Ultra-Talk

Mark Halliday read his poetry on campus here the other evening, and it was a great reading. Halliday is known as the "ultra-talk" poet because many of his poems are discursive and conversational--rhetorically rich monologues. The label can be misleading, however, because his poems are exceptionally well crafted and, without being preciously self-conscious, are often self-reflective, and they are extremely subtle in the ways they move and the ways they end. The poems are often relentless in their pursuit of the implications flowing from the premise with which they begin or from which they (apparently) sprang. Many of the poems are sardonic, satiric, and downright funny: qualities one thirsts for in poetry from any era. His poetry is not altogether dissimilar to that of Kenneth Koch. (I wish I had asked him directly about that comparison; maybe he doesn't like Koch's poetry.)

Halliday's books include Little Star, Selfwolf, and Jab, and he has also published a book on the work of Wallace Stevens. Halliday teaches at the University of Ohio.


During his reading, as he was introducing a poem that was, to some extent, a miniature novel, he said there were 11 reasons why he couldn't be a novelist and, by implication, why had to be a poet. He didn't specify what the 11 reasons were, but I hope to hear them some day. I am sympathetic to his difficulty with fiction. I've written and published stories, published one novel, and written other novels--but I find fiction-writing almost immeasurably harder than writing poetry. Writing novels is "labor" in a way that writing poetry does not seem to be, even as writing and revising poetry are no vacation. I tend to get distracted from plot, characterization, and scenes by . . . . well, by almost anything. One word can throw me off the track. In the forest of writing-fiction, poets often behave like bad hunting-dogs; when they're supposed to be moving forward on the track of that plot, they wander off to look at a bird, sniff something arcane, bark at the moon, lie down, scratch themselves, or hunt an animal in which the hunter has no interest. Unfortunately, and fortunately, poets are interested in everything. To them the demotic is rare.

Please find and read Mark Halliday's poetry.