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I thought I might
try to address the poetry, and to some extent the prose, of John Wilkinson,
whether this be a propitious time or not, partly because Salt have recently
brought out quite an interesting 'Selected', called Schedule of Unrest (14).
Now, why should we be interested in John Wilkinson? I notice that the back
cover of Schedule includes a number of plugs, from people, among whom notably I might
cite Robert Potts and Roy Fisher, although pride of place goes to Tom
McCarthy who speaks of how in Wilkinson's poetry, 'a hidden world - the real
one - shimmers into view'. McCarthy, so far as I can tell, is a somewhat
unconventional, no doubt innovative novelist and sometime critic. The main
publisher's blurb opines that of this writing '[t]he unfamiliarity of its
surfaces and soundscapes have too long delayed its appreciation.' There is
mention made to the 'troubled internal lyric and the breadth of his social
and political engagements'. Whether by accident or design, these 5
endorsements, the blurb, the bio, do not attempt to situate Wilkinson's work
historically, nor with any present contemporary trend. Who does he write
like? Well they don't really say. Wilkinson himself neither really indicates
anything in his 'Preface'.
So why read John Wilkinson? Is it about trying to get a take on what might be
a somewhat hidden 'real world', according to Tom McCarthy, or is it because
he is so definitely not 'pedestrian', according to Adam Phillips, or is it
because this might be 'one of the most significant bodies of work in
contemporary poetry' according to Patrick McGuinness. Phillips usefully also
cites 'sheer verbal inventiveness and unheard-of melodies'. But keep an eye
on that 'troubled lyric'. The 'delayed appreciation' the blurb cites is no
doubt also not wholly inaccurate, although quite why might be a complicated
question of publishers, readerships, critics etc.
I am an interested reader of poetry, have been since my teens, born 1961, and
influenced at an early stage by the modernism of Eliot and Eliot's criticism,
although of course Eliot was also very interested in 'tradition'. I read a
bit more Eliot, not finding any great advance on his 'Selected Essays', and
where was it going, anyway, it seemed like the next thing was Auden, who of
course is highly verbally fluent and erudite, yet no doubt not quite so
radical as Eliot in some of his more intense pronouncements, for which we
might credit some of the influence of Pound. I moved to the US in 1983 and
did some reading in poetry there, where it seemed that, what I might surmise
in a rather concise fashion, the vestiges of the 'New American Poetry',
perhaps conspicuously the Black Mountain Poets (Olson, Creeley etc) and the New
York Poets was running into an encounter with the formal radicalism and
sensibility of Language Poetry, among whose proponents included Charles
Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian etc. Not too many
British poets were catching the Americans' ear, one notable exception perhaps
being Tom Raworth, whose Clean and Well Lit, Selected, was published by Roof
Books of New York in 96, after numerous earlier publications, though I didn't
myself closely engage with the work of Raworth at that time. The New American
thread was then still quite strong. I was quite fascinated by Olson's 'The
Kingfishers' poem for its summary of the situation/state of play. Olson was
very interested, out of a very wide ranging scope of interests and frame of
mind, in the 'cybernetics', a kind of proto-information theory, of Norbert
Wiener, which comes out in that poem in particular. I'll recite a little of
that, -
The factors are
in the animal and / or
the machine the factors are
communication and / or
control, both involve
the message. And what is
the message? The message is
a discrete or continuous
sequence of measurable events distributed in time
(cited from
Weinberger ed 93)
And then Charles Bernstein has a not very easy to find rejoinder to Olson in
his Content's Dream book of essays, which I think was called 'Unfinished Business'. The
conclusion coming to pass seemed to be that Olson had taken far too much on,
it couldn't 'cohere', as Pound said, and one had to essentialise it a bit
more, get it back to what the poetry was about, the language itself, with a
continuing radicalism. Silliman has been a very able social chronicler of
that scene, Bernstein perhaps a rather better surmiser and critic of its
formalism and suppositions. For better or worse, I have a few pieces by Olson
to hand, I do not have any Bernstein (though Content's Dream remains in a storage box, bit of a
precursor to A Poetics), though I did end up regarding Bernstein as essentially a defender
or advocate of disjunctiveness and difficulty, without the highly expansive
mytho-poetic ambitions of Olson. These days it tends to be Olson's associate
Creeley that I prefer to read.
