a brief note on the poetry of Joshua Marie Wilkinson

***

Boy-scatter in the market,
moths awake inside the piano.

***

Surely you remember the legendary earthquake.

***

A little bit of Christmas in your eyes,
stuck to your red lips. (p 19, "The Trick Was to Disappear")

I recently got copies of the first two poetry collections by Seattle-born Joshua Marie Wilkinson, his Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Portland OR: Pinball Publishing, 2005) and more recent lug your careless body out of the careful dusk (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2006), which was also winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. I first discovered the work of the writer Joshua Marie Wilkinson a few weeks ago, after picking up a copy of the American journal Phoebe (see my note on that here), as he was included in the eleven writer multiview, "Eleven ways of Looking at Travel." This is the first part of what he wrote for Phoebe, responding to the question of travel, and talking about his first collection:

When I started writing my first book, Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, I had moved from my home in Seattle to Bratislava in order to be close to where the painter Egon Schiele was from. For several months I traveled by train over the Slovak-Austrian and Austro-Czech borders in order to find the little towns where he painted and where he had lived. I didn't write that much, except for sketching notes on the trains. Taking pictures is a kind of writing I suppose. But travel was integral to that book. I wasn't out for adventures, I just didn’t think I could write it unless I
went to Vienna and to the little towns in Northern Italy, Southern Czech Republic, Eastern Austria, and Western Hungary, and Budapest where Schiele, and eventually Wittgenstein, had been about a century before. Trains allowed all my travel in Central Europe, so trains recur again and again in that book. (p 33)

I don't know exactly what it is that leads particular poets to compose whole collections on the work of painter Egon Schiele, whether Wilkinson's first, or Vancouver poet Catherine Owen, who also did as her first poetry collection, Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 1998). There have been other references here and there as well, such as in Winnipeg poet Sarah Gordon's debut collection, Rapture Red & Smoke Grey (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2003), as she wrote “Today is cold and damp in the bones as I was walking downtown the / air was reaching through my jacket and sweater and I was prompted / to write an essay on Egon Schiele’s hands.” (p 6), and continuing with “How odd to mention Vienna here, in the middle of a prairie winter / location is everything.” As Jane Miller writes in her introduction to Wilkinson's Schiele:

The time may be right for a poetry that is not only imaginative, but that is
also grounded in reality. "Each day you must offer yourself with words to
somebody," Mr. Wilkinson says, giving great responsibility to language, and to
the poor soul who is taking an affirmative stand regarding life itself. This is
about as un-existential, and as unashamedly positive a viewpoint as I've seen
from a poet in a while. Bravo to Joshua Marie Wilkinson for believing in this
world, its history and its art. His own art might make believers of his readers
who, I'm confident, will trust and follow him:

It is dusk again.
A plain-clothed woman opens a side-door
from the Monastery's basement & I slip into the passageway. (p 9)

As lovely as this collection feels, there is just something about the book that doesn't strike me; as good as the writing is in this collection, there's some intangible there somewhere that keeps me from getting too deep inside the collection. Maybe it’s the same unknown fact of why Schiele that prevents me from getting deeper. My own little anti-narrative hang-ups.

I am writing from the outhouse by candlelight
& father may at any moment burst in.

My pillow no longer smells of you or, worse, I've nearly
forgotten your scent. The bedroom window rattles
& I sleep shaky in fits.

I fear that these letters will not reach you,
that the messenger boy's already betrayed me

& reads this with yellow eyes before he shakes the bag out
into the ravine from underneath the bridge.




The pitched roof of the pharmacy gives the rest of the black painting
the slightest glow where the red fronts of houses are nearly brown.
The sky & blue river are flat.
The bluish shutters of a small house are thrown open to the moonlight.

Black silhouettes could be anything but the figures I see.
A couple quarreling or stretching after love in the summer darkness,
sharing a cigarette at the window.

You fall asleep thirsty with your mouth open.
But I picture you again, at the kitchen window sewing white feathers
into your fire-spinning dress, your cat Texas asleep in the sink
& even music tricks me, brings you back. (p 81-2, "The Satchel of Letters")

Is it simply a matter of the subject matter wearing me down? Is there just something there I can't look past, no matter what Wilkinson is doing with the material?

Dear Egon,
I am writing to tell you that the house here in Krumau
is ready for you. There's a piano in the studio
though keys are missing. I will drag it out with my brothers if you say.
Also, a handsome girl lives next door.
She's a dancer with broad shoulders & a flat nose like a boxer's.

Woods can be a city. (p 54, "I Think Words Do This To Your Body")

On the other hand, there is something astounding, and even spellbinding about the poems in Wilkinson's second collection, lug your careless body out of the careful dusk. Built as what could easily be called a long poem broken into fragments, the collection is broken into seven sections that are themselves broken, page by page and line by line. Winner of the prestigious poetry manuscript contest, the Iowa City Prize (which I keep not winning), the winner gets an armload of cash and a published book at the end of it, with previous winners including Cole Swensen, Liz Waldner, Joanna Goodman, Peter Jay Shippy, Michele Glazer, Susan Wheeler and Emily Rosko.

Did the movies spoil you early?
Couldn’t the river take that man away?
Had you wished for a better entry?

***

The man slumped wide-eyed
dead at the wheel of the milk truck
isn’t enough for a poem until
the ground thaws,
the windshield splatters onto the dash,
into his pleated lap & animals catch
the opened scent.
Montana burned flesh. They nuzzle
& tug him lengthwise
like a dummy
into the goat field
& wish him goodbye.





Sweaty water, oven belly, brick chin, monster
oarsman, your man square
in the mirror like he's been drinking
the spitty punches. (p 8-9, "A Moth in the Projectorlight")

There is just something about Wilkinson's lines that pull apart the material of the poem and break down into the essential lyric fact. How is a poem? In his work generally, Wilkinson manages to pull a shock of image against another shock, and let the resonant electrical bursts make waves across the many layered lines. Call it resonance, perhaps; call it love and lusty restrain. The lines of lug your careless body out of the careful dusk just keep feeding in through other lines and leaving physical traces, well after I've finished reading. Written with echoes of the previous book, the poems in this collection are more abstract than those of his Schiele work; even to be able to call it the "Schiele work" seems an inappropriate boiling down of such material, but what else to call it? And how else to consider this work, where by holding less hard onto the ideas of a fact the poems themselves become so much more?

A girl I knew plowed fields all night
in Bow, slower than sleep-
walking until the sun creamed
the hilled horizon, rousing the elk
to gallop through it & dimmed out
the headlight of her tractor, green
as a lime. Thirsty bugs, coyote shriek,
damn summer things to dread. She was
so quiet in the morning when
we'd wake for work that I feared my
breathing would be the most awful sound
& held it until she began
to search for clothes & dress before me
in the dark. (p 54, "Boy-Scatter, the Sleepier & the Sleepiest")

lug your careless body out of the careful dusk is a magnificent collection and needs to be experienced.