Wilkinson has an array of quite astonishing artistic virtues which would fit him to be the doyen of the avant-garde scene; as the one who crosses the widest range of human situations, has the most graceful rhythmic organization, the greatest facility for inventing images, the greatest openness to searching theories of identity and authenticity. But he also offers difficulties of comprehension, and of knowing that one has understood, of a rare order; there's the rub.
Deceitful as the first breach in the sense-world
my pale duenna, my cynosure. For the aftertaste
of reproduction, in vitro or high fidelity, still
hangs like smoke until I wrap myself in its veil
In white gatherings of the dream, my drowned face
turns out to orient to the morning star. & she
will glance at its surface so at a second breach
my face must drown its fond totem. So to speak
orotund out of a sphere. In that sound she sleeps
like a statue, under the handsome bullet plough
insists with her silver line. The subject falls
on his 4 feet, wrings his hands wrings, his hands
How shall you dream me now I cannot devise you?
How shall you speak me now I can't pause once?
At my last gasp I want your mouth something awful
Rip the veil from solid things & choose that veil
(from Proud Flesh, 1986) Here is an excerpt from The Nile (1992), a poem about the Gulf War:
Unfeeling, moving hand,
it's your play, compile a run-time hierarchy of goals;
hand, with a care
velcro units on our conceptual map, make them stick.
Though fierce jets of refusing scythe
through an administered world, such hands
deliver right on target, blessings onto the near bales
which might be military
children, might be materiel,
antagonists in spirit leave the stand littered
expensive stuff, shavings of distinction
yet to be theorised, snap at their animals' legs,
bend round to court them diplomatically; hand,
feel free.
This poetry relies on images, not just to adorn the fabric but actually to carry the argument; it's very erudite but consistently depends on something rather primordial and irrational. So doing, it achieves freedom from the besetting prosaic discourse of modern English poetry; it's neither a rehash of a New Statesman article nor an attempt to analyse ideas. In the power struggle between the doctor (privileged, rational, in authority, detached) and the patient (credulous, excitable, and at the mercy of emotions), the poet has become a patient. He has shed the whole baggage of "opinions" and "organized knowledge" by which the middle class carries out social life (and, naturally, a livelihood). The benefit for the reader is presumably the infectious power, which such a stylistic gesture has, to throw the reader into imaginative and associative thought. The problem with a long flow of images is one which Surrealism always struck on, that is the problem of their motivation. The images cannot be just the outwash of a sensory apparatus discharging its ballast. Why does the speaker's drowned face orient itself towards the morning star? what psychic process does this reflect?
So we have rejected two positions, rationalism and the pure autonomous image. We have left the poets at the mercy of their own inner lives: dispersed by their own dreams. I believe it is essential to art that the image should be voluntaristic, consciously developed as the expression of wishes and as a message. Only then can one genuinely speak of imagination being at work.
There is a modern Russian folksong called "The Stonecutter". In the middle of an empty plain, a stonecutter is working stolidly on a wall. What are you building, stonecutter? I'm building a prison. He has a son and the son grows up and spends his life in the prison. This is rough, yes, but completely effective. Surely this effectiveness is because this text, entirely built around an image like the other poems we have discussed, has an image which is consciously programmed and consciously decodable. The incident is certainly a lie, in the sense that it did not happen; but this, after all, proves that it is part of the writer's inner life.
Wilkinson, involved in Concrete Poetry while still at school, published his first pamphlet in 1974; another half-dozen pamphlets followed during the Seventies: The Central Line, Tracts of the Country, Pornography, Maudie's Umbrella, Swarf.
