The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth

by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Poetry. In prose poems and lyric fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson uses the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and others--and graduate degrees in poetry and film--to entice readers into the extraordinary correlation between poetic and cinematic imagery.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2009

About the author

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author or editor of fifteen books, the most recent of which is his debut novel, Trouble Finds You (Fonograf 2023).

He lives in Portland, Oregon, in the United States, with the writer Lisa Wells, where they serve as series editors, with Mark Levine, of the Kuhl House Poets series for University of Iowa Press.

His work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Believer, Iowa Review, A Public Space, and many others. After many years in academia, he now works as a psychotherapist.

Reviews

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt my insides heaving with thoughts of barley and malt, and the smell of coffee choked me, stole my breaths.

[Ryo Yamaguchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joshua Marie Wilkinson has been in my radar for some time, though this is the first proper response I've really had to his work. I first came to him at the vehement request of a better read friend of mine back when I was poetry editor at Dislocate, that we solicit some collaborative poems Wilkinson and Noah Eli Gordon were then getting out to periodicals in advance of what, I guess, would become Figures for a Darkroom Voice. I mention that “guess” as caveat that, other than this collection, I've only otherwise read Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk. His (and Gordon's) kingdom is vast, impressively prolific for his age, so I feel a little embarrassed that I am about to draw such large conclusions from merely two collections. That being said, I'm hoping for a shorter post and review, so now that the obligatory hyperlinks are out of the way, let me get down to it.



If you are at all familiar with Wilkinson, you know his writing is most often fragmentary, near tanka-like, and his voice is defined by great mystery—these kinds of dark narratives of childhood and youth, often in rural settings, with strong bents toward fable and quite often an almost painterly delivery. This collection is no different. I am tempted to call him a surrealist, but that's not entirely true—every time I go and seek the actually fantastic in his work, I find nothing but the utterly possible, the, in fact, plainly possible, the quotidian, a great population of objects that suggest otherworldliness simply by their delivery and combinations. We get, for instance, lovely lists like that which makes “deer & salt block:”



One boy hides a turtle from his brothers in a dresser drawer. One boy is mute & sluggish from the hurricane sirens. One boy took a long time in the bathtub reading the comics. One boy loops a tractor chain to the ceiling fan & tears the whole roof down. One boy speaks through a keyhole to the others about a shortstop's hex.



And so forth. On one hand, this seems a rather run-of-the-mill catalogue meant to establish a summarial description of life in that place, of boyhood there (perhaps, as a result of his draw from films), and yet, on the other, the deep specificity of each sentence, not to mention the really striking imagistic qualities, resist our summary. Despite the fact that one could very well have experienced any one of these, that one sees a self-recognition from one's own youth, the grouping as a whole is indeed surreal, and this is partly because it is difficult to draw a really tenable narrative or thematic line between them all. There's an overriding furtiveness in the actions, perhaps, which evokes that quiet place of boyhood imagination and the private machinations of figuring-out-the-world, but the distance between territories is still so great that it challenges the reader to not rest simply there. Such arcs are translated more often across entire sections, in this case across the various “books” that makeup the collection, which secures a stronger sense of each little asterisks-bounded moment as an entry in a catalogue. They are curios, and there is an inherent difficulty, then, in deriving a larger concern for the sections or for the book as a whole.



This is what I think Wilkinson does best—he makes the ordinary seem otherwise, and within the specific realm of youthhood, childhood, I really can't think of someone who does this any better. He will capture you with his stories; he will make you want to stay. Of course, I have a problem with this, too, in that the tableaus of the child’s more enraptured mind also fall into these sorts of crutches. One is that he populates so much of the text with old-timey nouns. Like this, from the section “The Book of Trapdoors, Thimble-Light, & Fog:”



A fifty-cent piece in the sweeper's
fist.

Thief's daughter
clapping in the game

behind the cistern.

Not lurk, just lisp
or coined through.



Another is that he populates so much with a kind of slick darkness, like this from “The Book of Falling Asleep in the Bathtub & Snow:”



Carry your sister’s ring
in your hidden pocket.

Carry this song
in the hood of your throat.



My quarrel is that “fifty-cent piece,” “cistern,” “hidden pocket,” and metaphorical pairings like “hood of your throat” have already had all the poetic work done for them in the past—there is no argument that they make for compelling surrealism—they seem, in fact, like staples thereof. They are almost anachronisms, and in that way they feel like nostalgias. And this is not something exclusive to Wilkinson—rather, I see this as a larger cultural trend among the young, urban, and artistic, the “hipsters,” but I will address that more thoroughly in another post. The point here, for this collection of poems, is that some of the text seems to sacrifice truly adventurous, risky image-making, image-making that could fail (and therefore, provides the tension of that as a possibility) for a more flawless, dependable design. In a sense, I feel slightly marketed to, at moments. Largely, however, this book will blow you away with a really stupefying array of powerful images.