I returned to Britain in 1992. There, through some thin threads, I managed to
pick up on what one might call some of the more radical tendencies in British
poetry. One common link was the poet Paul Green, who had interested himself
in keeping contact with some of the more radical publishers of poetry in the
US, like Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop's Burning Deck, etc. Through Green and
Peter Riley, who at this stage was running a bookselling business, I picked
up on some of the more radical threads of poetry publishing in the UK,
including the likes of Rod Mengham's Equipage pamphlets, of which there were
many, and such magazines as Angel Exhaust and Parataxis (edited by Drew Milne). Parataxis as it turned out was notable for
foregrounding the poetry of John Wilkinson, and that I have to say is
probably the first main place I came across him. At some peculiar point, I
think in Angel Exhaust 8, Andrew Duncan picked out for him what he thought were
some of the more crucial developments or interventions in recent years, where
he cited John James, Andrew Crozier and Michael Haslam. I didn't really
follow up on these particularly at the time.
I suppose after that matters verged into a bit of a hiatus. I took to reading
Dickens and Don DeLillo and medieval philosophy. Parataxis ceased with issue 10, Angel
Exhaust was only
appearing sporadically and infrequently. I did have a look at Iain Sinclair's
anthology Conductors of Chaos (96), which Wilkinson was in. After some considerable
passage of time I procured Drew Milne's Selected (The Damage) and Andrew Duncan's Selected Anxiety
Before Entering a Room and indeed Peter Riley's Selected, Passing Measures (all now in storage boxes), and I
had felt compelled, partly on account of Peter Riley's strong advocacy
(though I might add not to me specifically), to get a copy of Prynne's Poems, which is difficult, certainly,
but in poetic terms quite fascinating. Not also without interest was the
anthology Floating Capital on the London scene, ed. Clarke, Sheppard (91), and the
magazine ed. Ken Edwards Reality Studios.
It has only been recently that I have rekindled some of my interest in the
radical or innovative poetry scene. There, it has seemed to me, the two
centres of London and Cambridge have remained pretty pertinent.
I wouldn't want to attempt an overview, and indeed many people don't like an
overview, at least until after the various combattants are dead and buried.
Still, one does like to have a sense of what's going on. Here, one can't help
but note the strong drift to the Internet. Silliman has pointed out two of
the stronger 'schools' active being Conceptual Poetry (or uncreative writing)
and Flarf, the latter not taking itself particularly seriously. But still,
does there not remain a market for some for a book in one's hand. Oh, and
Silliman has reverted to an advocacy of The New American Poetry, rather than
trying to revive Language Poetry itself. So, where does one find John
Wilkinson? One finds him, formerly, in Equipage pamphlets, and more recently
in the list of Salt Publishing, one of the more radical British publishing
houses, who are responsible for publishing most of his significant books,
based in Cambridge initially, latterly off to Cromer, Norfolk, specialising
rather more in fiction these days than poetry. The Internet is a bit of a
morass. One small tactic is to check out the lists of publishers one is
interested in, among whom I might include Salt, Shearsman, Carcanet, Reality
Street, Jonathan Cape, Enitharmon, Arc etc. Given that Drew Milne ventured
into a Selected quite some years ago, albeit under a somewhat uninviting
title, it might seem surprising that it has taken so long for Wilkinson to
get there.
But so much of this is preamble. No, I essentially link Wilkinson to Equipage
and Salt and indeed Parataxis, perhaps the most interesting thing I'd read by him up
until now was his Reverses pamphlet from Equipage (in a box). I like to think I keep
apprised of later, more forward developments in poetry, and that I think is
where John Wilkinson's poetry finds itself. It doesn't actually seem to me
that there has been a lot of informed commentary going on about Wilkinson,
although one does notice some small indications like a review of The Lyric
Touch in the Journal
of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
The summary then would be that I am interested in Wilkinson as a Salt author,
who have a radical and very interesting poetry list, and as a, perhaps
unavowed, member of the Cambridge school of poetry, who continue to lead the
way in respect of certain formal developments.
So, has Wilkinson's poetry tended to be overlooked? Well, it might look that
way. Robert Sheppard's very interesting Poetry of Saying (05) critical book is mainly
interested in Wilkinson for his involvement in the independent poetry
publishing scene, and his contribution to 'Conductors of Chaos', which gets a
brief mention. More recently David Wheatley's critical book, Contemporary
British Poetry
(15), aimed at undergraduates is interested in Wilkinson predominantly for
his criticism from The Lyric Touch, on Prynne, Denise Riley and Keston Sutherland.
Wilkinson's own poetry does not get an extended discussion.
This extended discussion thus far is to set out, essentially, how I came upon
John Wilkinson. Prior to Schedule of Unrest I have not attempted any real
commentary on Wilkinson, and I have essentially not related closely to his
writings, whether that's a good or a bad thing.
