JAMES WILKES
////// 68 pages
Size: 14.5 x 21 CM
Through lyric poems, prose poems and fragments, performance scores and visual collages, Mille Regretz writes towards, through and around the chansons of the Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez. Employing a translatory approach that draws on Josquin’s own procedural compositions, this book takes the ‘dubious and spurious’ nature of the chansons’ printed scores and partial lyrics as a starting point and an invitation to reimagine the relationship between poetry and song. The poems move centrifugally from past to present across the verbal, visual and sonic, welcoming chance encounters and mishearings into the process of making; they are, as Wilkes writes in the afterword, “a kind of opening to the world.”
James Wilkes writes poetry, experimental short fiction and performance texts, and collaborates across disciplines and art-forms. He has been writer-in-residence at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, the Medical Museion (Copenhagen), and the Wellcome Collection. His first collection was Weather A System (Penned in the Margins) and his work has since appeared in Poetry Wales, Datableed, The White Review, gorse, The Stinging Fly and Adjacent Pineapple. Recent performance/installation venues have included the National Poetry Library, Metal Southend, South London Gallery, Aarhus Litteraturcenter and Kings Place, London. He has taught at Royal Holloway, Bangor University and Tate Modern.
James Wilkes | Mille Regretz, Chansons after Josquin des Prez
“These brilliant reworkings of the chansons of Josquin des Prez contribute to a body of poetry that departs entirely from the understanding of translation as a means of traversing – and so sometimes inadvertently reinforcing – national or linguistic frontiers. Instead, Wilkes’s poems take flight from translation into a zone of relation between sound and sense, past and present, voice and echo, poetry and music that enables new intermedial imaginings. ‘Alive in an inkscape’, his intricate overlays of text and voice create hauntings, dances and mirrored sound; song is re-energized by noise, unfolding multiple forms of listening and being.”
Zoë Skoulding
“Each poem is a veritable engine, I feel like I’m writing as I’m reading, I’m talking to Josquin, singing time, thinking along a piano key into a new structure. This is when process is as moving, and as beautiful, as lyric. With an extraordinary music, this is poetry brilliantly reflexive to its own craft, in antique, unique and cunning routines.”
Holly Pester