Enter the Fugue Zone: On Joe Hall’s “Fugue and Strike”
Joe Hall | Fugue and Strike | Black Ocean | April 2023 | 126 Pages
The word fugue is an old one, and like most of its siblings, has carried multiple meanings in its travels. In the modern argot of the medical, a fugue is an acute state of dissociation, perhaps brought on by trauma. To the composers of old Europe, fugue was a musical form, defined by the repetition of a few simple themes in ever-more-complex layers. Trace back to the Latin fuga, and we inherit further meanings: refugee, fugitive, tempus fugit. The word invokes transience, a flight from one thing into another, whether mental or physical. It conjures strange and unfamiliar vistas.
These are just some of the themes of Joe Hall’s Fugue and Strike, his fourth poetry collection. The title of an early subsection, “Fugue & Fugue,” gestures toward the plurality of meaning, a fugue of possible fugues. Each of the constituent poems is labeled numerically as “Fugue 1” through “Fugue 87” along with its title. The emphasis on counting and ordering is akin to musical notation, the J.S. Bach variety of fugue; we can read the book as a baroque composition, with each poem a meticulously placed note. But at the same time, the sequence skips, moving directly from Fugue 30 to Fugue 35, from 50 to 62, and so on. We’ve jumped vertiginously over, or perhaps sleepwalked through other, missing poems. In this way, the book’s form evokes the psychological fugue state, in which the afflicted may find themselves suddenly in an unexpected place, with no memory of how or why they came to be there.
In short order, Hall gives this place a name: The Fugue Zone. The phrase recurs in almost every poem of the “Fugue & Fugue” section, often accompanied by its numerical coordinate, as in the following:
the oil of fugue in a bottle cap by the fan
the laces of bus routes in the grievance file of heaven
there it is, there it always is
the Fugue Zone, the Fugue Zone #37
Or, later:
The Fugue Zone #49, make it to 50, soggy shovel-face of printouts
cascade of cascades around the sun, who drank fog through a bone-straw
who dawned in extinction and dawned in cascades of extraction
whose mist of money and dollars, value an hour and an anti-aesthetic
These excerpts give only a hint of their cumulative effect. The Fugue Zone takes shape as an ever-shifting oneiric landscape, seen from the viewpoint of a weary and bewildered traveler. Certain motifs—wheels and gears, fog and mist, planets and other heavenly bodies—recur and offer tantalizing hints of a symbolic order. Yet these fragmentary images resist being reconciled with each other, and seldom resolve into a coherent whole. There is at once a strong sense of place and an inability to grasp the contours of this place, or envision it within the mind’s eye. The Fugue Zone evades interpretation, and remains surreal in the strictest sense of the word.
The comparison may be obvious, but this dreamlike quality of the Fugue Zone is reminiscent of The Waste Land. Almost a century earlier, Eliot’s admonition—“Son of man / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / a heap of broken images”—captures the feeling of traveling through The Fugue Zone eerily well. Like the elder poet, Hall’s concern for newness or the quality of the unexpected in his use of imagery is palpably Modernist. Lines like “laces of bus routes in the grievance file of heaven,” or the image of a worker in a bookstore “vomiting gold,” startle the senses and provoke the imagination with their departure from the tangible. Likewise, the musical quality of both texts often takes precedence over their meaning. In reading, you’re struck by the sound first, and the sense second. Not for nothing: Hall was a bassist in a punk band and he retains a strong sense of rhythm, particularly in his blank verse.
This is not to say that Fugue and Strike is beholden to tradition. On the contrary, it’s a radically original and experimental work, just as The Waste Land was a hundred years ago. It responds, in the same way, to a bizarre and uncertain modern world. “My life was full of disorienting changes; so was the world around me. Go with it,” says Hall in a recent interview, and this credo provides a useful glimpse into his work’s foundations. With a little effort, we can peer through the recurring mist and fog, and discern the outlines of these “disorienting changes,” giving them names. Prominent among them is COVID-19, as when the speaker muses that “if I have said I’ve wasted / my life in poems, I meant today is day / 41 of lockdown, waste is a / form of devotion, to what, to who,” or reflects that “We are twins of the egg / in a roving quarantine, / this delicate bridge: night.” The pandemic, of course, left many of us with fogged brains, either from actual infection or the associated stress and fear. The disorienting sensation of navigating Hall’s dreamscape mirrors the way the world itself has been made strange around us. In the genealogy of words, fog is fug is fugue.
