Graduate Workshop Blog Spring 2018

"Perhaps my prolificity is due to the fact that my work evolves as my daily life. My life in poetry. Poetry in my life. Afam Akeh is one of the members of my generation of poets that I most respect and listen to. I was so happy when he returned to writing poetry after about a decade or more of silence. He reads my poetry with devotion and close attention. Right from our beginnings in Lagos he has encouraged and supported my work. He may not be wrong in calling me a confessional poet but that is just one aspect of my writing. Other critics and appreciators have seen me as a surrealist poet, political poet, anarchist poet, environmental poet, abstract poet, avant-garde poet, etc. I don’t have a label for myself or what I write. Regarding where I find the energy for work, I guess it resides in my unapologetic love for life and my curiosity about everything." Uche Nduka, from this interview, in which not a few of our topics get called upon.  "A three-week visit home is ...

             Before Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s 2017 Meadow Slasher , there was Selenography , the 2010 collaboration between Wilkinson and Tim Rutili. Wilkinson provided the poems, Rutili the polaroids; the result is an opaque investigation into poetry as testimony, witness, being there. In this way, Selenography already touches on many of last week’s class discussion. More curiously, however, is the trajectory Wilkinson follows from testimony to confession in his most recent work. There is, in fact, something of a through-line between these works, or, at least, a portal between these two explorations of witness to confession. Two lines in Meadow Slasher brought this to my mind: “So you’ve been into the photographs? / What’s not desire’s aperture” (10). While this reference to photographs may not be a likely callback to Selenography , it nevertheless opens up the possibility that Wilkinson is much more invested in the lyric self than what his often d...