Caroline Wilkinson

@carolinewilkinson

Writer, Poet, Critic (she/her) Words in DIAGRAM, Witness, Fourteen Hills, NOVEL www.carolinewilkinson.com

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Bluesky

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Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· 11d

Little Lyford Pond, Maine

Light blue mountains and the woods reflected in pond. The sky above the mountains is white and mirrored in the water as white.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· 13d

Mushroom from today’s walk 🌱

A brownish red mushroom with an orange and yellow edge at the mossy base of a tree. The mushroom is the length of the exposed tree root.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· 18d

Windmill

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· 20d

Sunset to the north

A blue, pink, and apricot sky with a few clouds. Dark trees in the foreground. Taken in Maine.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· 20d

In the woods.

A mossy tree trunk with large red fungi growing from bark. The red is pinkish.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· 24d

Smoke cleared today. A breathable night sky.

A deep, bright blue sky with patterned clouds over and around two trees.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· 27d

Newly arrived, Proof Inaugural Poem Suite by Cornelius Eady Forward by Tyehimba Jess Tupelo 2026 From Mamdani’s inauguration. From the 1st page: You have to imagine it: Who said you must keep quiet? Who heard your story, then Rolled their eyes? Who tried to change your name To invisible?

The cover of Eady’s collection with a picture of a seated crowd in coats and hats from the back from New York in January. The title, PROOF INAUGURAL POEM is in light gray font over the dark coats, while Eady’s name is in red across the white back of a chair.

PROOF
You have to imagine it:

Who said you were too dark/too
Large? Too queer/too loud?

Who said you were too poor/
Too strange? Too fat?

You have to imagine it:

Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then
Rolled their eyes?

Who tried to change your name
To invisible?

You've got to imagine:

Who heard your name
And refused to pronounce it?
Who checked their watch
And said "not now"?

James Baldwin wrote:

"The place in which I'll fit
Will not exist
Until I make it."

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jul 5

Near Monson, Maine

Mountains underneath blue-edged clouds with a road bending through trees below.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jul 2

“The woman makes herself dull. She lets the flames blunt the impetus toward thought….” From A Jealous Tide by Fiona Wright (Splice 2020), skillfully exploring emotional life through waterways—rivers and oceans—while diving into shipwrecks and literary archives.

The woman makes herself dull. She lets the flames blunt the impetus toward thought. By a violent act of will she refuses to allow herself to look either forward or back until it becomes a habit to leave her mind blank, to give all her attention instead to the tending of the fire, the boiling of the kettle, the warming of the pot. Until she can almost believe that she isn't waiting.

She isn't waiting. She doesn't expect at every moment a knock at the door. She isn't alert to the knuckle-rap that will cut through the carefully shuttered quiet. She

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 20

On to the second volume of On the Calculation of Volume. “I am merely a human being roaming the streets, or maybe not even a human being, maybe more of an animal of some sort, neither hunter nor hunted, neither hungry nor well-fed, just a creature wandering up and down.” S. Balle trans. B Haveland

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 19

Good morning. After a lot of rain in Maine.

A dark gray sky with moments of brightness above green trees and the top of a white house.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 17

Also, while looking up this passage in the thorough index, I found this gem. (Seeing the entry, I thought, having finished the book, “Oh yes, book f*cking. That’s in there.”)

fucking: ass-, 84, 167; book, 167-8,
211; of the little by the big, 166-7.
See also penetration

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 17

Love this analysis of free indirect discourse, one of my favorite techniques in fiction from @annakornbluh.bsky.social’s Immediacy: “Unattributed words and ideas belong to no one and therefore to a kind of everyone-that's what makes them free.”

Free indirect discourse, a marvelous affordance of language only available in written form, mixes perspectives of characters with narrators with implied readers and hypostasized social consensus; it is a type of mediation of ideas that always raises the question, as Roland Barthes and others have observed, "Who is speaking?"* Unattributed words and ideas belong to no one and therefore to a kind of everyone-that's what makes them free. Collective intellection of this type to to represent

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 11

Clouds with a dark center, a gray absence.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 10

Morning roses in Maine 🌱

Yellow roses with the morning sun hitting them.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 10

Excellent to the end. I’m including the first paragraph here for anyone interested. The first-person narration alternates between the daughter whose voice begins the book and her mother.

