John Hall: page writings
'Page writings' as a heading is intended to include all those writings that are not visual poems or essays. Thirteen Ways of Talking About Performance Writing is something of a hybrid, relating both to page writings and, as a 'lecture', to articles. Interscriptions is a different kind of hybrid, alternating quatrains with layered image-texts. Publications from 1999 to the present are shown below, starting with the most recent.Titles of solo publications are in the bibliography. | |
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All the poems share a sense that poetry, among its other qualities, is also a mode - or a set of modes - of thinking: the saying of the world cntinues to matter.
"The writing is like a keep, a strong defence, or castle core. It holds." (Peter Hughes in Tears in the Fence.) |
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... a keepsake: a metonymic souvenir for a missing whole, that can itself be something of a whole. But what can this whole be? An assemblage of syllables missing both the full silence of not writing and the fullness of a copious speech that always expects a reply? An attempted reconciliation with all those missing others whose voices and writings feed into the unquenchable source of a spectral language, always full of what it misses? A call and recall, as though this keepsake, these selected keepsakes, keep calling out and calling back, missing in the necessary non-reply all the faces that speak and spoke, the bodies with skin, exceeding language: companions, strangers? | |
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Thirteen Ways of Talking about Performance Writing Published by PCAD (Plymouth College of Art and Design, Tavistock Place, Plymouth PL4 8AT). ISBN 978-0-9557491-1-7 Text now included in On Performance Writing, with Pedagogical Sketches |
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The Week's Bad Groan A poem sequence from the early 1970s, revived for this publication out of a conversation with The Sardine Tree by Peter Hughes. |
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a fragment from The Week's Bad Groan |
the beautiful lovers left in the mire of recent distress without their favourite painter, teaching the young who offer some corporate resistance & what is famous about the beautiful lovers is a certain fragility |
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Couldn't You? Poems for the page (1999 - 2007) Shearsman for details. Versions of poems that are included in the book can be found at the Great Works and Jacket websites. |
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Apricot Pages: a brief textual adventure Prose fiction Reality Street for details. Read opening section here. |
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