Having spent forever in preamble, I will try to proceed. One must note the
cover of Unrest.
Salt have gone for a nature scene, a couple of kind of lightning struck,
straggled/frazzly trees in front of a nature scene of river and tree foliage
in bloom. This contrasts considerably with, for instance, the assembly of old
car tyres on the cover of Effigies Against the Light, ie it's not social at all in any
sense, it's a nature scene, albeit a somewhat 'troubled' one.
And as for the book (262p). I've remarked elsewhere that I find that the
selection being undated and sourced means that one might have difficulty
tracing the provenance of certain poems, although it does seem to be
essentially in chronological order. Wilkinson often wrote what we might call
sequences, and several are here intact, I think 4 actually, 'Down to Earth'
is now redacted, and there are excerpts from another 6.
On perusing the book, I have to say I think the sequences are the strongest
thing in it, I think Wilkinson does better where he has time to elaborate on
matters that concern him and that helps the verbal fluency. I don't regard
Wilkinson as a particularly terse poet of short lyrics, I don't think that's
his forte. I think the opening of the book is good enough, the very first
poem, 'West', is capable and well written, but I wouldn't regard it as at all
typical of his main style or threads. Indeed, I don't think the book really
gets going until we reach the excerpts from 'Proud Flesh' (p32) and I'd say
the end is rather stronger than the beginning, there we have 'Iphigenia', 3
short poems and 'Down to Earth'.
How typical these excerpts are from 'Proud Flesh' I don't exactly know. It's
mainly in quatrains, though they can also be read as 'sentences', the very
opening of what we get is
Slender pickings fall to
the lap of the foster-child
who chides them into
their own spheres, the nuclei
of unshockable plasm
(p32)
I think this might confront many as very unconventional speech, the first
line might seem to make a certain amount of sense, but then 'chides them into
their own spheres' is kind of odd and pointed, why is he chiding them, what
are these slender pickings, and then why are we adverted to 'nuclei of
unshockable plasm', a potent but rather peculiar expression. The spheres
presumably are the nuclei, but quite what is unshockable plasm. Can plasm be
shocked or unshocked? On a certain level this turns out to be a little
typical of Wilkinson. He does, as we will find, have a penchant for unusual
or unexpected or sometimes erudite vocabulary. Sometimes it's startling or
impressive, sometimes it's just confusing.
If one looks through the contents pages of Schedule of Unrest one will not, perhaps curiously
enough, find too many unexpected or confusing titles. They all seem to make
enough sense, nothing particularly tricksy, no unexpected conjunctions etc.
'Saccades' is a little curious, which pertains to the rapid movement of the
eye. 'Cite Sportif', a sequence, is a bit unexpected, and although Wilkinson
is not given to a lot of mythologizing, 'Iphigenia' is here too. But most of
these are not altogether unexpected, tricksy titles.
I had a look at what for me was perhaps the most interesting title, 'Attention
and Interpretation' (p161). This, as it turns out, seems to go somewhere else
entirely, beginning,-
A treatise divides
between its several heads, yellow
safe as its green is
matter-of-fact, ladies-mantle
bunched lustrous jar
and ends,-
wallowed again on the lam
like an ECHO virus; take
that ragamuffin seeds
& multiplies, cursed to remain
orphaned ever within its
own likenesses - it is clear,
is it not, is it not, is
it not, blue heaven sweats.
(p161)
[note: not 'sweet blue heaven'] Here one can note again an undoubted verbal
fluency, but what of the meaning? We have a 'treatise' of yellow and green
'several heads' being referred to a jar. Or unless the jar was just moving
on. Again, the first line might make sense, but what on earth is a yellow or
green treatise? This serves to reiterate a problem I find with Wilkinson that
the fluency seems often to overrun the realism or context, if you like, and
we sometimes seem to end up wondering what he is talking about. The ending
here similarly is wrapped in confusion, albeit that it might seem verbally
interesting. What is an 'ECHO
virus'? Then there's that insistent repetition of 'is it not', unusual for
Wilkinson, and the peculiar final phrase 'blue heaven sweats', and we're left
wondering what that had to do with the rest of it. Well one might have to
read it again, as I say I think Wilkinson works better in longer stages.
'Take the colourful antidote/ to irony, the sexual check on starvationÉ/plump
the little object I which wallowed'. Must one conclude that 'Attention and
Interpretation' is actually a poem about sexual desire?
