WEBVTT

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I've had a little bit of a cold.

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So if I have a sudden fit of
coughing, please forgive me.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And maybe I'll leave the
room and [INAUDIBLE]..

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Josh Marie Wilkinson
is the author

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of five books of poetry
most recently Selenography.

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He has edited two anthologies
for University of Iowa Press

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including Poets On Teaching.

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And he has just completed
his first feature length film

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a tour documentary
about the band Califone.

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He lives in Chicago where
he is an assistant professor

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at Loyola University.

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He graduated from University
of Arizona Creative Writing MFA

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program in 2002.

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Wilkinson's poetry is lyric,
imagistic, cryptic yet

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always sincere, a perhaps rare
quality in contemporary poets.

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Compressed without
excess of any kind,

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Wilkinson's work is
obsessed with visual art.

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This layering of multiple
artistic dimensions

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works to create a transformative
lens for the reader.

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Wilkinson has created
a kind of new language

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in which readers
must wrap themselves

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in order to inhabit his world.

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In his latest book Selenography,
the first book in the No Volta

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pentalogy.

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Wilkinson juxtaposes
his poems with Polaroids

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taken by the artist Tim
Rutili depicting moments

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like a small plane crash, a
graffitied bathroom, legs,

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a hung skeleton, a lone crow.

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These images complement
the silences hollowed out

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by the poems to create an
atmosphere of utter stillness.

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Selenography literally
meaning lunar geography

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feels as though it is
as one of the poems

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suggests, a storybook
collecting our ends.

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The landscapes are
ours and not ours.

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They're human and not human.

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They are haunted by ghosts
of the past and future.

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What little life exists here
is merely the fleeting specter

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of the present.

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The last section of Selenography
invokes Samuel Beckett.

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Let me hear nothing of the moon.

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In my night there is no moon.

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And if I speak of the
stars it is by mistake.

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It is as though the
world has come unglued.

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The force that holds the Earth
together the moon, is gone.

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The book ends on a paradoxical
quandary, a speaker

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without a way forward.

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There is no love
without strangers

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in the street with their
murmuring like wires.

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A knock at the wall,
a chalk line to cross

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says the boy with the
trapdoor in his eye.

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I have a fold I have
no followable path.

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Please help me welcome
Josh Marie Wilkinson.

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[APPLAUSE]

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