Lyric In Its Times: Temporalities in Verse, Breath, and Stone

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In this important new intervention, leading poet and critic John Wilkinson explores the material life of the lyric poem. How does the lyric considered as an object, as an event grapple with permanence and impermanence, the rhythms of change and the passing of time Drawing on new insights from contemporary philosophy and object-oriented ontology, psychoanalysis and the visual arts, The Lyric in Its Times includes innovative and insightful new readings of work by a wide range of lyric poets, from Shakespeare, Blake and Shelley to Charles Baudelaire, Frank OHara and J.H. Prynne.

Reviews

[A]stonishingly trenchant and flawless. -- Calvin Bedient * Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion *
Remarkable ... This is a book to marvel at and with, to be inspired by as companionable breath, as tremendous defence of poetry, as manifesto for the rocky three-phase dialectical enactments of art in living language generating the fourth dimension of lyric. * Blackbox Manifold *
John Wilkinson reads lyric poetry for its repeatable evanescence, which Wilkinson characterizes as an experience of life, of beauty time and again, not to be exhausted by one reading of an unambiguous inscription (11). As a conception of aesthetic experience, repeatable evanescence illustrates the inexhaustible ability of lyric poetry to initiate disruptive aesthetic events for readers across various historical moments. Wilkinson understands lyric poems as dynamic object-events that amalgamate a variety of temporalities and other objects. To this end, he develops a style of close reading that combines the analysis of rhythm with attention to poems material rhetoric of such objects as stone, rock, and glass. So while Wilkinson exceeds the boundaries of treating poetry as a historicist object, resources including visual art, Object-Oriented Ontology, and psychoanalysis allow him to illustrate the complex material life that lyric poetry subsumes as an aesthetic object. Wilkinsons particular interests center on the poetry of mid-twentieth-century New York City and St. Ives, Cornwall, but his readings stretch from the Renaissance to the present and additionally dabble in French and German poetry. * Journal of Modern Literature *

Author Bio

John Wilkinson is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, USA. His previous publications include the poetry collections Reckitt's Blue (2013) and Ghost Nets (2016) and the critical book The Lyric Touch (2007).