Anthony Hawley is an American poet, writer, critic, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across poetry, film, drawing, installation, sound, performance, and art writing. His books include the poetry collections The Concerto Form and Forget Reading, along with chapbooks and artist publications such as Afield, Vocative, Autobiography/Oughtabiography, and dear donald….
Hawley belongs among contemporary poets whose work crosses literary and visual forms. His writing is especially attentive to fragmentation, memory, erasure, music, image, and the pressure of public language.
The Concerto Form
The Concerto Form, published by Shearsman Books in 2006, was Hawley’s first full-length poetry collection. The book followed earlier chapbooks from small presses and brought together work shaped by formal variation, lyric sequence, and an interest in the relationship between poetry and music.
Music is more than a metaphor in Hawley’s career. Composer Pierre Jalbert’s string quartet Icefield Sonnets was inspired by Hawley’s poems, and Hawley later developed an ongoing performance collaboration with violinist and vocalist Rebecca Fischer as the duo The Afield.
Forget Reading
Hawley’s second full-length collection, Forget Reading, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2008. The poems examine what language can carry inside a culture crowded by information, spectacle, and competing forms of attention. The collection continues his interest in discontinuity and the unstable boundary between private perception and public speech.
That emphasis places his work within a broader history of experimental poetry that uses syntax, sequence, interruption, and borrowed language as active formal materials.
Autobiography, memory, and erasure
Autobiography/Oughtabiography, published by Counterpath, develops another central line in Hawley’s writing. Its poems investigate memory, disappearance, self-description, and the instability of autobiographical narrative. The speaking voice repeatedly approaches its own past while questioning how much of a self can survive the act of writing it down.
This tension between preservation and erasure also helps explain the movement of Hawley’s later work into installation, video, performance, and artist books, where text becomes one element among image, object, sound, and physical space.
Interdisciplinary art and The Afield
Hawley’s visual and performance projects have been presented by galleries, art centers, and cultural institutions including Residency Unlimited, the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, and other contemporary art venues. His projects combine moving image, drawing, sound, text, installation, and live performance.
With Rebecca Fischer, he forms The Afield, a collaboration bringing together violin, voice, video, electronics, and written language. The duo’s work makes the relationship between sound and text a practical compositional problem rather than a purely literary one. Readers interested in this dimension of poetry can continue through the guide to sound devices in poetry.
Criticism and teaching
Hawley has also written extensively about contemporary art and film. His essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, and Hyperallergic. This critical work runs alongside his poetry and visual practice, extending his attention to form across several artistic disciplines.
He studied at Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts and has taught in art and writing programs in New York. He has also received fellowships and residencies including support from MacDowell, VCCA, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat.
Further reading
For related poets and literary traditions, browse the poets directory and the overview of modern poetry.