The globe trellis of the lamp is light green
Intent
In the grandstand restaurant Lady
In all deference Highly intelligent
Predicting its collapse
Like the crimson disc of a
Fictional antique world
That permeates the atmosphere Of a novel
I shall fold it In a carton
A replaced Map of the English pleasure-
Garden
When my hostess She so intensely
Discriminate of the evening light
Uniting the folk In a readverting
Conscience The simulated
Crash of her party
(from Tracts of the Country) The poet is hypersensitive to details but has trouble in placing emphases. There is a crucial shift in his work away from the jittery, brilliant, arch, gossipy, Laforguean, style of his early pamphlets, refracted into endless detail but essentially retrievable, into the ciphered, hermetic, rhetorical, political-psychoanalytical style of his mature work, which takes place on a much larger scale; and is, for me, largely incomprehensible. Clinical Notes, published in 1980, is the transitional work; the tasks of writing at length (ninety-three pages, and about time working in a hospital as a psychiatric nurse, accepting therefore a tragic strain, are obviously causing problems to the quicksilver and rather camp diction of his Seventies work, but the meaning is not impossible to follow even if the emotional tone is unspecific:
Is she digging a shelter for world-war-3
Or digging for prehistoric remains
She labours to break a hole in the ice
She's learnt it's the virgin space, her permanent
Body that slumbers beneath
And cut by the pick she's unable to bleed
The earth resists in a white all-over noise
Packing down in her silent seamless throat
The calling-tones of short-wave radio stations
Nothing more was heard from that white domain
Whatever she took with her froze
In the contemplation of being contemplated
Anomy of the perfect air-brush simulation
Spraying with artificial snow the waiting audience.
A gap in publications followed, in which he was however writing prolifically; I would say that Air Fleet Base (1981?, published in Equofinality and Grosseteste Review) is the work which crosses the gap into the new style. Since then have followed Proud Flesh, Bones of Contention, The Speaking Twins, Stages Along the Lichway, The Nile, Chalone, and now the huge retrospective Flung Clear. But this still understates the extent of his published and unpublished poetry. Proud Flesh (published 1986) is white all-over noise, as far as I am concerned. This extension-deterioration of language is associated with leaving Cambridge (there was also a research year in Boston) and going to Birmingham, and working for the NHS, and so a linguistic situation where he virtually wasn't seeing other poets and literati and poetry stopped being a social thing. His work assumed all voices in the dialogue into itself; it became monumental, trackless, self-sealing. Equally, it is associated with working with mental patients, listening to damaged and subjective language, and feeling guilty about the power implications - me sane, you patient - of discoursing rationally; Wilkinson wanted to create a poetic discourse in which the discourse of the mad wouldn't automatically be contradicted, isolated, and refuted by the context; he wanted a permissive flow in which everyone functions at the level of object relations, unconscious fantasies, metonymies, imprecise boundaries between self and others, and so on. This is equivalent to another poet writing in the pseudo-primitive language of some tribe; an evasion of colonial guilt. It was, in its way, fantastically generous. His work ceased to be either happy or witty. The American poet on whom JW wrote his (uncompleted) doctoral thesis became a schizophrenic and actually published schizophrenic poetry, if that phrase has any meaning; this had long-term repercussions among his English followers. Wilkinson still had trouble in placing emphases; an original detachment and ornamentalism was not assisted by the handing-over of the poetic text to other voices and a negative, dissipative, politics of the self. Wilkinson said, in interview: "And it was a long time before I was able to find ways of deploying the first person poetically which seemed to avoid taking it all back, to a personal authenticity. (Question: So other parts of the world are more authentic than the self?) It is not so much that other parts of the world are more authentic as that for me the self is always a provisional construction and one which is contingent on the practice of writing, which is forever reforming it, which is forever seeing it crumble and a new shanty being erected, a new temporary version of self." This precept straddled the border between politics and textual politics: "That was more an indetermination for me, I had a horror of finding myself with a consistency of voice. I think that was owing to the voice I have. It would be difficult to be better spoken than I am and when I look back I see, not out of any deliberate project, but much of my life has been an attack on my well-spokenness. Both as a writer but also in terms of my employment, and socially and so on. So I've tried to shift and turn. Of course there comes a time when you have a history of writing behind you and you cannot avoid the recognition that there is a consistency of tone or cadence or of voice however you struggled to evade that. (...) I've been talking about how a sort of decentred practice of writing is what is what has given me a sense of there being a centre at all, and that decentred practice of writing is John Wilkinson." It is perhaps time to relate JW's erosion of textual authority with the indeterminacy, loss of centre, etc., which we saw in the New Poetry anthology of 1993. Of course, those poets are doing it all fifteen years after Wilkinson. Can one devise a rebellion against cultural authority which would not involve recycling procedures and theoretical systems which were in use in Paris twenty-five years ago and in Cambridge fifteen years ago? Perhaps I could hail the consensus visible in that Bloodaxe anthology as a reinstatement of the British avant-garde, after decades of treachery by the conservative poetry establishment; but I can't help noticing that, while the conservatives admitted the existence of an avant-garde alternative if only to denounce it, the new mainstream refuses to admit the existence of anything outside it - and, especially, anything formally "further out". The curse of the populist approach is that, by denying the existence of a history of critical and anti-hierarchical poetry, it obscures most of the technical possibilities and solutions already worked out, and condemns the poets, who are without privileged access to modern literary history, to epigonism and provincialism. It seems to me that today's pop musicians are at least aware of the stylistic history of the public styles which they pick up.
