IPHIGENIA
John Wilkinson

"Imagine if one diagram could denominate in the lowest way every event that your life gets stuffed with, imagine this diagram placed on the glass top of an overhead projector, then imagine a great pleach of delineated and abstract event diagrams being roughly stabbed and tugged over the glass in a blur, so that they never rest within the frame that nonetheless comprehends them in abstract; if we can imagine this, we have an image-reference for the propulsive development of one thing leading to another in John Wilkinson.  And these things, these events, can be anything on the bleeding spectrum from total irrelevance to life and death (usually our life and other people’s death, as in Iphigenia).  Some lint rises.  Microphytic fronds hyper-propagate.  And, Iraq becomes the property of Krug drinkers.  The events are “roaming their slots,” discharging themselves onto the static diagram of the English tense structure and sliding off into the fantasy episode bin that has no bottom and will never need changing or emptying."--Keston Sutherland, 'What Is Called John Wilkinson: Introduction to a reading from Iphigenia, Cambridge, 26 April 2004

1-903488-38-9. 2004. 24 pp. £4.00 / $8.00

Iphigenia

Visited on barley sugar barley water barley wine
     barley whoreson,
O barley cane John Barleycorn
Swollen in his coat he transubstantiates fume.
               Lemon barley.
Whisky.
In this way the small grain gains bulk.

Starch fuels the floating factories’
     misbegetting
microphytic fronds hyper-propagate, block
any exit,  
spiraling through vinegar,
thicken at the base of the alembic
     Thus too the surface creams & spumes.

Internal welts crimsoning, their congealed crime
     riveted each button door,
where yeast the human analogue, its cells’
limitations switching off, carcinogenic
floaters on Burgundy,
          performs wheelies, jack-knifes,
rides the premonition, rides before it curls
into cascade.

Every proposition swells, birthing clingy scarfs,
a jellyfish’s lunar pulse.
The destroyers are fabulous too.
     I love the cars
     I love the cars
Whitening on the bench. The centrifuge.
The little fridge.
The strips of yeast cells as they stalk the earth.
     I love cigarettes.

Others snack on fattening rations, lifts rise
& plunge at one finger. Caged within music
they greet travellers, these our apparitions,
accruing light to us with retail cheer,
revel in such gocers’ generosity, their con-
summate fervour. Using market movements
we invent new snacks for them, broker Fausts.

I like it sweet, I like it whipped, I like it salted,
          I like it fresh-churned.
Does the rose bush burnt from pure longing
     visited with fire rust,
transfigure in the blaze to the same figure?
The same shall furl & pack fire
into its prolific heads,
& does the blood-red garland
          decked in thorns like spurs,

manifest the crowning dream of a virgin
wading through blood – Don’t fuck with me:
I want the thick cultivar.
The sentence is delayed hunger.

On Effigies Against the Light: “This book by one of the most intellectually demanding and politically engaged of contemporary English poets, suggests that the differences between some versions of modernism and postmodernism might be nil. The political content of Wilkinson’s work distinguishes it from the xenophobic high modernism of the English tradition. The section “Chalone” at the start of the book begins with an examination of the continuing legacy of the plantation system; where some moderns mourn the coming of modernity, Wilkinson (in “Reserved”) admonishes us to “watch things spring apart, &/ know with a blank chill/ they ought to.” Yet Wilkinson also refuses a reactionary postmodernism that simply spits capital’s fetishes back at it: “Here is amber, here is pitch to smear your arms, salve lips,/ tallow to stuff resounding ears. You stand like flypaper./ You hold a trowel & with it you daub every lost saying.” Though bombarded, linguistically and otherwise, Wilkinson’s speaker continues to self-construct, rather than destruct.” --Publishers Weekly

“The speed of this writing, its kinetic movement “like a run-time virus”, derives from the extraordinary scope of its inclusions. This is not the low-risk inclusiveness of semiotic playtime, but the propagation of strings of significance among the resistant data of moment and location. Difficult of access, but no less difficult of egress, the poetry in this volume makes unflinching demands on the reader, demands that repay slowly but in abundance. Reader, I was crushed and exhilarated.” --Jeremy Green, Chicago Review

“Some of Wilkinson’s poems still seem to me like white noise, like information rapidly and promiscuously flooding my attention; but I do not believe that they will necessarily continue to. Others do offer me precisely that sense of the bearing, the bearable and the beautiful; and although, for good reasons, that state is almost untranscribable, and not automatically reproducible in identical fashion for every reader, it is something one looks for in art, and is privileged to encounter.” --Robert Potts, The Guardian