Working with Russell-West-Pavlov

John Kinsella

The collaboration between Russell West-Pavlov and myself has relied on two material actualities: proximity and interstices. These can be geographical — being in Tübingen — or they can be conceptual, an overlapping of ideas and interests. But they are both material in the sense that we configure them as ‘real’ and expect ‘real-time' occurrences. We might occasionally work with abstraction, and I certainly do in making poems, but ultimately our making relies on pragmatic and temporal actuality. 

Proximity might seem to speak for itself, but it doesn’t. Our first shared qualification of ‘proximity’, as opposed to our own individuated notions, came about across the distance — on a link-up between Schull, West Cork and Tübingen Germany. There was a virtual proximity, and also the proximity of thinking and what we hoped might be achieved by sharing ideas and making discrete writings out of this. 

So, collaboration was very much grounded in the dichotomy and paradox of distance and closeness. Apropos of this, when I have been in Tübingen, we find occasions and to meet and talk and walk and ‘congeal’ our ideas. Sometimes this has taken the form of notes, most often of conversation that shares ideals. When our working together was first mooted in 2016, we discussed the possibility of ‘mini essays’, and how they might form interludes to more explorative and discursive making in the greater context. And that’s what happened, I think.

Interstices are where we overlap in thinking, while sometimes holding quite different ways of seeing and interpreting. That necessarily comes through our different life experiences, our different ‘positions’ qua how we do and don’t interface with the world, in conjunction with our strong overlaps in political, ethical and social views. We also share certain experiences in a proximate ways (complex relationships with ‘Australia’, ‘authority’ etc, the rejection of values that inform our gender-ethnic-class statuses and so on), and this combination of difference and similarity creates those interstices from which we write. Our differences are as strong an informant of our sharing textuality as our similarities.

Though we have written at many tangents to our core ‘themes’, the focal points of our work till now have very much been orientated around time and place — both fundamental themes in both our work across the decades. In part, I am sure these interests are what drew us together. Further, a deep respect and interest around issues of the Global South, and resisting the abuses of capital, wealth and privilege, solidified our approach and ‘content’. And a major overlap on the Venn diagram of concerns is the environment in its spatial-temporal vulnerabilities around intactness.

Very often, in writing poems that relate to the foci of our book, I work in the overtly figurative and allusive. So, a poem that seems to be about, say, seeing or hearing a bird, or observing a tree, is also about the issues we tend to talk about between ourselves (via email, video link or in person). Sometimes I focalise a mutual concern/interest in a different way, and reflect over the independent threads that lead us to shared processing or a commonality that also emphasises difference:

Proximity Reciprocities and Contraindications

for RW-P 

 

This is return. Used so much, by us. Too much?

The meat ants have new volcanoes on their old range

and, to mirror, sugar ants have raised funnels. Click?

That’s taking liberties. Collecting wood, I hear machinery

of hunting, of tree clearing, of breaking up. But weirdly

there’s a certain intactness, even if a bullet pierces.

Membrane. The stench of herbicide on the air. And from

the hefty paddocks of Victoria Plains, the defcon smell

of pesticide. Early stages of crops. Protection. And NuSeed

signs proliferating in contrariness — their barren seed.

In return we measure change: storm damage, erosion — dry 

more than wet. What’s left behind. Inside the house,

compacted but at different points, new and overlapping

and reconvened narratives. Those who’d have us gone

before arriving again, though ‘before’ is as relevant

as the self-seeded rare tree — where did the seed 

come from? Dormant so long? Blow-in? Birdshit, claw, beak? 

Tail of kangaroo. Signs still here — tracks, scats. And ours.

Another type of poem is a response poem to an idea, text or situation that I send to Russell in the hope that it might prompt something back from him. And yet another is in response to something Russel has said or written, or that has arisen from a shared experience. Often those experiences have been based on walks or journeys around Tübingen in which Russell has imparted a piece of knowledge that has fascinated me, and created a potential for proximities and interstices for future response. 

In the case of the following poem, Russell did (I think) include it in something he was working on — a tangent, but also a shared temporality and a placing it in a zone of mutuality. So, separate and overlapping. Ourselves, and a common body of idea-making and intertextuality. Both of us emphatically believe that no one owns ideas, and that ideas proliferate and overlap and are part of a greater body of thought and works that share a concern for ‘rights’, so having these ‘whispers’ of connection are every bit as important as the more overt textual blocks with our name below:

Failed Narratives of Extinct Volcanoes

 

On the ledge

of the extinct volcano

facing another extinct volcano —

Georgenberg — sore thumb —

alp-life with villages

and factories, small or large

as families: castle keep,

bare-limbed forest

tries to hold its own

in cold rain, not sleet,

as lookout comes home

to roost, real city

below. Rain eases

into mistranslation,

generative phonology

of migration.

Whose ‘spanner

on the works’

makes production

skilled, well-engineered?

Winding down the cone —

Achalm, yes — lathed

mountains higher

or high enough, 

down into

Reutlingen, 

past oaks, word 

fragmentation.