I don't remember 15 October 1969. There are people who swear they remember their birth. I don't. It's likely that I was well positioned in my mother's womb, because the birth was normal. Not particularly long, or particularly short, with the last contractions coming every five minutes. My mother was twenty-five, young and healthy. Her mental state, though, was not so healthy, as I learned later.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 6

I have been loving this book about a Latvian woman doctor exiled with her daughter in the USSR. The novel explores themes of freedom, knowledge, and birth. Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena trans. by Margita Gailitis (Peirene)

A book cover with a black silhouette of a face with another silhouette facing the opposite direction. Around the face are geometric shapes, including a circle of red and beige. The words on the cover read:

‘A blistering Latvian bestseller'
The Guardian
SOVIET MILK
Nora Ikstena
Translated by Margita Gailitis
PEIRENE

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· Jun 3

Sunset

A blue and pink sky — the pink across the clouds with trees on the lower left corner and one along the right edge.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· May 30

I recently mentioned this Lydia Davis essay to someone about that weird word, gubernatorial. “I have always enjoyed pronouncing gubernatorial, as though its rather crude sound, incorporating two voiced plosives and the word ‘goober,’ is concealing its more elegant, softer, silkier cousin, ‘govern’”

A Note on the Word Gubernatorial

65

jective did not evolve in the same way as our noun. Why did it not turn into governatorial or governorial? Simply because it was not spoken as often?

I have always enjoyed pronouncing gubernatorial, as though its rather crude sound, incorporating two voiced plosives and the word "goober," is concealing its more elegant, softer, silkier cousin, "govern." Gubernatorial swings us closer to our Spanish friends, governor to our Italian. During the U.S. presidency of Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, there was much talk of his association with the cultivation of peanuts (collo-quially known as "goobers"); thus, goober-natorial, as applied to the office of the governor of the Peanut State, was doubly appropriate.
2011

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· May 22

The tree outside the window, a crab-apple.

Dark pink apple blossoms against a blue sky with white clouds.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· May 21

Sunset

Orange sky with blue clouds and evergreens in the foreground. At once, stormy-seeming and peaceful.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· May 20

In the newest Asheville Poetry Review, I have a poem, “Dickens in Manhattan.” ashevillepoetryreview.com #Dickens

Caroline Wilkinson

Dickens in Manhattan

Three places remind Dickens of decay
in his travel writing on the US.
One makes him betray terror in a vision when, before his eyes, faces coalesce, becoming "some strange mirror." They become
a "countless repetition" of "an African face."
Women asleep on the floor wake and turn
towards him, casting an intimate spell
of a mirror too immense to unlearn.
How could Dickens forget it? Him, wearer
of fine clothes befitting Englishmen
with their civilized looms and drawing rooms. Them, looking out from the country whose cotton fills those looms.

Dickens leaves behind the sight, resuming the fast pace he kept by foot in a book
that stares out at the reader even now.
The number of faces should be calculable but is countless. So how to measure that look
and, with it, the vow it exacts when exchanged—
a vow to see, not just one face repeating but many? Who were those women,
and why were they there? Dickens outpaces any questions of cause. The February night begins to burn as he walks by.

His infamous sympathy for the poor
is everywhere and nowhere. In "cramped hutches" where people slumber
near burning charcoal. The sleeper,
freed of will's grip, moves towards the fire— and is singed. Hell, Dickens calls it, a hell that tips into "judgment-hour." Dickens says
it's as if "every obscene grave were giving up its dead." Such degradation comes
from force not filth—an easy thing
for me to say. I learned a free state—

A free state I left in debt.
I went south to find
a form unbiblical and present.
I see a face, my own, and know
I've stressed all the wrong syllables.
To force smiles is everyday.
Ahead is everyone. To rise means
falling with upstanding scum, superior-seeming, well-dressed nothing. To speak
of this mirror's wrong. I must trust
it will crack and I'll slip through.

Historians say the relocation of a million people in chains from eighteen-twenty on let a nation keep exporting cotton.
The "surprise and fear" Dickens finds
in a reflection is from these years.
Who were those women,
and where is everyone they hold dear?

You have just questions, says force
without making a sound. Laughter's
in the gaping mouth, the breath dense, head tipped back. Everything's funny, hence free game. The mouth says
the empty ring of freedom's full.

I stare at a page. Dickens writes
of decay in stagnant water near Boston.
Rot looms too in Virginia where slavers condemn the air to "ruin and decay."
As Dickens testifies, everyone breathed
the rot and stench of slavery.

So Dickens did not stay long in Virginia.
He did not stay long after seeing
a face as large as a large continent.
He saw the wrong of freedom's state
and wrote of the disgrace. He left.

Caroline Wilkinson@carolinewilkinson· May 19

I just received my contributor’s copy for the latest, and last, issue of Asheville Poetry Review. Thank you to founder and editor, Keith Flynn, who is focusing on his own poetry in the face of illness. I know I am among many in seeing his journal as a profound inspiration ashevillepoetryreview.com