Then, too, there’s a particularity of place at work, as The Fugue Zone maps onto the real and unreal city. Hall is a distinctly Buffalonian poet, and his poems are steeped in the atmosphere and history of Buffalo, New York. They couldn’t have taken shape in quite the same way in any other place. Two of the Fugues, number 8 and number 38 respectively, are hymns to Buffalo’s public rail system, “riding with futures flowered from the aroma of a covered dish steadied in the cars’ swarm,” a “plot outside suffering on the apron of a well-worn grid.” In contrast to so much of the book’s surreal imagery, the transit system feels familiar, even homelike. It’s communal in nature, offering “a seat that would accompany our infirmities,” and perhaps a refuge from the fog outside. Vital infrastructure indeed. And in turn, Hall carries his preoccupation with Buffalo’s transit system in the other direction, publishing at least one poem on the side of a Buffalo bus shelter, rather than a website or magazine. The city runs through the poems, and the poems inscribe the city, binding each irrevocably to the other.
This geographic rootedness may seem counterintuitive in the age of online distribution. One form of conventional wisdom, after all, holds that literature has largely outgrown distinctions of place, swept along in the great currents of globalization with everything else. In this view, a poet with a strongly regional flavor is simply limiting their appeal; the goal is to be universal, writing about everywhere and nowhere. The idea that a city like Buffalo could be worth writing about, as such, is seen as an anachronism, just as much as posting a poem on a physical bus-stop wall. It’s in opposition to this conventional framework, then, that Hall’s work gains its political dimension. By being so distinctly Buffalo, Fugue and Strike insists that poetry is inseparable from the material world that produces it. (“I walk around the city, drink the sediment of Buffalo pipes, breathe its air, mess around in its wounded dirt,” says Hall in interview mode.) The text contends that there is such a thing as public space, and that the poet can intervene in it. Moreover, it asserts that Buffalo—a poor, working-class city in the Rust Belt, crumbling from decades of neglect—is capable of ecstatic beauty.
Hall’s Buffalo is not merely in conflict with certain literary trends. It’s a site of conflict in itself. Buffalo is a city that very nearly had a socialist mayor in 2021, before a dramatic eleventh-hour reversal reinstated the incumbent, who had already lost his primary. It’s a city that was terrorized by a white supremacist mass shooter in 2022, leaving scars that still linger today. And above all, it’s a site of police brutality. In one early poem, which is neither a “fugue” nor a “strike,” Hall casts aside the cloak of ambiguity, and names names:
Tim Howard arrests Tim Howard for murder
and spends the night looking the other way
as Tim Howard knocks Tim Howard’s head against
the hardness of the Erie County holding center
whispering murderer, murderer, murderer.
A half-page footnote details all the suspicious deaths that took place under the notorious Sheriff Howard’s tenure: thirty in all. The poem is equal parts black comedy and scream of frustration, imagining a macabre poetic justice as the only kind available. The figure of Howard is totemic, a grim archetype; he is every killer cop in America, and the institution of policing itself. The echoes of the George Floyd moment, along with COVID, form the second animating crisis of Fugue and Strike’s poetics. By refusing to let the dead remain silent, the text places itself on the side of resistance and abolition, in defiance of established power. By envisioning Howard’s self-destruction, it dares to imagine the same for America’s institutions of violence and repression writ large.