How is it that every Left-Wing undergraduate who starts to write Left-Wing poetry that isn't like pop songs and posters thinks they're the first one ever to do this? How did we manage to lose this history? Why is that everyone who introduces a New Left idea into their poetry, even one datestamped "Paris, 1966", simultaneously feels at the forefront of the world and as if no-one's going to understand them?
Stages Along the Lichway (published by Silver Hounds, 1991?) is relatively easy to follow, because the subject is a public figure and, to some extent, I've actually thought the things being said in the poem. The poem is an elegy for Mark Hyatt (1940-72), who had an exceptionally difficult childhood, among gypsies, with very little formal schooling or socialization. Like many of us, he fell in love with poetry. He became associated with the Cambridge Leisure Centre. His style was naive, in the sense of a naive painter; the poems, mainly gay love poems, were amazingly direct and enthusiastic: "His caddis-worm,/ his louse,/ the gibberish of familiar lies, the mimic thrush/ palavering his ears like an adviser/ he might trust,/ break into an octet, a bird-bright cantata" (JW). There has been a certain sense of guilt, among poets who may know where Cambridge is, at not making him famous or publishing his complete archive. This project has been hampered by the fact that Hyatt's poems aren't very good: "Are they agreed/ still tinkering round the hearth/ rubbing their fingers over a notch in a blowstone;/ have they reached their verdict, every bony lot/ is cast & counted over (...) no go, pas marche:/ The vacancy isn't available." - thus JW evokes a fearful covey of execrating hags, with whom I must align myself. Hyatt made away with himself in Manchester after being deserted by his lover.
One feels that having, thus, a picture to illustrate Wilkinson's words makes retrieval of their astonishing flexibility and expressivity more certain. In fact Lich-way, along with poem 8 of The Nile and a very few others, are the only poems of the mature Wilkinson I can understand. This makes it a good opportunity to study his techniques, as an instruction method, perhaps, for the fearsome scarps of The Interior Planets and The Nile. I'm not sure that one can speak of repeated devices in Wilkinson (except generally of a rejection of the organizing and repressive conscious mind, and hypersuggestibility - which, of course, means that successive instants of flux are maximally different from each other), but at least I can follow Stages Along the Lichway.
A synthesizing concept would be a lack of metalanguage. This is literally "language describing the status of other language". For example "he was running" contains more metalanguage than just "running"; tense and pronouns can be seen as modifiers of a primitive original signifier. Some languages do this by modifying words with markers of number, case, person, etc.; in English this is achieved largely by external modifying words, associated by word order; poetry has a history of breaking the rules of word order and so straining the code. Obviously, if each word explains the others, then each word stops explaining the others if it is badly labelled itself, in a systematic breakdown. Wilkinson is good as far as "running", but finding out who is running, where, when, is tricky. Normally we are helped, in reading poetry, by pointers, such as genre rules, contextual clues, summaries and anticipations, which technically increase redundancy. I would suggest that these too are metalanguage, and that Wilkinson's work has been systematically stripped of metalanguage at every level, the impossibility of working out the syntax at phrase level being exactly mirrored by difficulty working out the design of paragraphs, pages, and the entire poem. Especially important is the difficulty of working out who is the subject of verbs, or of verbless descriptions; we find sensations mostly without an owner.
Initial suggestions on this would be: a. To explain is to assume a kind of authority and JW feels that by not explaining what's going on he can symbolically shed authority and be democratic. b. metalanguage makes the social context clear, including relative status of humans as primates in a hierarchy, and JW would rather obscure these relations: we are not to be allowed to judge what is said by the socioeconomic status of who is saying it. c. he believes in a group imaginary as the zone of activity of a poem, or also of economic work, and is interested in effacing the boundary between different individuals. A fourth, but clearly wrong, version is that he is being anti-democratic and trying to exclude the uninitiated. Another version is that he rewrites frantically, always taking things out, and that removing metalanguage is his version of poésie pure. The poem has been refined beyond the point where it can be understood.
