Following John Wilkinson

• Main Author: Joe Luna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2015-09-01
• Series: Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
• Online Access: https://poetry.openlibhums.org/article/id/725/

This article reads closely John Wilkinson’s essay ‘Following the Poem’ (2007) alongside some of Wilkinson’s poetry from the 1980s and 1990s. Using the work of Donald Winnicott as a touchstone, the article critically evaluates the claims made in Wilkinson’s essay about fullness and intersubjectivity against some of his poetry’s expressions of fragmentation and dismemberment. The article concludes with some reflections on Wilkinson’s quotation of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in Proud Flesh (1986), and on the later collection Hid Lip (1992). It argues that an illuminating disparity or contradiction exists between the avowed aim of the reading practices described and advocated in ‘Following the Poem,’ and the state of the subjects repeatedly presented in Wilkinson’s poetry. The article finally suggests that this contradiction itself speaks volumes about the kind of world in which both poetry and poetics exist.