~JANET MCCANN~
H. PALMER HALL: REFLECTIONS
ON WRITING, PUBLISHING,
AND OTHER THINGS
Hall's true subject is
how one's
writings grow from a lived life,
and how the places he has
known
generated poems and essays.
These essays represent
experiences
of a Texas childhood,
a violent coming-of-age
in Vietnam,
and a reflective maturity.
Ordinarily
anything
with the word "Publishing" in the title sends me running, but I would
have
missed a lot if I had run this time. Palmer Hall's short
collection
of essays, Reflections on Writing, Publishing, and Other Things,
is gripping. It is indeed about publishing, as it does describe
Hall's
years as publisher and editor of Pecan Grove Press — in this
reader's opinion
one of the most generous and responsible small presses as well as one
of
the best. But Hall's true subject is how one's writings grow from
a lived life, and how the places he has known generated poems and
essays.
These essays represent experiences of a Texas childhood, a violent
coming-of-age
in Vietnam, and a reflective maturity. Hall's is a sensibility
deeply
rooted in the natural world, and he recreates in some of these essays a
mythic childhood countryside that is also quite real.
The
book
is also about the vitality of poetry, something many of us who write it
now doubt. Hall helps to convince us that we aren't wasting our lives
and
that if poetry does indeed 
"make
nothing happen," it enriches our perception of those things that do
happen
and thus helps us live our lives. In "Poetry in Vietnam," Hall
comments,
"In those days, not writing, I lived poetry, sucking it in and blowing
it out . . . When I . . heard a boy named Bao report on American
convoys leaving the camp for Pleiku and heard the jets strafe and
napalm
his position, the poetry that is Yeats and the poetry that is Stevens
("O
blessed rage for order, pale Ramon!") mingled with red dust and death."
In another essay he quotes a poem he wrote much later about his tour of
duty in Vietnam, and we see how poetry can simultaneously wound and
cure.
Hall traces
the genesis of particular poems, making the reader more aware of where
her or his own poems come from, and how. Reflections on
Writing,
Publishing, and Other Things is a book about place, about
observation
of place and writing about place, and also about the distance between
exile
and home.
Hall, H. Palmer. Reflections
on Writing, Publishing, and Other Things. San Antonio, TX:
Pecan
Grove Press, 2003. ISBN: 1-92-247-03-X, $7.00
© by Janet McCann
