Writings, Readings and Not Writing: poems, prose fiction and essays

Abstract

This submission of published work consists of a number of different modes of writing that interrelate as the concerns of a poet, essayist and teacher. There are twenty-seven separate publications, presented under six categories headings: (A) poems, including prose-poems, written for the page; (B) prose-fiction, represented through a single work; (C) visual poems; (D) enquiries into aspects of a general poetics, including questions about 'situatedness' or 'implicatedness', genres of discourse and their related modalities, poetics and grammar, and a poetics of reading; (E) critical and celebratory readings, mostly of contemporary poets and poems; (F) meditations on institutionalised divisions and modalities of knowledge and practice and their implications for arts pedagogy. These six categories are intended to open out on to each other, to constitute an exploration of writing and reading that is always more than the sum of its parts. With the exception of one article published in 1992 all work was published- or will have been - between 1996 and 2005, a period that coincides with the consolidation and development of a field of study and practice at Dartington College of Arts named Performance Writing. The poems and prose fiction exemplify specific practices within this field and the articles are attempts to develop theoretical and critical instruments within it, especially as they apply to poetry. The articles move between close readings of poetic texts and broad enquiries into reading, writing and the operation of texts within their social, spatial and temporal contexts, such as domestic settings or bereavements. Three articles address 'grammar for performance writers'; three others focus on reading and its relation to knowledge, form and setting; another three, including a review, are enquiries into discipline and interdisciplinarity.