by Adrian D’Ambra
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Outlook
“For me,” says John Kinsella, “all centres are fringes.” Kinsella’s own poetic voice and vision have reached out from the periphery of the remote rural backblocks of Western Australia to be heard and taken note of as far away as Cambridge and New York. A first dip into his poetry can be a lyrical experience in which wheatlands seem to roll on forever under the impassive eyes of birds of prey. It is evocative but beneath the surface of this numinous world there is danger and threat, uncertainty and unease. He has named his own aesthetic “radical-pastoral,” a poetry in which the ravages of the white settlement of the Australian continent are measured in terms of the erosion of landscape. It is a bold poetic in which the subject matter might mistakenly be attributed to an earlier age but the consciousness is utterly modern. Its truths are not necessarily declamatory slogans and denunciations; they are the echoes and reverberations that elaborate out of the observation of minute and mundane detail. Just as the absolutely trivial and inconsequential might be meant to record and reveal the essential in the lives of Tim Winton’s characters, the ordinary and everyday can become the vehicle of poetic revelation in Kinsella’s writing. His deeper subject matter, though, is not so much the universal nature of the human condition but the particular nature of the human predicament in Australia where to humanise the landscape along our inherited predominantly European lines is equally to doom it. This is not simply about destroying nature; it is about destroying ourselves.
Background
John Kinsella was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1963. One source I’ve come across records that his mother, also a poet, read Wordsworth and Milton to him rather than nursery rhymes. This could account for the brilliantly elegiac and monumental in some of his longer and more assertive pieces. Kinsella studied at the University of Western Australia and he has travelled extensively through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Kinsella has published poems in a large number of literary journals in Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Japan, India, Canada and Britain. Any Australian poet who has tried to place their own individual poems in literary journals at home or abroad in the last decade or so will have crossed paths with him at some point. He is the founding editor of the Australian literary magazine Salt, he is co-editor of Stand in the United Kingdom and has been the international editor of The Kenyon Review in the United States. He is poetry editor for The Observer in London and he writes reviews for The New Yorker and Overland. John Kinsella has been the recipient of many awards. He has received writing grants from both the Western Australian Department for the Arts and from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council. He has received many poetry prizes including; the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry from the Adelaide Festival and The Age Poetry Book of the Year Award. He is a three-time winner of the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry. In 1996 he received a Young Australian Creative Fellowship, and he was awarded a two-year Fellowship from the Australia Council. He was made an artist By-Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1997 and a Fellow in 1998. John Kinsella was appointed foundation Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College, Ohio, for the spring semester of 2000/2001. In 2003 he was Professor of English at Kenyon College and Adjunct Professor of Literature at Edith Cowan University. Kinsella has published and contributed to more than twenty collections of poetry. His Peripheral Light, Selected and New Poems have been selected and introduced by the eminent American critic and academic Harold Bloom who launched the American edition in New York.
“I give this language nothing”, writes Kinsella in his First Essay on Linguistic Disobedience [Page 126], “the birds’ sing-song translates as a forest/ denuded of trees: these wooden houses/ working for nothing.”
Prior to this collection Kinsella’s best-known book of poetry was The Silo. Of its title poem Harold Bloom writes the following: “Australia is [and will always be] permanently undiscovered country for me, but as Kinsella’s constant reader I begin to sense that the abyss of the outback is a condition of his poetry, a frame that enables it to continue. His cairns are ‘pyramids of the outback,’ the setting for a pastoral poetry that triumphs in The Silo:”
…Before those storms
which brew thickly on summer evenings
red-tailed black cockatoos settled in waves,
sparking the straw like a volcano, dark
fire erupting from the heart of the white
silo, trembling with energy deeper
than any anchorage earth could offer.
[from The Silo, Page 39]
Bloom continues his discussion of this poem: “This is the hawk’s vision, not the crane’s and the old silo is the veritable tower of mortality, a temple of the Reality Principle. What makes the poem Kinsellan are those vitalizing cockatoos, trembling with more than natural energy. I think again of Lawrence, but now in an unlikely alliance with Robert Frost. The Silo, a permanent poem, makes space for itself by putting a fine pressure upon the modern pastoral, from Thomas Hardy onwards.”
Thus far it might just sound like John Kinsella has quickly and successfully written himself from the periphery to the centre, from the experimental to the canonical, from the fringe to the academy. That is not how he sees himself at all. In an interview with Rod Mengham he had this to say: “I’m a pacifist. And I’m a vegan anarchist with a commitment to developing a language to facilitate small unit/group living. The mere mention of the word ‘anarchist’ has people running or mocking. I’m using the word in a practical and specific way. I’d always been interested in [the Russian anarchist] Kropotkin, and in the eighties lived with a number of ‘groups’ of friends. We were active against people like Jack Van Tongeren’s Australian Nationalist Movement, against nuclear proliferation, logging in the south-west forests, and extremely pro Aboriginal land rights. I believed – and still do – in the ability of small groups to self-regulate, to ‘make’ their own law, and to be morally responsible through self-regulation. The State protects and dehumanises simultaneously – one learns to live within it, even accept it, but never to give in to it…”
Comes before the house – domicile
on the cleared block. Prelude
to building permission. The shire
never quite turns a blind eye,
but you can sweat it out in summer
and shiver in your sleeping bag
in winter, the reinforced concrete
floor a proverbial slab of ice…
Soon, very soon, the house
will be built.
