Time-play-space: playing up the visual in writing

Hall, John (2004) Time-play-space: playing up the visual in writing. Pores 3: An Avant-gardist Journal of Poetics Research, 3. ISSN 1740-4304

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Abstract / Summary

The article is a reflection of that aspect of Hall’s practice which brings a visual aesthetic to bear on a literary practice, produced after more than ten years of working with framed textual images as well as continuing to write for the page. It was commissioned by the editor for an issue of the journal with the theme of ‘Time: Tempo: Temporality’, particularly requesting Hall to address these topics in relation to his own visual poems. The article continues an exploration into a ‘poetics of reading’, already well underway with the article ‘Eluded Readings: trying to tell stories about reading contemporary poems’ (The Gig 15, Willowdale, Ontario, September 2003, pp. 35-54; a recording of a talk version is available at Archive of the Now: http://www.archiveofthenow.com/) and extended in ‘Reading Illegible Pages'. This enquiry particularly focuses on the different modalities of time between primarily textual and primarily visual domains, and the different understandings of both prosody and syntax that can be invoked to help understand a relationship between the two. Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ provides terms for some of the discussion. Hall assumes the value of close textual reading but insists that this needs to take into account the ‘situatedness’ of texts and readers, where ‘texts’ as a term includes visual images. Other contributors to the issue of the journal are poets and poet-critics, working on both sides of the Atlantic. They include Bruce Andrews, Allen Fisher, Jed Rasula and Maggie O’Sullivan.

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