Reasons for the poem being hard to understand are: lack of metalanguage; use of figures, one piled on the other, again without labels; compression; erasure of the distinction between reality and imagination or analogy; erasure of the distinction between inner-body experiences and perceptions of the outside world; lack of contextual clues about the situation, about the person speaking, about relations between various people in the poem; erasure of the distinction between different people. It's fair to say that most of these point to a degree of poeticism of unique intensity; the farthest you can possibly get from prose. A feature of most culturally self-confident forms of poetry in European history is an extension of rules allowed in speech to a point which would be impossible in speech or prose, and which also threatens comprehension.
If you proposed, But poetry is for expressing your emotions with, he would retort that that is intolerably selfish and aggrandizing. If you said, But I want to identify with the poet's emotions, I want to know who is having the feelings and why, he would retort that that is also egoistic, greedy, and ethically unworthy. The aim is a non-hierarchical group with a weak sense of individual identity, and this is desired for political reasons. Emotions, too, are suspect as regressions to infantile states, implying a kind of insecurity which demands, to reassure itself, guarantees such as a sense of superiority, or set prerogatives, which act to break up the group and to impose boundaries between different selves which compose it. This much I determined by interviewing the poet; I hoped for some of his decisions to be based on artistic grounds, but I could not elicit any such claims. No, his style is based on ethics, and these come partly out of the ideas of the Counter-Culture which he encountered as a student and even as a schoolboy, and partly from the Buddhist ideas which he was smitten with while at school.
Because the New Left sought to bring all assumptions into the light, where they could be discussed and voted on, they looked out in language all the structures which incorporated stored judgements from the past. This impulse influenced poetry a great deal, not only in lexicon, but in syntax. The techniques for distributing emphasis were found to be prejudicial, they implied certain conclusions and swept others out of sight; the whole history of formal argument was found to derive from the courtroom, where both sides were biased and the consensual underlay was a fixed lawcode whose authority confined debate to the realm of trickery. Wilkinson consistently avoids certain linguistic structures which we also find avoided in apparently dissimilar writers such as Ulli Freer, Allen Fisher, or Barry MacSweeney. W. is one of the poets emerging after 1968 who believe that discarding various kinds of linguistic organization can evoke deeper levels of psychic organization, and so free the psyche from some of the behavioural habits imposed by the social organization of a class society, and so give the possibility of floating into a different psychological state, and joining in an egalitarian social structure. He is trying to prepare for autogestion. Undoubtedly, W. believes that our society is at pains to build a strong boundary around the personality, bringing selfconsciousness, a sense of possessions, but also isolation; art may even be the spearhead of such conditioning; he is concerned to bring out how much of our experience is mediated (by identification, observation, communication) and doesn't really belong to one single person, and how preset social roles (defined hierarchies and jobs in an organization, for example) are artificial and restrictive. The purpose of failing to distinguish one person from another is didactic: we are challenged to prove that such distinctions are necessary. This loss of boundaries qualifies us, of course, to participate in the Utopian group, where there are no leaders and all decisions are collective. This project has taken precedence over the project of making the poetry comprehensible.
The crisis of radical modernism would seem to be how to discard an inherited system of synthetic judgements, disqualified for containing unconscious authoritarian structures, without regressing to a stream of primary, patternless, and indescribable, sense data. If you disqualify the English language, what shared symbolic code do you use to carry on political debate? JW is, in writing a formal elegy, creating symbolic wealth in order to bestow it on the impoverished Hyatt; he is, within the poem, the source from whom prestige flows. But he is profoundly unhappy about any ownership of wealth and any attribution of prestige. W's problem in a word is that of being hieratic while also anti-hierarchical.
Maybe we can establish a link between the old and the new form of conscience. Auden was dexterously cutting out emotions from poetry, in pursuit of some Anglican ethical ideal, Wilkinson is eliminating the central figure from poetry so that there is no centre, no possessed emotions, no assertion of emotional needs, in pursuit of some personal (feminist? Buddhist?) ethical ideal. Maybe things haven't moved all that far. It is not accidental that W.'s belief in the image also throws us back to a previous stage of mental organization, which can claim to be more real. He constantly uses ideas drawn from psychoanalysis, and most probably believes that infantile states persist in mutated form throughout life, and that physiology can have surprising influences on intellectual and emotional processes. He seems constantly to be fetching events back to their infantile or bodily origins, as if that explained them or made dishonesty and incomprehension impossible; he may also identify this pictorial level of perception with lyricism in poetry. It is hard to determine whether the exposure of primal and infantile components of emotions is supposed to make us conscious, so that we reject and advance out of emotional positions; or whether the Unconscious is seen as virtuous, so that thinking in powerful primal images is innocence and liberation.
