All right, moving right along here.
To try to give some kind of scope to the tireless,
exorbitant, unrestrained work that Joshua Marie Wilkinson
does is to get lost in a vast network of words, worlds,
people, names, real and virtual places, things to see,
things to read, things to do--
it's, in other words, to slip down a steep time slope
and into the vast swampy valley we call contemporary poetry.
I want to hold off on that.
In an interview from a couple of years ago,
Joshua said this about lyric poetry.
He said, "It's never fully a song
because it's a lyric for me in the old sense
of the word-- split from the music it was composed against.
And because that music is absent,
the poem's forced to do its own work to body forth,
but never rises up all the way into the sung--
at least not literally.
It falls just short of song, and this for me
is its stunted work as poetry.
I love that almost-ness-- somehow other to
spoken language but not quite singing either."
I'd like to stay with this stunted music
for a bit, this necessary fallen separation between music
and word.
It seems to me that Joshua Marie takes up
the call of the lyric against music,
by transforming language into a kind of antisystem of nodes,
contacts, and energies.
He is, to use a phrase from his book Swamp
Isthmus, logging noise.
To me, his poetry works neither on the microcosmic plane
of strophic song, nor on the macrocosmic plane
of universal history.
I hear in it, instead, connective and loose strands
of word pulse, language passed through precarious, exposed,
and broken telephone lines, and some wires
cabled into the muck.
That last bit is from Swamp Isthmus.
Each short concatenation, each couplet, each noncouplet,
each enjambment, each little verse paragraph,
each ampersand, bleeps out inside
of the tracery of other ghostly signals.
I'd say, then, that Joshua's lyric moves not only
phonically, but telephonically.
Accidental voices streamed through more or less bad
connections.
Words, images, figures, faces, bodies, names, rhythms,
arise from and fade into the ambient sonic groundswell.
Here are the opening lines of Selenography, the first book
in Joshua's No Volta pentalogy.
Who writes pentalogies?
"The milkman's apprentice begins to heave noise up
from the road, and this must be the beginning.
There are all sorts of enemies and underlings,
and mine will make liverwurst out of us."
He'll read better than that.
"This beginning that must be there
is that noise heaved up from the road,
a kind of voyage begun in the midst of enemies
and liverwurst.
But that beginning, there, in noise shows us already
this will be the other side of voyage.
Not the telos found but the dissipation of the oceanic.
Not the trade route opened or the forces of history
mastered and made apparent, but the ship lost with all hands.
In the midst of this loss, though,
memory does its little valve work,
and we get to hear its buzz."
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a poet, publisher, anthologizer,
critic, editor, filmmaker, sub-sub-librarian, and drummer.
He has written or edited over 20 books, chapbooks,
and anthologies.
He also teaches poetry and poetics here at U of A,
and he runs the vaunted and hallowed Letter Machine
Editions.
His next two books of poetry will
be Meadow Slasher and Shimoda's Tavern, in 2016 and 2017,
respectively, I think, from Black Ocean.
Please welcome Joshua Marie Wilkinson.
[APPLAUSE]