John Wilkinson

Biographical note:  John Wilkinson is Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches literature and creative writing, having worked in UK mental health services for three decades. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, and Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow at the National Humanities Center. The Guardian described his last book of poetry, Lake Shore Drive (Salt 2006), as “multiplex, visionary, ragged, and exceedingly strange because exceedingly true to reality”.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713950
ISBN:  9781844713950
Author:  John Wilkinson
Title:  The Lyric Touch
Series:  Reconstruction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-07
Extent:  284pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  16 mm
Weight:  426 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The Lyric Touch gathers John Wilkinson’s essays on British and American poetry of the late twentieth century and on poetics, several of them referenced in standard works despite being hard to obtain. It includes his important essays on J.H. Prynne, John James, Tom Raworth, Barry MacSweeney and Denise Riley together with a lucid account of the formation of the ‘Cambridge School’, and a substantial introduction to the American lyric poet John Wieners. The book also discusses major writers such as Mina Loy, Lynette Roberts, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Marjorie Welish and Andrea Brady. Finally it includes Wilkinson’s most significant theoretical statements, ‘Cadence’, ‘The Metastases of Poetry’, ‘Mouthing Off’ and ‘Following the Poem’, the last including detailed readings of P.B. Shelley and Paul Celan.

John Wilkinson’s prose entices the reader into engaging with some of the most demanding and rewarding poetry of the past fifty years, and connects it persuasively with a radically excessive strain in Romantic English lyric. For this book, the vectors of excess are marked as information (as in Prynne), language (as in Raworth), self-consciousness (as in Riley) and feeling (as in Wieners). All distinguish lyric poetry as an art from other linguistic transactions while it remains humanly recognisable. This separation and recognition are understood throughout as the basis for a politics.

The Lyric Touch will be invaluable for anyone interested in recent British and American poetry, as well as enthusiasts for John Wilkinson’s own poetry.

Table of contents:
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: British Poetry
Counterfactual Prynne: An Approach to Not-You
Tenter Ground (J.H. Prynne)
Into the Day (J.H. Prynne)
The Line to Take: An appreciation of the seventies poetry of John James
Unexpected Excellent Sausage (John James, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan)
Illyrian Places (Denise Riley)
A Single Striking Soviet: The Poetry of Barry MacSweeney
The Value of Penniless Politics (Douglas Oliver)
Tripping the Light Fantastic: Tom Raworth’s Ace
Off the Grid: Lyric and Politics in Andrea Brady’s Embrace
2: Poetics
Cadence
The Metastases of Poetry
Too-close Reading
Mouthing Off
Frostwork and The Mud Vision
The Water-Rail of Tides (Lynette Roberts)
Following the Poem
3: American Poetry
Chamber Attitudes (John Wieners)
A Poem for Liars (John Wieners)
Stumbling, Balking, Tacking: Robert Creeley’s For Love and Mina Loy’s Love Songs to Joannes
Faktura: The Work of Marjorie Welish

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Excerpt from book:  

Introduction

The present book is not a complete collection of my prose writing of the past thirty years; I have excluded articles concerned largely with mental health and public health matters, and literary-critical articles which now seem to me ungenerous or pointless. For reasons of space I have been obliged also to remove a number of shorter reviews, including those of books by Rod Mengham, D.S. Marriott, Drew Milne, Simon Jarvis, Andrew Duncan and Keston Sutherland. I regret this, but the exigency may stimulate me to more extended consideration of these notable writers on other occasions. Among British poets I would have liked to write about W.S. Graham, Allen Fisher, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Mark Hyatt; again, this must wait. And the writing of some of the greatest American poets of the last half-century, Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest, remains a summons to attention and emotional alacrity, and reproaches my lackadaisical ways.
The earliest articles have been lightly edited, mainly to remove asides I now find embarrassing, and to reduce traces of an oracular prose style. The articles were written for widely different publications, from mimeo worksheets to cultural magazines to peer-reviewed academic journals, and this shows. However, spelling and punctuation have been standardised to British usage of an informal academic kind.

Reviewing these pieces, the title offered itself readily enough. The collection finds a continuing preoccupation with the seductions of lyric, in a pulse of succumbing and resistance discerned within the poems it reads as well as in these responses. The poems include those of John Wieners, characterised by emotional and linguistic extremity, of Denise Riley, by lyric auto deconstruction and reconstruction, and of J.H. Prynne, characterised by intellectual ambition, astonishing rhetorical resources, and at the last, by the compensatory joys of the lyric counterfactuals they embody. I have been surprised to discover Laura (Riding) Jackson shadowing this book as suggestive of the costs which an excessive investment in lyric poetry might incur; and by an emerging understanding of Frank O’Hara as having instigated a dialogic lyric practice which suggests a way out of the romantic-modernist and individualist matrix inhabited (and quarrelled with) by the poets of excess.

This collection includes essays and talks concerned with my own poetry. Until recently I worked outside the academy; and even now I regret and resent the tendency to separate literary studies from ‘creative writing’. While the writing addressed in the book is hopelessly ‘unrepresentative’, reflecting a sensibility trained in particular places at a particular time, such partiality goes along with an intense need to argue, for myself as well as for others, the value of poets scarcely heard of when I was writing. This is the kind of thing poets should do, and which the academy should better appreciate and promote.

I was taught to read poetry by two remarkable schoolmasters, Derek Rosser at Sherborne School and Brian Worthington at Clifton College. At Sherborne I enjoyed the several advantages of being introduced to contemporary poetry by Charles Verey, Thomas A. Clark and Lawrence Pedersen; of a school library with a fine collection of poetry of all periods; and of two bookshops (in this small town in a conservative part of England), each of them with a better literature selection than any bookshop in present-day Cambridge, and both selling a good range of small-press poetry books. At Cambridge I was taught by Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, and above all by J.H. Prynne. Charles Lambert introduced me to the poetry of John Wieners, and Geoffrey Ward and Rod Mengham to much else. Wendy Mulford opened my eyes to contemporary writing by women. The more recent essays have benefited from Maud Ellmann’s fine scrutiny. With such advantages I should have done better and should have done more, but at least I can record my gratitude.

Mishawaka, IN
February 2007

Unpublished endorsement :  Wilkinson’s essays in The Lyric Touch offer a body of critical work which, while insistently attentive to the play and resonances of poetic language, is never content to rest with the notation of mere semiotic experiment. Throughout Wilkinson maintains an invigorating ethical commitment to a comprehension of the lyric subject’s location in the world that drives the critic as much as the poet to take on the intricate connections of institutions, power and language. Like Wilkinson's own poetry, his critical essays refuse to accede to the moribund route of pathos or easy sentimentality, but track the imbrication of the lyric voice in the meshings of machinery and discourse. This is criticism that answers to the demands of poetry itself: in a language that is always responsive to its occasions, it never fails to foreground the pleasures of its own readerliness, of a mode of response that itself verges on lyric and yields not dissimilar pleasures.

David Lloyd, University of Southern California

Unpublished endorsement :  John Wilkinson is a poet and critic of unfailing verve and accuracy. No voice audible today sounds a more exact imagination.

Simon Jarvis, University of Cambridge