One important figure in Wilkinson's poetry is the shared virtual body. This may be traced back to the language learning process. The child attempts to relate inner sensations to a verbal code which is quite separate in origins. In order to first learn the meaning of the word "anger" you have to imagine someone else's body, undergoing such an emotion, and relate that image to what is happening inside you in moments of what you may later on call "anger". This "someone else's body", where shared meanings are stored and stabilized, appears in many forms in art. Language acquisition occurs as an instrumental help in a much deeper activity, that of intuiting other people's (i.e. primarily the rest of your family's) feelings and intentions; someone, even a young child, quite unable to do this, lacks the faculty which makes them a human being. We can see that the proposition "no ideas but in things" is the exact reverse of the truth; things don't have ideas. This "virtual body" makes possible the genre of Allegory; the 16th C Complaynte of Scotland shows a much distressed woman wandering the land weeping, who is also the country Scotland; the "small space" of this woman's body is a sensuous equivalent for the "large space" of Scotland, too large to be seen. Allegory is an archaic figure, which yet recalls the pathways of association by which we build up abstract and large-scale concepts from the data which reach us only through our senses, i.e. through our body. In Wilkinson the projective fusion of physiological sensations and the physical world is incessant; he ignores the boundary between inner and outer. When he says "In the stomach, the knitted pouch, humours fight, /stripping the lambs-tail & extricating breath-yarn,/ pouched in fat-mottled sky, in every whimpled/ brook's resume... These collect in turn/ lint-innerness for the belly our innerness empties." (Envoi 15-18 and 23-4), the identification of every hollow physical thing with the "emptiness" John feels about Mark's death is basic, but the "landscape" is above all a symbolic site where shared feelings can be represented in a shared way - the externalization of the inner. The whole poem's happening in the allegorical landscape of Dartmoor is also why it is so hard to tell who is feeling what; feelings have become ripples in shared space. This effacement of boundaries may explain why he is unable to realize how little the reader can follow; he literally has no space to represent the reader's line of awareness.
Proud Flesh is a collection of what used to be, or might be, love poems:
Which arms held your elbows, why do your arms whirl
dust & ashes? gropers round you, lamia of compassion
intimate with the glass they flesh, with the flesh
glassed where thick mud has been smirched across
& the glass that struggles to cover itself reflects
; making clear, again, that the concept of love used in traditional poetry is unusable now because it assumes too much of a separation between the two human subjects; the modern method is to start from an intimacy and shared identity, which means that neither partner is exerting power over the other one. Of course, by ignoring conflicts of interest this method may indulge selfishness and moral blindness, just the two qualities it is piously seeking to anathematize and send out of its presence. Come to think of it, the suspicion that art is grossly self-indulgent, given to fantasy, and encourages selfishness in personal relations, could even be true.
Wilkinson has made it apparent that he regards his poems both as part of a process of working through racism, sexism, and class prejudice, and as the results of going through that process: the "process of questioning inherited formations,(...) first of all a kind of class placing, then a gender placing, then going to America was when I started the process of a placing as white." We have already come across this attitude once in this volume: in the discussion of The New Poetry, where I pointed out that the inconsequentiality of several dozen poets in that anthology was due to a wish to avoid being blamed for the actions of a patriarchal and imperialist dominant power. Once more we have to ask how different the avant-garde is from the mainstream. In Wilkinson, we see with peculiar clarity the equation between power within the text and political power: by renouncing the power to specify situations, to interpret behaviour, he is claiming to shed his load, his share of the guilt for History. (Perhaps it's unfair to bring in the biographical datum that he's married, and divorced, and his second wife is Black; these issues aren't something safely remote from his daily life.) I'm not wholly convinced of the political merit of this: what it reminds me of is a colonial Governor, sometime in the Sixties, going through the ceremonial handover of power to the natives of the country. The handover actually ends a relationship; nor is it interesting in itself. Nor am I convinced by the artistic interest of such a pull-out or renunciation. The egoless style is supposed to reveal group dynamics, but in this case it's too hard to find out what the situation in the poems is.
