Published 2013. Paperback, 278pp, 9x6ins
ISBN 978-1-84861-318-8 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]

This companion volume to On Performance Writing 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, trying out forms of reading—and of the writing these forms seem to call for—that allow the texts to propose the most apt reading, having always in mind the ways that any one reader—here, the author—is already implicated. Although a wealth of thinking and wide reading is evidently present to such readings, they avoid grand theoretical position-taking or the setting up of criteria designed to ease pre-emptive judgments — reading here is process rather than capture, and often slow and not 'clever'. The essays mostly arise out of occasions — 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. The author is Professor of Performance Writing at Falmouth University and visiting professor at York St John University.

Order From:

Order from The Book Depository

Order from amazon.co.uk

Order from Barnes and Noble.com (USA)

Order from amazon.com