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.

 

 

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.)

Shearsman Books

 

... 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?

etruscan books

 
   
Interscriptions

a correspondence

(with Peter Hughes)

Knives Forks and Spoons Press

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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.

Oystercatcher Press

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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Else Here: Selected Poems

(1968 - 1999)

Etruscan Books for details.

A poem from else here

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