There was one other piece by Wilkinson where the title struck me, and it is
not so much a title as an opening line, from 'Sarn Helen' (the name of a
Roman road), which Keith Tuma featured in his anthology of 20th
Century British and Irish poetry in 2001, though it is not actually evident
in 'Schedule'. This was 'You've got some lip' (Tuma 01 p840). Now in reading
Wilkinson this struck me as both typical and atypical, ie the pungent, Tuma
even calls it 'rebarbative' note, is in a way Wilkinson writ high, ie he does
go in for that sort of thing, yet the lineage of rather shortish quatrains
is a bit unlike him, it's leaner and more fluent in some ways.
This poem of 40 lines, 10 quatrains, can tell us, perhaps, quite a lot about
Wilkinson, without entirely settling the matter. Well that's the opening
sentence, 'You've got some lip'. This could be quite an affront, offensive,
who's got some lip, me, you? How is one to respond to that, it is highly
spiked. Then the next sentence begins 'A legionary/ levels with the/
sewer-rat'. Now part of the problem with Wilkinson is often that the
'realist' context is rather poorly sketched, we are in the midst of some high
flown rhetoric, and it can be difficult to know what's going on. One presumes
that those who admire this sort of thing will be caught up in sewer rat v.
legionary and think it's all a wonderful play of extraordinary verbal
dexterity, which on a certain level it is. There's actually, perhaps for the
pedant, rather a lot here that isn't exactly spelled out, ie what legionary,
Roman maybe?, what sewer-rat, maybe a captive. Then the narrative again is
highly verbally fluent but once more confusing. The whole thing transpires in
about 6 sentences. We get 'I might yet crack/ the whip of a keyhole tracery'
and there is something in the same sentence about 'catapulting a skiff', a
skiff being a small boat, and there is a reference later to 'carrying boats
upon your backs'. Part of the problem here was, who is the 'I' cracking the
whip of the keyhole tracery? One presumes it's the legionary, given the
punctuation. But why would he do that? And it is 'I might yet', ie he doesn't
yet. Are what are later termed 'savages' being offered the possibility of
escape, presumably across water? Tuma says 'It is a poetry [of] which what
might yet be' (p836). In any event, escape is thwarted, 'your resonant shout/
won't crack the deep in a flitch/ of dominion' and therefore, in closing,
'Slurp their/ stinking rodent bolt-holes.' Amid all the scene setting
confusion there are as it were numerous verbal high jinks and play with
words, and numerous odd or original uses of vocabulary, terms we don't
ordinarily encounter, Tuma glosses five of them, but 'voussoirs'?, a
'friendly camber', 'guano', 'penetralium', 'prolapse', 'cross-hairs'. It
might sound fine to somebody just interested in the sound of words, but what
does it mean, and besides the context is difficult to make sense of along
with the point of view, and there is some undoubted bluntness there too, ie
'got some lip', 'sewer-rat', 'savages', 'stinking bolt-holes'. Tuma's
summation is perhaps worth repeating,-
Near the end of the last poem in the sequence ['Sarn Helen'], the reader
encounters the lines 'Flimsy/ as I am I burrow in the fallopian waste of my
making,' as if this poetry in which it is not clear that any 'calibration'
will 'serve to fold/ edgeless radiant, erasive, your saved up fervencies'
will nevertheless emerge as the poet's habitus. (p836)
I wanted to cite that one because it is indicative of some of the problems I
have with Wilkinson. An odd thing can be that certain effronteries or pungent
use of language can be memorable in certain ways that something kinder or
gentler may not, and I'm afraid 'You've got some lip' is peculiarly
memorable, either Wilkinson does or somebody he knows does, it's not 'sweet
blue heaven'.
I listen to quite a lot of music. Some thought Captain Beefheart, say, was
quite innovative and refreshing, others thought it was just cacophonous and
incoherent. Wilkinson makes me think sometimes of some kind of unholy
collusion of Elliott Carter and The Clash, Carter's extraordinary technical
fluency and inventiveness, The Clash's bluntness of attitude and delivery.
One does tend to find a fair spattering of blunt wordage among Wilkinson,
despite or in the midst of the technical fluency. Among his cohort I think he
is peculiarly noticeable in this, I don't think the tendency is quite so
notable in, say, Sutherland or Milne or Prynne, even. Well, if you can take
it, if you want it.
As I said, I think the sequences in 'Schedule' are among the most effective
features. Now, among these some of the most affecting passages probably occur
in 'The Speaking Twins', although Wilkinson himself is of course not a twin,
oh, and why speaking? Don't all twins speak? This seems to be from 1984. In
some ways it displays Wilkinson's better and more troublesome features. There
are it seems a few very interesting passages here, I might cite
'I believe I can read you
if I switch the poles.