So far, this is an image in negative. Politically and aesthetically, we’ve learned what Fugue and Strike abhors, but not what it embraces. It remains for the latter half of the book, entitled “Garbage Strike,” to bring clarity. “Garbage Strike” is a meditation on waste, trash, and salvage in all their forms: from the sewage churning in the pipes beneath our feet, to the pulped remains of unsold books, to the quotidian black-bag on every doorstep. Like fugue, the word waste is a chameleon. It’s connected to the question of police violence, with “the militarization of the police partly the military solving a problem of disposal” for its excess and unwanted equipment. (To be wasted, notably, is slang for “killed.”) In other contexts, waste is ecological, both the agent of climate change and the devastated landscape it leaves behind. It’s the passage of time, rendering yesterday’s cutting-edge technology into shattered fragments of junk. It’s exploitation, which wastes so much human potential on pointless drudgery. Waste is “spilling and spilling from several terminals,” a “flood brimming to the lip” and threatening to overflow. Far from inert matter, it’s always in motion, always charged with kinetic force:
I want the history of lurching waste flows and accumulations, the labor of carriage and decomposition, the production of intensified difference and hierarchy among workers, and the rebellions of those laborers: Mudlarks; dirt-carters; loaders of horse-corpse barges, dung ships, and containerships; workers in ship-breaking yards; emotional garbage sorters and haulers. What if it was a celebrated labor? To disassemble the titans.
In other words, “Garbage Strike” picks up the things, and the people, that modern capitalist society casts aside, recasting them as vital and potent. To understand the history of waste, it maintains, is to understand the whole history of the world—and from there, to see the ways the world might change.
If that last passage looks different to the ones that came before, it’s by design. Formally, “Garbage Strike” makes a sharp break from the patterns of language set up by “Fugue and Fugue.” In place of loose, impressionistic verse, there’s suddenly a lot of prose in the mix, and even a strong narrative thread. Flexing his erudition, Hall takes on the role of a labor historian, chronicling the lives of rebellious sanitation workers throughout time. In quick succession, we visit Memphis in 1968, New York in 1677, Tokyo in 1971, Pittsburgh in 2020, and so on. In each time and place, a familiar story plays out. The people who deal with the dirtiest jobs of all take up collective struggle, and find that they have more leverage than they imagined. Waste, above all, is a great equalizer: rich or poor, powerful or abject, everyone produces it, and needs it removed. So, the question emerges: “if no trash left the police station, gated communities / if no trash left the board rooms of Silicon Valley / if no trash left the White House / or the last 3 bosses’ offices,” what happens next? Who really holds the power? “What,” Hall asks in the book’s most provocative moment, “might a garbage strike look like on a planetary scale? What would it demand?”
“Garbage Strike” goes a long way toward making Fugue and Strike more legible, and places it within a specific movement: namely, the rebirth of proletarian poetry. Long dormant in the United States, this literary current reached its first peak in the 1920s and 30s, when its foremost practitioners—poets like Max Eastman and Kenneth Fearing—were active members in the trade unions and socialist parties of their day. Langston Hughes, most famously, dabbled in proletarian poetry with pieces like “Good Morning Revolution,” which somehow never seem to appear in his anthology chapters. With the Red Scare(s) and the decline of the American left, proletarian poetry faded into the background, and certain institutions managed to convince everyone that political poetry of any kind was in bad taste. This story is, by now, more or less well-known. But in more recent years, proletarian poetry has begun to reemerge, and writers from the Rust Belt have led the way. Cleveland’s own Brendan Joyce has been a figure in this resurgence, along with writers like Wendy Trevino, Darius Simpson, Kyle Carrero Lopez, Noor Hindi, and others. It’s clear that Joe Hall deserves a prominent place among their ranks.
Fugue and Strike is, like the baroque fugue that inspires it, a wonderfully complex and multifaceted piece of art. It’s formally innovative without being gimmicky, surreal and mysterious without being needlessly obscure, and polemical without being strident. I expect to keep returning to its pages for a long time to come, and to be richly rewarded by the experience. A journey through the Fugue Zone is no small thing to undertake, but it has no shortage of wonders to offer.