Following John Wilkinson

Joe Luna

doi:10.16995/biip.1

Abstract

This article reads closely John Wilkinson’s essay ‘Following the Poem’ (2007) alongside some of Wilkinson’s poetry from the 1980s and 1990s. Using the work of Donald Winnicott as a touchstone, the article critically evaluates the claims made in Wilkinson’s essay about fullness and intersubjectivity against some of his poetry’s expressions of fragmentation and dismemberment. The article concludes with some reflections on Wilkinson’s quotation of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in Proud Flesh (1986), and on the later collection Hid Lip (1992). It argues that an illuminating disparity or contradiction exists between the avowed aim of the reading practices described and advocated in ‘Following the Poem,’ and the state of the subjects repeatedly presented in Wilkinson’s poetry. The article finally suggests that this contradiction itself speaks volumes about the kind of world in which both poetry and poetics exist.

Highlights

Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
Someone following a poem may find the potential for restoration as much through positive re-integration as through the negative space of ‘the detours, the lapses and the breaks in his or her journey.’[4]. Reading a poem is described in terms of a ‘journey’ of stops and starts, one that entails the mediation of positive and negative space, words and the gaps between them, and as such one that ‘connects a reader with a dense, intersubjective world entirely distinct from postmodern filminess.’[5]. Wilkinson gives three examples of following poems: Peter Szondi’s reading of Celan’s ‘Engführung,’ and his own readings of Herbert and Shelley
How does the method Wilkinson advocates differ from, or contribute to, such established canonical motifs as the heresy of paraphrase, or the much-maligned and fought over deconstructive injunction il n’y a pas de hors-texte? What is the nature of the ‘hybridity’ discovered by such a method? Is this hybridity only available in poems? Can any poem be followed – or only those whose content lends itself to being unpicked and reintegrated? What advantages has the experience of prosody over any other experience for restoring a ‘full being in the world’? What does Wilkinson mean by ‘intersubjectivity,’ exactly? In the short course of the essay’s seventeen pages, the ‘dense, intersubjective world’ is never more than alluded to