You see I like to get
everything four-square.'
(p70)
and,-
'but to strip my hedgeÉ'
You high or low In your
turn High/low compliance,
laddering, gripping the
taut straps you rush,
one leaving her stomach
below's bleeding above's
sated ears, one
semaphores the launch pad
Cancel me Then take me
higher! Take me up!
(p70)
The sequence ends:-
Name is Afterbirth. I
need. I am immaculate.
Forlorn fort.
(p71)
This looks very fluent and suggestive, but still I am reminded that Wilkinson
wrote elsewhere,-
I who cut my teeth on the
did-shoulder
fell back on resources I
once held beneath contempt
(from 'The Nile' p122)
One gets the suggestion of Wilkinson as answerer, one who might hold you to
account. I think the above is certainly written with a high level of fluency
and inventiveness, and it is a little difficult to interpret. And for such an
'impersonal' poet, in the best Cambridge school tradition, it is near about
as personal you'll get, though needless to say in character, in persona, in
fictive context, no twin as such, he.
On this theme I might add from Wilkinson's short but very clear sighted
Preface to this book the following remarks,-
The solitary poet's
tendency to sublimity and abstraction
in stalking the
landscape and city, disintegrates (I trust)
through the saving
stickiness of language into a world of
things that insist on
being recognised as attachments
(pxv),
one might note that the words 'stickiness' and 'attachments' might be
resonant of where Wilkinson is coming from.
And I did want to move on to a brief consideration of 'Down to Earth'. This
has been 'redacted', and I don't have the original to hand, it is rather
dense and concise, generally in formal stanzaic patterns, either quatrains or
triplets or couplets. The original is an 80 page book from Salt. What is of
note here? Well, it ends with a bit of a eulogy to Artemis, a Greek goddess
of hunting and childbirth who demanded chastity, sister of Apollo. But, no,
mythology is not the main thread here. We can find signs of Wilkinson's
remarkable verbal fluency in such expressions as 'A flight of birds/ ignites
against a sunset, blackening/ in short order.' (p245) One might note a bit of
a tendency to end expressions on a somewhat frustrated or down note rather
than an optimistic one. There were some passages here that I thought
expressed a certain sort of empathy with the concerns of others, although
while Wilkinson seems to extend a sort of oppositional note against the way
things are, he doesn't quite come out and say what his political position is,
as such. Perhaps he doesn't need to. Anyway, we have,-
barrios will
air-condition Texas,
try-outs glamorous as
Mixcoatl
leave their ball court
for the antechamber,
shaping up for sacrifice
with sun's chop.
I hear them call from
every skip, I hear
them when I skip a beat,
the beat is theirs
(p258)
This ambivalent play on the words 'skip' and 'beat' is very typical of
Wilkinson, bringing up again what Sheppard called his 'dense multiple
referentiality' ('Saying' p154). 'Sacrifice' hits a sour note, later we hear
of 'the/ full skips of the disregarded' (p259).
What to make of it all? Here is 'The Speaking Twins' again,-
But you sing, sirens,
twitching under the hands
of virtuoso
truth-players. Yes you will rise, shining
Martyrs, who hissed &
sank an infinite light-
years above the caskets,
ordering my domain
prankishly, I could only
act stupid against
such glamorous outrage.
Let high arbitrary
mouth off, deceiving us
with its cross-talk-shall,
but collude with us
(p65)
Without wishing to go on at great length, I would reiterate that Wilkinson
displays an extraordinary verbal inventiveness, indeed there may be at times
a tendency to be so dazzled with his recondite style as to gain much apprehension
of what it's all about, maybe we who get it and they who don't, but of course
that wouldn't be quite right, Wilkinson is surely writing after a point.
Wilkinson himself regards this as late 'lyric' rather than, say, disjunctive
or modernist poetry. And Wilkinson, who has written with considerable clarity
on other poets, one of our best readers of Prynne, I might say, has given
some hints as to where he's coming from in his short Preface to this book,-
the writer I am still
reverts to the first conditions of his
work, andÉmy songs start
from the cry in the night
extended into words
through an exploratory oral shaping
(pxiv)
I'd say at the very least that Wilkinson has worked strenuously and
persistently to extend the scope of what it's possible to say in poetic
language. Much of this is high flown, but it's with a purpose, and generally
enacted with some effective fluency. It seems to me quite in keeping with
late modernism, and among the most innovative interventions in poetic art we've
had in some time. Of course it's not all sweetness and light. Who would have
it any other way?
© Clark Allison
2015
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