’89 domande a Sonny Hall – Poet

✪ PUNK AMORE PICTURES OF SONNY HALL BY FRANCIS DELACROIX ✪

Made in England

A British prototype of the poète maudit or pure marmite, both addictive and questionable, Sonny Hall is a figure of Glamorized-England. His piercing blue eyes cut through an immaculate white face, dusted with brown freckles. A romantic irony emanates from his childlike pose, almost virginal. It clashes with sharp strays of sorrows. Sonny Hall reminds me of Peter Pan’s shadow, stitched back onto the character’s toes in the old Disney movie : clumsy, anarchic, yet lovable.

I first met Sonny in Paris during Fashion Week a few years ago. A horde of crows was lined up for the Ann D. show. He was waiting with a cigarette and a dizzy smile. Dressed in a terrific suit, his shiny waxed hair were coiffed backward. Sonny looked tough, morose and sleepless. Since then, he has lived in Lisbon, returned to London, and found his way back to Paris. This city calls its orphans. Sonny obeyed.

Autodidactic, he paints, writes and acts ‘started writing when I was sixteen, after rehab. A form of salvation… or so I thought’. 

Since 2019, Sonny Hall has published two books of poetry, The Blues Comes With Good News and On the Soft Edge. He also founded a Publishing House, Blue Beggar Books, starred in different films and was recently invited as a guest speaker to the prestigious Trinity College of Cambridge.

His life is lined with scars and his fragile body hides years of longing — love, artificial love, foster homes, homelessness, adoption, the tragic loss of a mother, and the tragic loss of his own mind. Seven rehabs later, he’s still standing and chooses to work, create, and elevate the crumbles of his very own self : Touching grace at last.

Today, we celebrated National Soup Day at a bar-tabac ; our words thus bounced between an order of soup, a plate of overcooked lasagnas and porc springrolls with a side of egg salad. ‘It’s nice to see a woman eat. They never do anymore’. I smile and hand him some bread which he swallows along with a few words. Certain syllables escape through his peculiar accent mixing the urban shores of East London to the coast of Essex with, at times, a posh sharpness you’d only find around South Kensington – a one and only. 

HALL: I’ve been up since 7AM, I had a nice walk and breakfast with one of my friends. I’m just getting into a better routine now. I think I’ve slept off the bed, you know, and now I’m feeling like I want to be up.

WEIL: I think we call it adulthood.

HALL: Yeh. Quite significant. It’s about humility at the moment, and acknowledgement beyond me. A lot has happened, you know…I’ve been homeless, I’ve been an addict, I’ve been in love too. I had to shed my skin from before. That’s the real interest, that’s the real important thing that I’m acknowledging with. Somehow there’s still Grace. 

WEIL: Which of your skins is currently shedding? 

HALL: All of them. It’s the year of the snake : it’s about forgiving. There was a brashness that I was living amongst. Things were going so quickly when I first started writing. It’s taken me six years to understand and forgive myself for being brash.

WEIL: What made you write? 

HALL: Rehab.

HALL: It was just the idea of writing honestly and for myself. I ended up thinking it would be valuable. I think it’s interesting to say that writing is my foundation. My first book, The Blues Comes With Good News, has been the one that’s had the greatest amount of catharsis outwardly. I was 19. It was first self-published and then published by Hodder & Stoughton. I now see its value. For a long time I detested it. 

WEIL: Why is that? 

HALL: It was naive. I hadn’t read poetry before. It was cooked: distributed everywhere. But instantly I felt like hated it. ‘What the fuck have I done?’. It made me want to learn. Today, when I meet an academic I love it. The Cambridge experience was very humbling in that sense. It was like tricking modernity, you know. Initially I thought ‘why the fuck have they got me here’. Then I saw why. The way I write is completely different from what they’re taught. It was and still is a surreal experience. I went in to frame it, to my face, you know. Made me want to learn. I’ve had this unrelenting way to learn since I left school at 15 and I’ve been trying to be a researcher ever since. 

