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Cluster index: John Wilkinson

Adages for poetry students.

By John Wilkinson. ◊ hese adages were prepared for students at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, whom I met to talk about their poetry on the afternoon of March 19th 2023. It surprised me that they should have agreed to a Sunday class, but much about Jadavpur surprised me, starting with a campus bedecked with far-left graffiti, […]

Two eclogues.

By JOHN WILKINSON. ◊ ECLOGUE: EACH TO EACH The flattened world is incapable of folding its creatures; they enter no burrows, nests cannot raise a rookery aloft amidst spheres of mistletoe, new carrot-top curls subside, creep along the earth they intrigue and disguise, matted and too shallow. What can break the bed, transparency of air […]

Breaks Broken: Some Recent Poetry.

John Wilkinson: ‘Here I consider line-breaks or what might pass for line-breaks in recent work by two prominent contemporary poets, one American and one British, revealing a strange affinity in their different kinds of line-breaks.’ diminution into insignificance.

In Defence of Stress.

John Wilkinson: ‘The apogee of academic instruction in close reading and literary history, was attained at a brief moment in the 1950s and 1960s, remaining essential to a reaction in subsequent deconstructive theory. Reliance on such a literary culture and its associated skills has become anachronistic.’

Violet.

John Wilkinson: ‘With Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” the violet hour recurs as the eventide bringing into sharp and estranged focus, activities and settings which otherwise are banal..’