he is writing a biography of Cleveland publisher and poet d.a.levy. Recently, he has published two short collections with Ethel Zine and forthcoming with Above / Ground Press.