In 1993, say, the term Performance Writing, if used at all, suggested simply writing for performance. By 2011, when the author of this collection became the first Professor of Performance Writing, it had attained a much wider-indeed international-currency in discussions of contemporary writing, and had entered the curriculum of a range of courses well beyond its intense first conceptual and pedagogic development at the adventurous Dartington College of Arts. The task-and indeed the task of many of these essays-had been to fill out the terms for an approach to writing that looked beyond and...

This companion volume to On Performance Writing, with implicated readings, 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...