Mapping Transformation in Phil Hall’s White Porcupine

By Lynn McClory

I thought of time and narrative structures while sitting in the pod this spring, and didn’t let go of the brain theory in Phil Hall’s map. All humans have a mental map, that memory of early childhood geographical and physical terrain. Hall said he would like to take us to his, but not go there himself.  How does he not go there in White Porcupine?  And how do other poets we’ve read hide, or draw, their maps for us?

White Porcupine is a reluctantly written autobiographical map of early years on an impoverished homestead in equally impoverished terrain. The book opens with a stand-alone poem made up of lines from the first line in each section of the book. The lines are a pre-text, and a sub-text, for the sequences that lie ahead. Hall is known for poking at the sequence. His Griffin nominee, The Oak Hunch, is partly a five sequence excursion into his psyche. A few years back, Hall produced a BookThug chapbook called The Bad Sequence, some of which I would have entertained you with tonight if Martin Levin hadn’t kept my samples, even after I kindly asked for them back. But BookThug is reprinting this poke at writing projects, so you too can enjoy this currently out-of-print series of hilariously “bad” sequences.

White Porcupine opens with the poet hiding his brain map in a wily fox sense of humour located in specific physical geography; the place Hall said he wanted to take us, but not himself. The first section title, Verulam, Harvey ... where Hall actually grew up, is and was for over a century and a half an economically bereft region where two rural Ontario townships, cut off by Pigeon Lake, intersect in isolation from the rest of Verulam to the south.

Hall simultaneously connects location, narration, and the narrator’s psychic stateon the opening page: "A name is a dot-mask on a smear" (13).  This map is insignificant, hidden and smeared with shame. 

"I am a far place this..." Hall writes. Syntactically this would be the place where the smear took place, "& this (poke)" this poet (?), this tale (?) are on their way.  The narrator transforms into a fox with a pink, gum-striped, long, white-toothed grin: " a fox // its strip-of-bacon-frying grin — its tongue out as long as its tail" (Hall 13). White Porcupine continues from page to page punning and stretching out the tale in one long, sectioned prose poem widening the narrator’s painful-to-tell-tale.

"A discourse," Barthes tells us in Music, Image, Text, "is a long sentence, the units of which are not necessarily sentences—narrative is marked with nodes, loops and lace words." (n.p.).  And in the same essay on narrative structure, Barthes writes that a poem can be understood as the outcome of a series of transformations.

The tale-teller in White Porcupine narrates a desperate need to transform his memory through wider writing: "Here I come screaming out of childhood’s burning barn/on a leash too short to reach the person I was meant to be" (24) he devastatingly reveals.  And "if what I have to say seems unconnected — wider!" (26) moves onto "propane Sherpas we wade into cream — holy vision!"(50).  Five exclamation marks shout humourous, pitiable, and self-deprecating hesitation on one page, simultaneously recalling the narrator’s emotional abuse and his desire to shatter memory with a new writing form, "where the old road went straight & the new road turns — go straight/ but it isn’t a road anymore — so turn — turn! — you missed the turn!// Bucky!  Four-Eyes!  Pastry-gut!" (35).

White Porcupine is written entirely without periods, commas, semi-colons, or colons, but there are nine exclamation marks, four question marks and lots of dashes. Each of them connect to the narrator’s desire to startle the reader with his map, as he is startled, or shattered, with the truth of his narration. Markings punctuate this text determined to subvert standard autobiography: expository conventionis not this poet’s route to transform his writing.

The four question marks in White Porcupineleave no question aboutthe importance of memory to identity. Is the narrator simply "whistling show tunes?"(25) about "the forged nail through the bare foot of a rubber boot / or the log homestead that turns into a pig pen?"(25). Can’t the beloved Grace Paley even remember his name? (37).  And in his letter to Lorna Crozier, he asks "for — what?// eventually I will have to write a poem in praise of my ruinous father"(48); the words "in praise" standing in for an exclamation mark, one I would have definitely put there.

The many dashes in White Porcupine reminded me of an essay I read recently in Heather McHugh’s book, Broken English. The essay, called “What Dickinson Makes a Dash For”, calls the Dickinson dash "elusive", “that suspense of punctuation, that undecidability, which is not an indecision.” (McHugh 106). “Dashes interweave phrases, release meaning from the sentence’s exclusionary powers, and nudge the whole occasion toward a simultaneous, manifold temporality,” McHugh says (107).

Typographical markers in White Porcupine accentuate how language is used to abuse, amuse, allude, alarm, and give pause for thought. Every "and" is an ampersand that looks like a person with a foot firmly planted on the ground and an up-stretched hand offering, or asking for something. Typical of Hall’s more whimsical ironic style is a little canoe drawn in a closed bracket on page 35; brackets that highlight sibilants, and startling i/ eye sounds from one page to the next," (smithereens)" on page 40 across from "(its lisp homes into the poorest corners)." White Porcupineis sign-mapped with linguistic-geographical descriptive codes from the get-go containing the narrator’s desire to withdraw, inform, and transform.

Hall places the figure of folktales’ most intelligent, clandestine, nocturnal animal to good use in his tale of a fox-scripter with shape-shifting wariness transformed to a teller of tales. The poems’ narrative track furtively loops in long lines, and in words that suddenly pop up again a page or few pages later: "the smear of Here being not/even — there" (14), "the snow-field backward/ fox ... making & unmaking tracks" (30), "which is why you’ll find the radio/ with its forked tail in the front yard/when the snow melts — & me singing/off-key Yr Cheatin’ Art" (62). These loops and "lace words," little jokes and puns, add pleasurable excess to White Porcupine’s otherwise starkly tragic tale.

Hall’s narrative is as much about his reluctance to tell his personal story as it is about writing itself, and what he desires his writing to be. In section "IV. RUTHLESSLY LOCAL/not suicidal/not joyous much," the narrator’s anguished sounds growl his need to write down, or out (?) the disturbing images mapped in his brain. From the first and last paired lines of the introduction to this section, he writes from where memory is most emotionally charged: "In this pity-blizzard of old photo-corners /& their leached-beak shadows" and "as you curve and Ur- out of phonemes & squelches" (43).

White Porcupine's autobiographical poems are mapped in unyielding scruff land and generations of familial and social oppression from which the narrator desperately wants to escape. This abject longing marked the narrator from childhood: “Half-asleep once early-on I heard ‘Then is’ as ‘Venice’ // an exotic distance from deep in those back townships:/ Verulam / Harvey..."(Hall 19).  Once again, there is mapping where "the music of error has had to be destination enough" (19).  In White Porcupine, Hall does take us to both his geographical and his brain map, with his writerly, transformed being.