Of course the poetry isn't impossible to understand; sometimes entire passages tumble into place before our excited eyes. I dare say it would be possible to hazard a satisfying guess as to the meaning of all of it, if one only had time. But continuous reading can only be baffling and frustrating. It's one of the classic indictments of 'underground' poetry as a social institution that Wilkinson's poetry has had the same vice persistently, and for fifteen years, and yet no reviewer has identified the problems and pointed out how they spoil the work.
One would expect that a book like the one I am writing would frequently invoke feminism as an exciting influence on modern poetry; this is not in fact the case, although Wilkinson has obviously been a great deal influenced by it since 1972: "the particular moment, say Cambridge at the time I went there, was exactly when Counter Culture started to be succeeded by the politics of the self, in terms of sexual politics." For a male poet to be visibly influenced by feminism would imply that he wrote about being Bad, so that feminism would have brought about Change: of course poets are too egoistic to admit to any bad behaviour, so we don't find such conversions. (David Harsent is the exception here.) Besides, to claim "I bought the New Ideas which other people haven't got and now I'm Good" would be quite unbearable. The conversation regresses to the search to be good, which has been around for a long time, and which Sixties hedonism was in part a break away from. There's too much overt goodness and judging of other people by a factor of 20. Depictions of love are very rare in good contemporary poetry; possibly feminism has made them even more difficult; it's very difficult to find "unreformed" male attitudes in poetry of circa the Fifties and Sixties. If poetry were more able to show the behaviour of two people, and not just one, changes of behaviour wouldn't be so caught up in this tedious dance of smugness and self-projection. The teetering nervousness of Nincompoop poets is a classic example of a crippled dialectic: the Other person is acknowledged to the extent that egoistic consciousness becomes ridiculous, but the linguistic process is arrested before the point where the real situation - the real power relationships - can be described. I am left wondering why 'process poetry' isn't about social process, but simply raises an aspect of authorial activity to the grade of subject, landscape, and hero.
I regard the 'ethical' critics as one of the great diseases afflicting British poetry. It never ceases to surprise me how people who quite clearly lack any probity or decency can be accepted as bishops of letters. The search for a poetic style which equates with moral probity has been quite fruitless; most bad poetry is promoted on the basis that is 'morally good'. But perhaps such a style would be represented by a poet who could describe a human situation, without the ego being so loud it drowns everything else out. It's not impossible to describe other people without falsehood. This seems to be easier to achieve for playwrights and novelists; one of the reasons, I greatly fear, for readers and writers searching out poetry was the lure of retreating into the self and severing the bonds of society. A pioneering march out of this besieged camp has not been observed and reported on.
Self-expression was a brilliant ethos for art between, say, 1940 and the present day; it is still probably the most widely accepted motive for art in Western society. This was an evident difference between us and the neighbouring civilization of Communism: which suggests links between self-expression and consumerism. It could be replaced as an aesthetic by an overarching, inclusive, social symbolism; like the official art of Communism. However, as things stand, any comprehensive symbolism can only be personal and individual, and so represent the ambition and emotional greed of the artist in a purer form. Poetry is publicly accepted as the true voice of the self. This favours a certain kind of artist, of whom Ted Hughes and Jackson Pollock are good examples. But, if the substance of the self, its appetites for gratification, power, and self-representation, are so much under cultural attack that poetry, or painting, can no longer be sustained on that raw material, then it is possible that poetry will wither away without giving rise to major new forms. The new situation may resemble a previous state of literary civilization known as preciosity, euphemism, civility, and refinement. This is a condign fate for those who mistake a reform of language for a reform of behaviour.
Bibliography
One source on Wilkinson is the interview, taped by Andrew Duncan, and printed in Angel Exhaust issues 8 and 9. This is quoted several times in this piece. ( see http://angel-exhaust.offworld.org for part 2) His statement, 'Cadence', was printed in Reality Studios 9. The major source, though, is the poet's statement in Poets on Writing, 1991, edited by Denise Riley.
This piece dates from maybe 1995, and Wilko has published just torrents of stuff since, which I haven't read. Maybe you have?
(last page or so needs rediretcion. not really about Wilkinson. crosscheck with Problems of Horror)