Essays on Performance Writing, Poetics and Poetry: Vol 2 Writings towards Writing and Reading

This companion volume to On Performance Writing, with implicated readings, brings together most of the essays-taking a deliberately broad view of that term so as to include, for example, two single-page visual essays and one sonnet-on the reading and writing of poetry by the poet and teacher, John Hall. The collection is in two parts. The first, starting with the often cited 'Writing and Not Writing', takes on, in the spirit of poetics, current issues for the category of poetry, considered both formally and contextually, and with particular interest in reading as a practice in which poems are actions and events rather than capturable things. The longer second part develops these thoughts through readings of specific, mostly contemporary, poems: the poets whose work is read are not intended to represent a proposed new canon. They have all, though, contributed significantly to a growing body of work in recent decades that brings together the social and bodily pleasures (and displeasures) of poetry with the ethical demands of truthfulness. They include Andrea Brady, Kelvin Corcoran, Allen Fisher, Harry Guest, Lee Harwood, Peter Hughes, John James, Nicholas Johnson, R.F. Langley, Karen Mac Cormack, Peter Middleton, Geraldine Monk, Alice Notley, Douglas Oliver, F.T. Prince, J.H. Prynne, John Riley, Peter Riley and John Wieners.

About the Author :
John Hall is a poet, teacher and essayist. He was born in the country now called Zambia in 1945 and moved to England in 1958, where he has lived ever since, mostly in Devon. His first poems to meet the attention of other writers appeared in The English Intelligencer in 1966. His first collection, Between the Cities, was published by Grosseteste in 1968. A number of other collections appeared between then and 1981. A period of 'not writing', discussed in his 1992 article, 'Writing and Not Writing', followed. He began to produce visual poems, particularly from the mid 1990s. He was a school teacher for five years (1971-1976) before moving to Dartington College of Arts (now part of Falmouth University), where he has worked in different capacities ever since. In the early years he was closely involved in the development of the Art and Social Context degree. He was Vice Principal Academic (or equivalent) between 1990 and 2002. He led the group that planned the Performance Writing degree for a 1994 start. In 2002 he took early retirement to be re-employed as Associate Director of Research. John Hall is Professor of Performance Writing at Falmouth University and visiting professor at York St John University.