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Reading by John Wilkinson
Highlights National Poetry Month at NHC
News Release Date: April 18, 2008
In recognition of National Poetry Month, the National Humanities Center hosted a public reading on Friday, April 4, by poet John Wilkinson, the 2007-08 Lily and Carl Pforzheimer Fellow at the Center.
Born in Great Britain, Wilkinson teaches in both the Creative Writing and English Literature programs at Notre Dame University, where he is poet-in-residence. His verse has been noted not only for its "startling incisiveness" and wit but its "infectious power." His first book appeared in 1974, and Wilkinson won the Chancellor's Medal for Poetry at Cambridge University that same year. In all, Wilkinson has published six major collections of verse as well as numerous critical articles on British and American poetry, recently collected as The Lyric Touch (2007). His most recent verse collections are Lake Shore Drive (2006), Contrivances (2003), and Effigies Against the Light (2001); and his 1986 collection, Proud Flesh, was re-issued in 2005 with an introduction by Drew Milne. Wilkinson has held a Frank Knox Fellowship at Harvard University, and was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in 2003-04 at the Nathan S. Kline Institute.
Wilkinson read selections from his newest book, Down to Earth (forthcoming, October, 2008 from Salt Publishing, Cambridge), as well as from poems set to appear this spring in the Chicago Review.
Wilkinson is the most recent poet to spend a year working at the Center. In previous years, the Center has been fortunate to have as Fellows other distinguished poets, including Mary Kinzie (2005-06) and Piotr Sommer (2004-05) as well as renowned poetry critic Helen Vendler. To hear selections from John Wilkinson's reading or to listen to recordings by Kinzie, Sommer, and Vendler, click the links below.
 John Wilkinson reads "A Claim to Land by the River" and
"The Whole Deal" (MP3 file)
- Helen Vendler reads three poems by William Butler Yeats
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