Joe Hall's Blog
July 5, 2019
Poetic Autoethnography
Life changes, $, age, energy, sanity, some loose connections all kept me from touring heavily for my last book, Someone's Utopia. So I've been spreading the word slowly, and I figure that after a year + 3 months I should probably post about it here.
Someone's Utopia
This book is about a lot of things--work, waste/excess/ecologies, despair, gender, family. I've never been able to sum it up neatly but a friend of mine recently gave a name to its method that fit: poetic autoethnography. Amazing how someone can crystallize a decade of writing into a few words. So that's an important part of what it is: the experiences of members of the families I've been among in their own words. It was a joyous process, learning about their lives and what they did to support themselves and others. At one point I found out that my parents were technically squatters in the house they were building around them. And across and within poems those experiences overlap and diverge with my own.
There's probably no coherent political messaging in the book but talking to folks helped and reading more on the subject made me realize how undervalued reproductive, care, and service work are. How gendered and racialized what work and what workers are recognized and valued. How unequal those scales of value are and how violently that inequality impacts folks' lives. Like any writing project I've done, I sure as hell wish I knew what I knew at the end at the beginning. But that's the way it goes. 175 pages of messy poems.
My first two books were lucky enough to get some shine, but I wrote them out necessity. A lot of it was me dealing with my shit in the dark! I could do without them. This is a book made from more conscious choices, and I feel intense gratitude that it's a thing in the world. Okay, thanks for making it this far. At this rate, my next post will be in 2032. Look out!
Someone's Utopia
This book is about a lot of things--work, waste/excess/ecologies, despair, gender, family. I've never been able to sum it up neatly but a friend of mine recently gave a name to its method that fit: poetic autoethnography. Amazing how someone can crystallize a decade of writing into a few words. So that's an important part of what it is: the experiences of members of the families I've been among in their own words. It was a joyous process, learning about their lives and what they did to support themselves and others. At one point I found out that my parents were technically squatters in the house they were building around them. And across and within poems those experiences overlap and diverge with my own.
There's probably no coherent political messaging in the book but talking to folks helped and reading more on the subject made me realize how undervalued reproductive, care, and service work are. How gendered and racialized what work and what workers are recognized and valued. How unequal those scales of value are and how violently that inequality impacts folks' lives. Like any writing project I've done, I sure as hell wish I knew what I knew at the end at the beginning. But that's the way it goes. 175 pages of messy poems.
My first two books were lucky enough to get some shine, but I wrote them out necessity. A lot of it was me dealing with my shit in the dark! I could do without them. This is a book made from more conscious choices, and I feel intense gratitude that it's a thing in the world. Okay, thanks for making it this far. At this rate, my next post will be in 2032. Look out!
