Metastatic lyricism: John Wilkinson’s poetry and poetics

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to resolve an apparent contradiction between the poetry and the poetics of the Cambridge Poet John Wilkinson, namely how his apparently paratactic (or ‘schizophrenic’) prosody that treats words as material objects in spatial juxtaposition squares with his effort to conceptualize the lyric as an event – an evanescent series of echoes (‘metastases’) whose task is to ‘eventuate reality time and again’. The essay focuses its attention principally upon two late works – Wilkinson’s essay, ‘Repeatable Evanescence’ (Thinking Verse, 4.1 [2014]) and his recent long poem, Courses Matter-Woven (Cambridge: Equipage, 2015). The question that regulates this inquiry is: How is one to read Wilkinson’s work? As he says, he writes in order to defeat any exegesis that tries to settle the meaning of a poem by constructing contexts in which parts fit together to form a whole (a process that Wilkinson identifies as ‘petrifaction’).