Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Jessica L. Wilkinson has published three poetic biographies, Marionette: A Biography of Miss Marion Davies (Vagabond 2012), Suite for Percy Grainger (Vagabond 2014), and Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine (Vagabond, 2019). Jessica is the founding editor of Rabbit: A Journal for Nonfiction Poetry. She co-edited the anthology Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers, 2016) and is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.
My poetic biographies—on Marion Davies, Percy Grainger and George Balanchine respectively—represent attempts to convey aspects of character in new ways, beyond the capabilities of the prose sentence; they test new dimensions for nonfiction writing and in each work, the ‘form’ of the biography has emerged in response to research encounters. In this regard, each book is formally and structurally different, as I consider each character worthy of their unique biographical form. For Marionette, for instance, I spent a lot of time at the UCLA Film and Television archive, where I encountered various instances of disintegration/damage that reflected back some of the silences and losses within Marion’s life story. Disintegration is a literal and metaphorical feature within Marionette, which unfolds as a series of film reels and each page is a ‘frame’. For my second poetry book, Suite for Percy Grainger (2014), I listened obsessively to recordings of Grainger’s compositions, piano-playing and ‘Free Music’ experiments, but I also delved into numerous archival spaces (Grainger Museum, Melbourne; Grainger House, White Plains, NY) and sites where he lived and worked, and a frequently reoccurring aspect was the ‘line’—musical line, stave line, whip marks (he was a self-flagellator), walking paths (he would go on the most epic walks during concert tours in different countries) etc.—which became a dominant principle for the production of the manuscript.
My most recent book is Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine. Balanchine was co-founder of the American Ballet School and the New York City Ballet, and is credited with developing the neoclassical dance style. For this work, I travelled to sites and locations where Balanchine lived, performed and choreographed, and also undertook extensive research in archives at the New York City Public Library (Dance Division, at Lincoln Centre) and Harvard University’s Houghton Library (where Balanchine’s papers are held). What came to the fore while going over my research notes was how difficult Balanchine was to ‘know’ beyond the expressions he made through his ballets—even his wives deemed him inscrutable. Further, I wanted the ballets themselves to be first and foremost in this work; immersion in the video collections at NYCPL had an obvious impact on the manuscript. From this research, then, came the decision to have the book unfold as a series of choreographed ‘ballets’. The poems in Music Made Visible are therefore titled from Balanchine’s corpus of choreographed works; each poem combines appropriate choreographical references with time-relevant biographical elements, music gestures, critical reviews and Balanchine’s life philosophy.
Currently, I have two other ‘poetic-biographical’ projects in the works—one on the life of chemist and physicist Marie Curie (and I was supposed to be in the Curie archives in Paris last year, but COVID has interrupted this work). The other is on the life of Australian ballerina Lucette Aldous, who sadly passed away in June of this year, 2021. The ‘L’ in my name stands for ‘Lucette’, and my mother gave me this name because Lucette Aldous was her favourite ballerina.
Beyond my own poetic biographies, as well as articles and book chapters that I have written exploring biographical and documentary poetry, I also founded Rabbit: A Journal for Nonfiction Poetry in 2011. Rabbit provides a platform for other poets to explore poetry as a medium through which to impart factual content in expressive, playful, performative and dramatic ways.
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