WILKES, James
Mille Regretz

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.” [publisher's note]

Published by Pamenar Press, 2022
Poetry