WEIL: A researcher of what? 

HALL: A researcher in terms of development, understanding choice making. You know, every word written in a poem is a choice. So it became quite scientific. To begin with, I was writing about honesty or trying to be extremely confessional at 19. I thought that honesty was my antidote. Eventually, I was still becoming self-deceitful and then it would go outward of course : because you lie to yourself and the lie becomes its own reality. I’m glad this first book resonated with some people, but it doesn’t for me anymore. I still write. I record my thoughts and whatever happens to me. I’m more satisfied with On the Soft Edge, the second book I’ve published in collaboration with YSL.

WEIL: At Saint Laurent Babylone, copies of your second book, On the Soft Edge, sit right next to Proust’s La Recherche. How does it feel? 

HALL: It’s humbling and funny. 

WEIL: Quite a contrast… 

HALL: Well, I do things, I work and am doer. I know I’m good at putting things together. I’ll take credits for doing – yes – not for being as big as Proust. My second book is very different. It presents my own paintings and some of my mother’s works. It’s a homage to my life. My blood family is in the book, my exes and first loves also appear in it. It’s like a real… It’s a life. My first book was definitely fueled by more anxiousness, it  was actually avoidant because I was angry. I didn’t have much anger while working on the second one. It was more about ‘how can I be playful?’. On the Soft Edge, is all about extreme and radical choice-making in terms of form. Every card has a different form. I was using different tools. Using punctuation finely, like tricks. Punctuation as the anti-hero. I didn’t understand how to formulate or play when I wrote my first poems and you can see that punctuation is absent from The Blues Comes With Good News. I learned a lot through the last few years. 

WEIL: Who did you learn from? 

HALL: My friends mostly. Ryan [Ryan Kevin Doyle], Jim [Jim Longden] and Nick [Nick Knight]. I’ve known them for many years and collaborate with them. All are self-taught and, without any form of proper academic background, they create, explore, and build universes. I don’t think I would have been what I am today without them in my life. Anyone needs soundboarding right? 

WEIL: Would you say that you need other people to evolve and build yourself?

HALL: Well, it’s a matter of faith. I think you create your own system and just give it a twist, in a soft way to accomplish something. Just like what you do when you stretch out your own body. You know what I mean? No force needed. It’s basically like my friend’s arm, they twist mine and we do a pirouette and I it’s like ‘Oh! I can now do but a fucking dance’ right? We help each other out. That’s probably why I have faith in people. 

WEIL: Are you superstitious? 

HALL: Only when it comes to magpies. There’s this saying ‘One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl, Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, Seven for secrets to never be told’. You always have to bow to a magpie whenever it’s alone. They’re known to be lonely… My mother used to make a salute whenever she passed a lonely magpie. I still do it. 

WEIL: Do you have a mentor? 

HALL: Nick [Nick Knight]. Nick was the first person I’ve ever worked with on a film, Yungsters, a fashion film. He’s a believer, he’s my mentor. Nick’s work is very surreal and as a human he’s extremely realistic. He’s taught me about how to go steady but also execute. We’ve been working on a new project. A six-year project of labor and love. I’ve learned about production through this but also about art direction. It’s all about action-consequence: from a poem we develop a performative piece. Me and Nick would dissect a poem, find its symbolism and, from that, create a narrative which we would turn into a studio show. We transfer a poem from paper into a theatrical piece of performance, costume, set design… It’s visual. Like a still theatre. It converges everything : film, photography, writing, narration. There will be fantastic people collaborating.

WEIL: From words to action again. Everything seems to emerge from your own writing. Do you also paint this way?

HALL: I paint to lift myself out of my own brain. I turn off and stop bargaining with myself. Today, I’m always at the studio painting. That’s what I want to work on at the moment. I’d love to develop that side of things and meet more people. I went to an AA meeting last night, not something I should have said, but who cares. I met two Americans studying French Literature and the whole meeting suddenly became very interesting. I want to stay in Paris. The world is a wreck, yes, but Paris is something. I have faith.