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

Hall, John (2013) Essays on Performance Writing, Poetics and Poetry Vol 2: Writings towards Writing and Reading, with Implicated Readings. Shearsman Books, UK. ISBN 9781848613188

Abstract / Summary

This is the second of two (see Vol. 1) closely related essay collections in the field of poetics. Here the topic is explicitly poetry rather than the broader field of Performance Writing, though the approach to poetics and to processes of reading very much draws on the conceptual developments associated with that larger field. Of the 28 essays, 11 were published within the REF assessment period, with others submitted to earlier exercises. The early essays engage in matters of a general poetics and the later ones apply careful critical attention to recent individual poetic works. One essay, ‘Eluded Readings …’ sets out aphoristically the terms for a poetics of reading, that are applied and adapted in other pieces in the collection. The first essay, ‘On Writing and Not Writing’, which prompted discussion among poets on its first publication, uses the state of ‘not writing’ to consider a number of the contextual factors that impinge on any writing. The essays on individual poets use critical reading methods felt to be appropriate in each case, remaining true to the phenomenological particularities of actual readings, avoiding an authoritarianism of critical 'capture', and dealing also with the complexities of the author's own implicatedness in reading. The approach in both parts is very much that of a practitioner, with reading regarded as as much of a practice as writing. †he volume is intended to be part of a continuing contribution – undertaken over 45 years in different ways – to the development of a poetry appropriate to its time. The critical essays all engage with poets whose work is not widely known and most of them still very much alive and working. All of the essays in the collection were written at the invitation of the editors or initially by conference or seminar organisers.

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