[from The Shed, Page 143]
In a period of incredible conservatism when interest in poetics, aesthetics and politics, indeed when any sense of public space or artistic culture seems to be at a deplorable low, Kinsella’s ideas and images are both incendiary and inspirational. “As an ethical vegan my prime concerns are with animal welfare issues and questions of exploitation generally”, he says in the same interview. “I don’t believe that animals should be used for human gain, nor should they be patronised in that ‘food chain’ kind of way. I’m against all forms of genetic engineering and the use of animals in any form of research. In essence, I feel that humanity can socially, intellectually, artistically and ‘spiritually’ progress without exploiting the physical and natural world in the way it does/we do.” If we can’t at least hope that some of our students might aspire to share some of these values, maybe we should simply abandon the classroom altogether? If we can’t use such means as Kinsella’s poetry to challenge the orthodoxies of our day then I would argue that maybe we should simply discontinue the teaching of literary texts.
An editorial note about Kinsella in the Winter 2005 edition of The Literary Review tells us that, “Kinsella has made it one of his missions to break down divisions in poetry between countries. As a vegan anarchist pacifist, he works against the very idea of nation, and more towards the idea of region, locality, and community – literally and poetically.”
“And as the sun begins to uncoil –/” he writes in Wild Radishes [Page 63], “The deep green of the wheat uneasy with light –/ The golden flowers of wild radishes bite/ Just before they are ripped from the soil.”
In a recent essay Kinsella writes, “I’ve often been asked how many ‘religious’ poems are experimental. My answer is that most experimental poems are at least concerned with the question of existence and/or are ontological in nature. First and foremost, the primacy of language is questioned; second, the space in which language is being presented comes up for scrutiny. The relationship between words and people, between language and thought, and language as written, is highlighted. A binary is developed. These are issues of spiritual presence, for me at least.”
Radical Pastoral
In that same edition of The Literary Review John Kinsella published the rhetorically titled essay Can There Be a Radical ‘Western’ Pastoral…? It is clear from this and from other material including recent interviews that this is a major aspect of Kinsella’s writing, but what does he mean by describing his work as radical pastoral?
“Radical pastoral,” writes Kinsella, “declares that what might be seen as idyllic in the country in conventional pastoral is really reflective of a corruption of nature, that modern farming and rural living lead to the destruction of the environment [erosion, salinity, dust bowls, poisoning], are exploitative of the non-human, and very often part of an exploitation of the working poor…”
We can see this illustrated in numerous Kinsella poems. In Goading Storms Out of a Darkening Field [Page 44] he describes, “charred hills, dry wells filled and sealed./ Sheep on their last legs. Dams crusted over./ Cursing the dry, cursing the bitter yield.”
“As a poet involved in challenging pastoral tradition,” The Literary Review essay continues, “and more relevantly, as a vegan anarchist pacifist who spends most of his life in rural areas, I feel an obligation to overturn the language of exploitation and disempowerment that have characterised the pastoral.”
I would argue that Kinsella’s poetics of radical pastoral is an aesthetic that we can well accommodate in an Australian lexicon. After all, what little remains of an Australian identity still continues to dress itself in the accessories – expressing both its resistance and its innate conservatism – of the bush: the four-wheel drive, the Akubra hat, the elastic-sided boot. This tension-of-identity is captured beautifully in the poem The Machine of The Twentieth Century Rolls Through The High Yielding Crop [Pages 71-72]: “Dust particles cling to sweat despite the sun just up,/ moisture levels within brittle stalks drop/ as rapidly as markets are lost or gained, shadow/ puppetry of information exchange leading the finest/ of mechanical technologies astray…”
An Orphic Poet
To conclude, I’ll return to where Harold Bloom begins his introduction of Peripheral Light. Bloom describes John Kinsella as an Orphic poet, praising the depth, breadth and fecundity of his imagination. This reference to Orpheus returns us to the elemental, inspirational nature of poetry. It also returns us to a notion of the numinous in art, the idea of art as a resonance, an echo, a voice arising out of humanity’s encounter with more than what it is itself, with nature and with the spiritual. This is beautifully instanced in Links [Page 3], “when the sand becomes an astrolabe to the stars,/ where in the reflection of the crystal spheres/ we wander without direction, searching out/ water flowers…” It’s the disembodied sound of that bizarre broken string that sweeps across the stage in a Chekhov play, the wordless moment before he speaks when Hamlet holds the skull. It’s the moment of realization – moment of profound discovery and irrecoverable loss – around which tragedies and great artistic endeavours are structured and from which they are fashioned.
