WEBVTT

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All right, moving
right along here.

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To try to give some kind
of scope to the tireless,

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exorbitant, unrestrained work
that Joshua Marie Wilkinson

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does is to get lost in a vast
network of words, worlds,

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people, names, real and
virtual places, things to see,

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things to read, things to do--

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it's, in other words, to
slip down a steep time slope

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and into the vast swampy valley
we call contemporary poetry.

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I want to hold off on that.

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In an interview from
a couple of years ago,

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Joshua said this
about lyric poetry.

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He said, "It's
never fully a song

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because it's a lyric
for me in the old sense

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of the word-- split from the
music it was composed against.

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And because that
music is absent,

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the poem's forced to do
its own work to body forth,

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but never rises up all
the way into the sung--

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at least not literally.

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It falls just short of
song, and this for me

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is its stunted work as poetry.

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I love that almost-ness--
somehow other to

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spoken language but not
quite singing either."

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I'd like to stay with
this stunted music

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for a bit, this necessary
fallen separation between music

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and word.

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It seems to me that
Joshua Marie takes up

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the call of the
lyric against music,

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by transforming language into
a kind of antisystem of nodes,

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contacts, and energies.

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He is, to use a phrase
from his book Swamp

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Isthmus, logging noise.

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To me, his poetry works neither
on the microcosmic plane

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of strophic song, nor
on the macrocosmic plane

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of universal history.

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I hear in it, instead,
connective and loose strands

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of word pulse, language passed
through precarious, exposed,

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and broken telephone
lines, and some wires

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cabled into the muck.

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That last bit is
from Swamp Isthmus.

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Each short concatenation,
each couplet, each noncouplet,

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each enjambment, each
little verse paragraph,

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each ampersand,
bleeps out inside

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of the tracery of
other ghostly signals.

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I'd say, then, that Joshua's
lyric moves not only

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phonically, but telephonically.

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Accidental voices streamed
through more or less bad

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connections.

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Words, images, figures,
faces, bodies, names, rhythms,

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arise from and fade into the
ambient sonic groundswell.

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Here are the opening lines of
Selenography, the first book

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in Joshua's No Volta pentalogy.

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Who writes pentalogies?

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"The milkman's apprentice
begins to heave noise up

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from the road, and this
must be the beginning.

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There are all sorts of
enemies and underlings,

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and mine will make
liverwurst out of us."

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He'll read better than that.

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"This beginning
that must be there

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is that noise heaved
up from the road,

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a kind of voyage begun
in the midst of enemies

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and liverwurst.

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But that beginning, there,
in noise shows us already

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this will be the
other side of voyage.

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Not the telos found but the
dissipation of the oceanic.

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Not the trade route opened
or the forces of history

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mastered and made apparent, but
the ship lost with all hands.

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In the midst of
this loss, though,

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memory does its
little valve work,

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and we get to hear its buzz."

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Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a
poet, publisher, anthologizer,

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critic, editor, filmmaker,
sub-sub-librarian, and drummer.

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He has written or edited
over 20 books, chapbooks,

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and anthologies.

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He also teaches poetry and
poetics here at U of A,

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and he runs the vaunted
and hallowed Letter Machine

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Editions.

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His next two books
of poetry will

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be Meadow Slasher and Shimoda's
Tavern, in 2016 and 2017,

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respectively, I think,
from Black Ocean.

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Please welcome Joshua
Marie Wilkinson.

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[APPLAUSE]