[Leonard · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mixture of free verse and prose poems make up this collection of somewhat vague and obscure poems by this poet.

[Jon Cone · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE BOOK OF WHISPERING IN THE PROJECTION BOOTH by Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Tupelo Press, 2009).



The fragment is something. The force found there, and that captivated the Modernists, persists. (It might very well one of the more enduring Modernist contributions to literature in this age. I don’t know.) In this collection, not his newest, but recent enough for me to feel comfortable writing about it, THE BOOK OF WHISPERING IN THE PROJECTION BOOTH, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, continues to explore the narrative and lyric potentials that the fragment suggests. This book isn’t all about fragment, as there are prose poems here also, but it is largely poems composed of fragments and arranged sequentially. Here the fragment is even more sparse than in his previous collection, more starved of excess meat. What was once allowed, no more. I like this collection immensely. I like the way it looks on the page. I like the rural, small town feel, which never cloys but maintains a heightened sense of sadness, a great sense here of an eye hyper-attuned to detail, the evanescent. And the mysterious. The deeply archaically mysterious. This is one complete section: “Please come back with this hammer taped/ to your leg.” What does that suggest to you? To me it suggests many things, but I won’t bore you with my thinking on these lines (line?). I’ll simply stress the concrete weight the image brings to me, and to you. Or these lines: “She folded the paper airplanes into an envelope/& sealed it with her fingertips.” What do these suggest? In the age of digitally dominated communication and entertainment what an anarchistic exercise it surely is to fold paper airplanes and then to send them (via airmail?) in an envelope that is sealed (lovingly?) by ‘fingertips’. The sensuous becomes the sensual becomes an act of nearly invisible sabotage. It feels like that to me. Both quotes come from the poem “The Book of the Umbrella.” Did I mention what wonderful titles Wilkinson employs? (The art of titling a poem is often undervalued, and Wilkinson is one of the contemporary greats. Aside: Wallace Stevens is the high-water mark for titles in the 20th century, in my opinion.) Beneath, or behind, or beside these wonderful titles the fragments that follow seem lurking presences, always suggesting meaning, the frayed edges of it, some larger narrative of which we glimpse the fleeting, the fleeing forms. But there are other forms in this book other than fragments in sequence: there are brief complete poems, that in fact don’t seem so different than fragments yet hold forth a completeness, an entirety. Thus, a poem called ‘Poem’:

How long
did the wooden
horse last after
the boys
carved out
its belly?
[19:]


A question. A gem. Or this other, another question, called ‘if you repeat the names & disappear’:

What story
opened the cistern
& had you
whispering
through your
pillowcase?

[45:]


If you are willing to let these poems have the space they need in order to breathe, if you are someone who enjoys a poetry of slow unfolding, if you even read poetry – who reads poetry? – if you find in poetry a modern form of meditation, if language is something you savor like wood smoke and the echo of a dog bark at dusk, if you like the way a shovel feels in your calloused hands, then this collection is for you to read and enjoy.

[abcdefg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry was like reading bits and pieces of dreams - surreal and very random, yet entertaining, funny, mysterious, and cryptic.

Each "book" in Wilkinson's collection is like a shelf of a curio presenting bits and pieces on the verge of the nonsensical. There's a childlike quality to the tone - almost like children from antiquity whispering in the dark about codified secrets, not revealing the entire story.

There's also a strangely unfinished, dreamlike quality to the imagery that arises from phrases like "The wind too will eat the scars from your face." Whose face? What kind of scars? How did they get the scars?

I find that the poetry did not (nor do I think that it was meant to) elaborate on any issues or current events or make any grandiose statements.

That, to me, is wonderfully refreshing.

Beautifully and hauntingly imaginative, not everyone can appreciate poetry like this. It's not supposed to make sense necessarily. There's something more (like surrealist paintings). There's a world depicted, but that world is not governed by the laws we adopt and live by.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes. And yes again to the insides of the insides of this beautiful book. I won't do it justice, so I'll let the book speak for itself a bit in fragments of its wondrous fragments instead.


+++

Rowboat of
white

flour & beetles.

The moon dips onto the meadow
& gets lodged where the deer
make their beds in the grass.

+++

We are standing in that field. The light is falling all over, developing us in the sounds of the chase.

+++

I am the boy who took the pictures you've seen. This is my sister who developed them without her gloves on. These are her hands.

+++

I want you to
remove something

from my question
& then I’ll
ask you
with my hands for it.

+++

Here is the traveler’s map which threads transom
to gully & threads ghost deer to the lost ocean.

+++


So, yeah.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this after "Lug Your Careless..." by the same author. Another great collection.