John Wilkinson

I am a poet and student of poetics who joined the English department in 2010 and retired in 2023. I served as Director of the Program in Creative Writing and Chair of the Divisional Committee on Poetics from 2014-2022.

My first collection of poetry, Useful Reforms, was published in 1976. My recent publications include My Reef My Manifest Array (Carcanet 2019), Wood Circle (The Last Books 2021) and Fugue State (Shearsman 2023). An absentee memoir, Colours Nailed to the Mast, was published by Shearsman in 2024. My work is referenced in the standard guides and histories of recent British poetry and of late Modernist poetry.

My critical publications include a collection of essays, The Lyric Touch (Salt 2007), which includes essays on poetics; on ‘Cambridge School’ poetry including J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, and John James; and on American poetry, notably John Wieners. My second critical book, Lyric in Its Times: Temporalities in Verse, Breath and Stone (Bloomsbury 2019) ranges from the Renaissance to the New York School, notably Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest, mid-century British poets such as Dylan Thomas and W. S. Graham, and contemporary poets including Layli Long Soldier and Cody-Rose Clevidence. It also discusses visual artists as various as Veronese, Peter Lanyon, Aaron Siskind and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

My critical, scholarly and research work falls into three distinct but related areas. 

1. British poetry and painting in the mid-century, focused in recent years on W. S. Graham’s relations with the St Ives painters Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Bryan Wynter, and the debates on abstraction and landscape which inform both the poetic and visual work. I am also interested in the bearing of these debates on concurrent debates in the US, particularly in relation to the painting of Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, and the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest. I have a book chapter in press on W.S. Graham and the painter Roger Hilton, adding to my previously published work on Graham; and a paper on the poetry and painting of Prunella Clough, retrieving her poetry from the Tate Britain archives.
2. US-UK poetics relations in the 1960s and 1970s. I have published a paper on Charles Olson and J.H. Prynne, drawing on their extensive correspondence, which challenges the one-way model of influence from US to UK in this period. There is considerable scope for further study, notably in relations between Ted Berrigan and John James, and the intensive connections between British Marxist Feminist poets such as Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford and American poets including Alice Notley.
3. Writing in the broader field of poetics, including a recent paper on the challenges presented to the practice of close reading by the poetry of Denise Riley, a book chapter on elegy and a forthcoming book chapter on the continuing influence of P.B. Shelley. In retirement I have returned to my pre-professional activity of reviewing recent books of poetry.

My background is unusual in that until 2005 my career was in mental health services in the UK, as a nurse, a social worker, a housing development worker, a strategic planner and a public health professional.

Poetry

(Most of these titles include the contents of chapbooks published earlier by different presses.)

• Fugue State. Swindon UK: Shearsman 2023
• Wood Circle. Amsterdam and Sofia: The Last Books 2021.
• My Reef My Manifest Array. Manchester: Carcanet 2019.
• Ghost Nets. Oakland CA: Omnidawn 2016.
• Schedule of Unrest: Selected Poems. Ed. Alex Pestell. Cromer: Salt Publishing, 2014.
• Reckitt's Blue. London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull Books 2013.
• Flung Clear: Poems in Six Books. Reissue of 1994 title. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2010.
• Down to Earth. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2008.
• Lake Shore Drive. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2006.
• Proud Flesh. Reissue of 1986 title, intro. by Drew Milne. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005.
• Contrivances. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2003.
• Effigies Against the Light. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2001.

Creative Prose

• Colours Nailed to the Mast. Swindon UK: Shearsman 2024

Criticism

(Books, and recent papers not absorbed into books)

·       ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo? Reading Denise Riley with Derek Attridge’, English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 71, Issue 274, Autumn 2022, pp. 204–221.

·       ‘J. H. Prynne’s Twist on Charles Olson’ in ed. Robert von Hallberg and Robert Faggen, Evaluations of US Poetry Since 1950, Volume 1: Language, Form, and Music. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press 2021, pp. 129-156.

·       ‘Elegy: Surreptitious and Prospective, from W. S. Graham to Margaret Ross’ in ed. Edward Allen, Forms of Late Modernist Lyric. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2021, pp. 79-105.

·       ‘Moreover: Reading Alfred Starr Hamilton’, CounterText vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 160-179.

• ‘The Forms of Abstraction: W.S. Graham and Bryan Wynter’, Textual Practice, vol. 34, no.2, 2019, pp. 305-331.
• Lyric in Its Times. Temporalities in Verse, Breath and Stone. London, New York etc: Bloomsbury Academic 2019.
• ‘The Weight of Words: W. S. Graham’s Lyric Poetry’, Chicago Review vol. 62, nos. 1-3, 2019, pp. 40-51.
• ‘The Dark Looks of ‘The Husband’ in ed. Charles Altieri and Nicholas D. Nace, The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 2017, pp. 85-92.
• “Drift and Pop: On Writing about W.S. Graham”, Poetry vol. 206, no.4, July/August 2015, pp. 427-433.
• “Silicon Versets at Work, Blue Slides at Rest” in ed. Joe Luna and Jow Lindsay Walton, On the Late Poetry of J.H. Prynne. Brighton: High Zero and Sad Press 2014, pp. 101-112.
• "The Iron Lady and the Pearl: Male Panic in Barry MacSweeney's Jury Vet." In Reading Barry MacSweeney, ed. Paul Batchelor, 87-106. Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts with Bloodaxe Books, 2013.
• About About: Ammons’s Garbage, Chicago Review 57:1/2, Summer/Autumn 2012, pp. 36-48.
• "‘Where Air is Flesh’: The Odes of Frank O’Hara." In Frank O’Hara Now. New Essays on the New York Poet, ed. Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery, 103-99. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.
• "Jim the Jerk: Bathos and Loveliness in the Poetry of James Schuyler." In On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, ed. Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls, 71-89. London and New York: Continuum, 2010.
• The Lyric Touch. Essays on the Poetry of Excess. Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2007.
• "Contemporary Lyric and Epic Constraints: A Reading of Rob Halpern's Weak Link." Chicago Review 55:2 (Spring 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'.
• "'Couplings of such sonority': reading a poem by Barbara Guest." Textual Practice 23:3 (2009).