For 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.

Nettelbeck, Walter Martin, Stephen Kessler, and by the writers and musicians he loved including Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, Stéphane Mallarmé, Miles Davis, and Hank Williams.

He had a Beat poet's willingness to range widely over human experience and language, mixing literary, poetic, and pop culture references with passionate love of experience and wry self-deprecation and wit.

"[1] Poet Robert Bly noted "In Gregory Hall, "surrealism" is not a doctrine, but an admission of grief beyond his control."