TEXTS OF THE ‘SELF’

Wingate’s Texts of the ‘Self’ is a kind of epic diary, a unique poetico-autobiographical document quasi-chronicling three decades of artistic and intellectual development in heterogeneous experimental styles. The work’s multifarious forms and subjects traverse the realms of linguistics, critical theory, art history, poesy, psychology, classical studies, musicology, and cultural analysis. A direct result of the author’s childhood readings of Montaigne, Shakespeare and the dictionary, the work would eventually show the combined influences of such divergent luminaries as the pre-Socratics, Lao-Tzu, Petronius, Schopenhauer, Laclos, Eichendorff, Bruckner, Jung, Stravinsky, Klee, Noguchi, Hesse, Bozzetto, Debord, Miyoshi, Calvino, and Cixous. Currently unpublished in its entirety, some poetic excerpts from the text have nevertheless surfaced in print, including the ‘disembedded’ long poem The Book of         is, as well as the Eleven Last Songs, Wingate’s experimental translations of the Hesse and Eichendorff texts used by Strauss in his Vier letzte Lieder (‘Four Last Songs’, 1948). Links to these and other works appear below:

...........The Book of         is   (i. - xxv.)

...........The Book of         is   (xxvi. - l.)

...........Eleven Last Songs   (i. - vi.)

...........Eleven Last Songs   (vii. - xi.)

...........Psychogeographies: New York Poems (excerpt)

...........Automatic Cleopatra Triptych