The magnificent expression Bloom uses to describe Kinsella is “Orphic fountain”. Returning to it recently I contacted John Kinsella and asked him for his own thoughts on Bloom’s fine praise. He wrote a reply to me about the tragic and elegiac, about the need for poets to bear witness to the inexorable nexus between death and destruction and beauty and healing. Kinsella’s poetic is in part a theoretical but also deeply felt experiment between nature and language. Returning yet again to Bloom’s expression I find myself actually focusing on the word “fountain”. It captures Kinsella’s commitment to his project, his enthusiasm for the written word, the fertility of his prolific output and the sense of a man whose most natural element is the language within which he lives and works.
Kinsella and the Outcomes
Adaptations and Transformations
Reading my own notes above and re-reading the poems I find myself imagining performance aspects of the poetry in two different directions. First of all, what would be the ideal sound accompaniment to these poems? If you were able to construct a CD of recorded sounds and music woven around these poems what would the play list be? Alternatively, how could readings of these poems be inserted or overlaid into certain classic scenes or films from Australian cinema? I find myself thinking of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Nick Cave’s The Proposition or Sunday Too Far Away, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Wake in Fright.
Relying on text and voice, how could we set up poetry reading soirees making use of the binary opposites in the whole battle of the bush between Lawson and Paterson and linking this with readings and interpretations of Kinsella’s poems?
Views, Values and Contexts
Kinsella’s political, social and environmental concerns and ideas are reflected in his poetry as they are in his views about the way he lives his own life. As a means of explaining the genesis of the poetry, Kinsella often returns to his definition of himself; anarchist, vegan, pacifist. Is this a poetry of the new-age-left?
Another way into the poetry via this outcome might be to examine what is left unsaid, the absences. For example, the other is notably absent from John Kinsella’s poetry. There is humanity there but very little of the immediate human touch. Kinsella has identified aspects of his poetry – as have some of his critics – as the poetry of loss and death. To what extent is this the case, how adequate or inadequate a description of the poetry is this?
Considering Alternative Viewpoints
In the July 1997 issue of Australian Book Review Ivor Indyk, editor of Heat literary magazine, published a review of John Kinsella’s earlier selected, Poems 1980-1994: “He is a phenomenon, so dedicated to poetry, so mercurial, so driven in his profession of it, as to put the normal criteria of judgement into abeyance… Less than twenty poems appealed to me as significant… Kinsella’s great achievement as a poet is to have created the role of poet for himself.” Indyk accused him of doing so by weaving, “a vast network of poetic contacts on an international scale.” The August, September and October issues of Australian Book Review carried a number of responses to what Kinsella saw as Indyk’s, “paranoia and righteousness” his “erroneous, libellous and rancorous… character assassination.” Your thoughts?
Creative Responses to a Text
Many of the John Kinsella poems selected for study could well be imagined as belonging to other, longer more intimate and prosaic texts. The observations of nature could well be imagined written amongst other field notes. The farming poems of the Western Australian wheatlands could be imagined as entries in a broader-ranging diary. What quotations would we find in these field books and diaries from Kropotkin and Marx, from Whitman and Hardy, from Blake and Milton? What would be this man’s thoughts on matters of national import such as the treatment of indigenous peoples, the environment, our membership of the coalition of the willing? What readings would he bring to the other texts you’ve been studying in VCE English and Literature?
How could we as writers make use of Kinsella’s injunction to bear witness and to record objectively the beautiful and the hellish in a natural landscape? How would we use his poetry as a means of learning how to observe the human imprint on nature and on landscape?
Bibliography
Kinsella, John, Can There Be a Radical “Western” Pastoral…? The Literary
Review, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey, Winter 2005, Vol. 48 No. 2
Kinsella, John, Peripheral Light, Selected and New Poems, selected and edited by
Harold Bloom, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Western Australia, 2003
Mateer, John, John Kinsella’s Prominent Place in Australia’s Literary Canon,
Canberra Times, 10/1/2004
Mengham, Rod & Phillips, Glen, Fairly Obsessive, Essays on the Works of John
Kinsella, Centre for Studies in Australian Literature & Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Western Australia, 2000
Pierce, Peter, Peripheral Light, Sydney Morning Herald, 3/1/2004
Sibree, Bron, Faith in an Ideal Word, The Daily Telegraph, Surry Hills, New South
Wales, 31/1/2004
Wark, McKenzie, Generator: Thinking Through John Kinsella’s ‘Genre’, Mengham
& Phillips, 2000
english literature teacher 