Jessica L. Wilkinson



‘Seeking to be here, doing this’: Po-Essaying into Agro-ecological Thinking

I don’t eat pork. Dislike its taste and texture. Perhaps this is because my mother is a terrible cook, her meats always tough and dry.

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‘Beware! This is not a real biography!’: Ali Alizadeh Interviews Jessica L Wilkinson

To many, biographies are a generic section in a bookshop which showcase – as this interview will discuss – a supposed element of ‘truth’. Suggestions of worthiness through platitudes such as ‘based on a true story’ or a ‘definitive biography …

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Alice Allan Reviews Rabbit, Verge and Cuttlefish

The Australian poetry scene, however you define it, is definitely thriving. So much so that it sometimes causes consternation. Perhaps you’ve been there at a poetry gathering or launch when someone wonders aloud whether, ‘thriving’ is one step removed from ‘overgrown’ – whether this healthy scene is actually in need of some ruthless pruning.

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Jessica Wilkinson Interviews Anna Jackson

New Zealand poet and academic Anna Jackson’s presence easily fills a large room. At the Verse Biography: Truth or Beauty? conference in Wellington last November (of which Jackson was one of the three organisers), her enthusiasm for lively poetic discussion and debate is clear – abundant questions and wild tangents exhibit a mind tumbling with ideas bursting to be explored.

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Mr. B’s Women

“Just between us, she could have been great” – George Balanchine I was a little boy with his eye in the keyhole, training: Vaganova, Karsavina, Gerdt pas de trois pink ribbon battement each one a different measure of sound unraveling …

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Simon Eales Reviews A J Carruthers and Jessica L Wilkinson

In 2013, Jessica L. Wilkinson and A J Carruthers collaborated directly on The On-Going March Box (Stale Objects dePress), a poetic object collection consisting of words and alphabet arrangements printed on oddly shaped sight cards contained in an aged box. Startlingly bold affirmations like ‘HORNS’ or ‘SHORN’ or ‘S-HORN-S’ in black and white, and ‘TO THE FORE,’ quivering with seismic formatting, behave as unapologetic provocations to the reader. Their affect is confirmed by the project’s extension of craft beyond the word: to the physical object and to the website documenting their existence.

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Review Short: Luke Beesley’s New Works on Paper

I’ve been meaning to write this review for a year – in fact, there’s a wine stain on my copy and I can pinpoint the exact date that I first put it on my to-do list (i.e. engaged in other work → frustration → tipped glass). Despite all of my sideways swerving, a year is a good amount of time to let Beesley’s recurring bees swirl around the head; a year helps one to figure out their tune. Or, as the poet writes, ‘It’s not about bees. There are no bees.’ Have I tipped the wine glass again?

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Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace

Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.

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X Marks the Parataxis: Louis Armand, John Kinsella and Jessica L Wilkinson

Displacement is apparent both geographically and textually in Letters from Ausland by Louis Armand, The Vision of Error by John Kinsella (subtitled, ‘A Sextet of Activist Poems’) and marionette by jessica l. wilkinson (written here all in lower-case and subtitled, ‘a biography of miss marion davies’). All three poets are or have been editors of literary magazines: Armand edits VLAK, out of Prague; Kinsella, SALT; and Wilkinson, Rabbit (why does this name always remind me of Wittgenstein’s drawing of a rabbit that can also be perceived as a duck?) Armand and Kinsella have also collaborated on a number of books.

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1961: lightly scored in three parts

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Audio of ‘Nonfiction Poetry: Performing the Real’

This panel from the NonfictioNow Conference 2012 – at RMIT University and in partnership with Iowa University and Barbara Bedell, the Copyright Agency Limited, the Wheeler Centre and ABC Radio National – explores and discusses the potential of ‘nonfiction poetry’ …

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Jivin’ with Bonny Cassidy etc.

never the same night—never the same light in the feet dark devil in the heel the dress got wet— i cut it off—i lost control—rolled off the bed // the fault was all stylus— how it beat the rhythm out …

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Wandering through the Universal Archive

One of the sequences produced by the collaborative entity, A Constructed World, renders the phrases ‘No need to be great’ and ‘Stay in Groups’ in a range of media – silk-stitch, screen print, photography and painting. One of the painted versions of the image shows a naked woman covered in yellow post-it notes overseen by a hulking, shadowy male. These figures represent the artists Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe. The image appears again in the form of a photograph and the installation was staged in various places around the world – as if the only way to get the message across would be to subject it to constant repetition in as many different formats as possible. Indeed, a number of the collective’s performances and installations attest to the impossibility of communication – even as these take the form of images that can’t fail to deliver. Avant Spectacle A Micro Medicine Show, 2011, features skeleton-costumed performers inexpertly singing and playing instruments while six knee-high wooden letters – S, P, E, E, C and H – burn like small condemned buildings at front of stage.

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Jessica Wilkinson Reviews Lisa Jacobson

The verse novel is a peculiar organism: descended from the sweeping epics that chronicled the birth of nations and the misadventures of wayward heroes, we can still find characters struggling on their ‘grand’ journey – likely to be a personal, emotional and/or psychological journey – with the occasional battle scene (though, this is more likely to take place on a much smaller, personal level). As a distinctly modern form, there is certainly much less aggrandisement of the natural world via mythical and magical hyperbole in the verse novel.

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Arrangement of Manteia y marionette

In this performance excerpt, recorded live at Montsalvat on November 8 2012, Jessica L. Wilkinson teams up with composer Simon Charles and ensemble Manteia to articulate the threads of marionette’s broken narrative while preserving its ever-elusive quality. Poetry: Jessica L. …

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Andrew Carruthers Reviews Jessica Wilkinson

In an intriguing vispo ‘Free Music,’ published here in Cordite in 2011, Jessica L. Wilkinson hangs a score. Hung, literally: for what is it about the musical score that gets hung up on text? What was the final sentence? No: hang the score, hang it, Wilkinson writes! Wilkinson’s visible labor is at work in the lower half of the piece, where letters are strung along lines: alphabetic versus diastemmatic (or neumic) notation.

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Ali Alizadeh Reviews ‘The Best Australian Poems 2012’

Whatever one may expect from an anthology of contemporary poetry released by a mainstream commercial publisher – an accessible selection of diverse voices and styles, one for both the non-specialist, general reader as well as the (less snobbish) connoisseur, a selection featuring promising emerging writers as well as more prominent authors, and so on – Black Inc. Publishing’s annual Best Australian Poems Series has been meeting these expectations, more or less consistently, for close to a decade. And despite the series’ many specific strengths and few weaknesses, the latest addition to the series follows the same general tradition successfully.

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THE REALPOETIK MANIFESTO

FOR TOO LONG has poetry been disregarded as a valid vehicle for the exploration of real world experience. Too often has poetry been filed in the ‘too hard’ basket and deemed ‘irrelevant’ and ‘inaccessible.’

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Free Music

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The Warriors: an imaginary ballet in three parts

1. Fiction leads through factual composition to an arbitrary place of free delight—at the end of such an arc is Mr. Percy Aldridge Grainger, slapping his knees and humming through the beat. Throw caution over the house and it might …

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