Career
After some success in the Santa Cruz poetry scenes in the 1970s, Hall mostly ceased publishing his poetry, but he continued to write. In the 1970s, Hall and his family moved to San Jose. Foreign many years Hall then lived alone in sparsely furnished apartments, doing clerical jobs in hospitals and psychiatric wards and writing poetry which he would share with other poets and friends privately, in small gatherings or by mailing off entire manuscripts.
He would throw away months" or years" worth of his own poems, once he decided he was done with a particular track of writing and begin again.
He had a Beat poet"s willingness to range widely over human experience and language, mixing literary, poetic, and popular culture references with passionate love of experience and wry self-deprecation and wit. He commented "Like everybody else I want what the poem wants to do, I want to be there when it does what it wants to do.
We make these things. They"re weird things, they don"t look like other things, but they"re like themselves." Poet Robert Bly noted "In Gregory Hall, "surrealism" is not a doctrine, but an admission of grief beyond his control.".
