John Wilkinson (poet)

John Wilkinson. Courtesy Salt Publishing.

John Wilkinson (born 1953) is a contemporary English poet and academic.

Life

Youth and education

From 1972 to 1975, he studied English at Jesus College, Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he co-founded (with Charlie Bulbeck and Charles Lambert) the Blue Room, a society devoted to the propagation of poetry and the other fine arts.

Career

His debut collection, Of Western Limit (a collaboration with Charles Lambert), appeared in 1974. He has since published 7 major collections of verse as well as critical articles on British and American poetry, some of which were collected in "The Lyric Touch" (2007).

After a career in mental health services, Wilkinson entered academia in 2005. From 2005 to 2010 he was writer in residence and thereafter research professor in the department of English at the University of Notre Dame. In 2010 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he teaches English and creative writing, and chairs the Committee on Creative Writing.

He is married to literary critic Maud Ellmann.

Writing

His recent collections are Down to Earth (2008), Lake Shore Drive (2006), Contrivances (2003) and Effigies against the Light (2001); a chapbook titled Iphigenia appeared in 2004, and his 1986 collection, Proud Flesh, was re-issued in 2005 with an introduction by Drew Milne.

In 1992, his work "Hid Lip" appeared alongside works by Stephen Rodefer and Rod Mengham in a volume called Writing Out of Character, published by Street Editions.

Recognition

In 1974, at Cambridge, Wilkinson won the Chancellor's Medal for Poetry.

Wilkinson has held a Frank Knox fellowship at Harvard University, and was a Fulbright distinguished scholar in 2003-04 at the Nathan S. Kline Institute. From 2007 he was Carl F. Pforzheimer fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

Publications

Poetry

• Effigies Against the Light. Cambridge UK: Salt Publishing, 2001.
• Contrivances. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2003.
• Proud Flesh (reissue of 1986 title, with introduction by Drew Milne). Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2005.
• Lake Shore Drive. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2006.
• Down to Earth. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2008.
• Flung Clear: Poems in six books (reissue of 1994 title). Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2010.
• Ode at the Gate of the Gathering. Brighton, UK, & London: Crater Press, 2011.

Non-fiction

• "Lost and Found in The Türler Losses" [on Barbara Guest]. Chicago Review 53-54:1/2 (Summer 2008).
• "'Couplings of Such Sonority': Reading a poem by Barbara Guest." Textual Practice 23:3 (2009).
• "The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and glitter in the poetry of George Oppen." Critical Inquiry 36:2 (Winter 2010).
• "Heigh Ho: A partial gloss of word order." Glossator: Theory and Practice of the Commentary 2 (2010), special issue 'On the Poems of J.H. Prynne'.
• "Contemporary Lyric and Epic Constraints: A reading of Rob Halpern's Weak Link." Chicago Review 55:2 (Spring 2010).
• The Lyric Touch. Essays on the Poetry of Excess. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2007.
• "Glossing Gloss and Its Undertow" [on Barbara Guest]. Textual Practice 24:4 (2010): 749-64.
• "Jim the Jerk: Bathos and loveliness in the poetry of James Schuyler." In On Bathos: Literature, art, music (edited by Sara Crangle & Peter Nicholls), 71-89. London and New York: Continuum, 2010.
• "‘Where Air is Flesh’: The odes of Frank O’Hara." In Frank O’Hara Now: New essays on the New York poet (edited by Robert Hampson & Will Montgomery), 103-99. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.

John Wilkinson Reading, Paris 9.6.11 Part 1.MP4

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the University of Chicago.

See also

• List of British poets

External links

Poems

• "Ladders", Jacket magazine.
• John Wilkinson profile & poem ("The Soul of the Ditto Ship") at the PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog
• John Wilkinson at the Poetry Foundation
• John Wilkinson, six poems

Audio / video

• John Wilkinson at YouTube

About

• John Wilkinson at Salt Publishing.
• John Wilkinson at the University of Chicago.
• review of Lake Shore Drive in The Guardian.