And maybe the most common mode for me is when I am working in my own mental space, and observing things far removed from Russell’s physical location and life, and link some thought in the poem with something he has said or we have discussed. So, the poem is about completely different things — e.g. seeing an echidna and watching the films of Stan Brakhage (Russell and I have never discussed cinema, which makes the ‘linkage’ even more interesting to me... and as the poem below is also part of a completely separate series of poems it creates silent links for me that I find generative and hopefully ‘opening out’ for future discussions and interactions):

Liquid Flow of Echidna from Gravel to Grass Bank — Reflecting Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987) While Painting Eye-Images

 

To roll and sway and merge

is to paint the path and deny

the tracks of pursuit, to crack

paint of script and rise and part,

push aside marbling and viscosity

of dry and wet, to roll uphill

to sway an orthography a writing 

of blur and merge: qualities

of sky and mouse-excavated 

tailings to nose into sense for

termites deeper than old tunnels

the awakening season for flame

to a-priori its ways into traces

of aquifer-augmentation — yes, beneath

hillside eroded; what reptiles

crossed in ascent or insects

with pre-fossil wings, pause

and sample, test and surge

a quartet out of crescent

of declining sun dazzle

in shadow of spines or spikes

or inverted feathers — inside to fly

bodily further in from the body

of valley while remaining so grounded, levitating

despite ‘poor eyesight’ — such misnomers of biology,

such occlusions of echidna-speak 

as close to ground they absorb and muffle 

our vibrations of passing or breathing hard:

shock-absorber psyches framed by

frames of universalised structures of art-speak,

skincells, hair follicles, applique and palette frescoes

of crossing over, of circumventing a branch,

of refreshing trails laid over a range

of terrains so specific you read

‘only’ into the allegories

the metaphors of consequence

for life overlaying their space — add quick light,

add flicker or flash, texture

to hair root and shadow enfilade

cosmos singing interior 

breaking of forms and refolding

to draw into a surface a logography

of constituents for all-time,

shared prognosis, differing

signatures and tellings, 

ends of lines.

And a new one for Russell to respond to, re-process, depart from (‘riff off’), or to leave floating in its own terms of reference... he hasn’t seen this one yet! When we were walking with our sons (Russell sorted the walk), I noticed a log covered in moss that looked animal-like... maybe a massive dog emerging from the side of a ravine. I took photos and pointed it out to Russell, describing what it looked like to me. I said, I will be writing stories about this, and asked him to take a look. As soon as I saw the strange shape, it sparked with ideas and scenarios I have been working with in my recent poetry: the politics of metamorphosis, transition, shifts, mergings... along with my usual concerns for protecting habitats. 

The place was the Seven Mills Forest near Stuttgart, and there is actually a working wood mill near where we entered, and near where I came across this was a hunter’s shooting platform, and that all bothers me. In a way, the animal-plant imagery is a kind of resistance, something beyond the human controls of the area. I did a series of poems and illustrations around the image, but when I got back to where we are staying in Tübingen I immediately wrote what follows. It's not dedicated, and I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of our collaboration when I wrote it, but we were there together, and sometimes such moments can become something else. And in the spirit of metamorphosis, it’s over to you, Russell:

Animal Log Is Cautious But Determined 

 

These are not qualities of lurk

or weirdness, not cryptic

beyond cryptic colouration,

but its emergence is cautious

and its transition remains

private though it reveals

itself from the bank — moss

hair, wood trunk torso,

branch legs. Hear it speak

over murmur of stream,

hear it deny the hunter

a mortal point of aim.

(April, 2023)

And maybe in writing we might think back to our 2019 walk in the Black Forest and our discussion over its fate... different places, if places in relatively close proximity (especially when compared with my writing of forests near where we live in the Western Australia wheatbelt), across time — one pre-pandemic, one post- (or still during, depending on definitions). One on a short visit from me, and the second at the start of a long stay. Both walks were with Russell as ‘guide’ and facilitator.

With Russ in Neckar Valley: mountain forest walk

 

The fork feeds back

Up the hill to take

River away from

Its restrictions

Raptor whistle black

Woodpecker call

But without the tap tap

To decode, without

The ratcheting up

To grub the leafless

Beech which holds

Designs on a tolerable

Summer to come,

Of tolerance, specs

Of walkers’ passing

Interest, collective

Breath, body heat

Of Kant’s working out.

(December, 2019)

Or if that doesn’t spark, maybe we can reach back to our conversation around the horror of hunting towers on the edge of fields and forests, and deep in among the trees along the lines of traversal by pigs and deer. I have written many poems around these travesties and manipulations of desire lines, and they have become a focal point for an animal rights campaign involving German forests. What hope do I have? As Russell said on our recent walk, at least you are personally less likely to be shot than in a French forest, to which I glibly and lamentingly asked/replied: Ordnung? 

Here’s one from a walk I just completed... and accompanying the poem is a series of photos taken from deep within the woods which will find their place in the resistance to violence against animals as well as humans, too. This poem refers to an exhibition of Daniel Richter’s paintings I saw the other day: barriers, ‘silent’ guard towers, open and closed zones, and deep ontological and physical threat.

Lament

 

Daniel Richter’s painted towers

survey human lines

of oppression: the watch,

the fence, the zone

of destruction.

The forest is an edge

to escape to or through,

and the forest myths

entangle fate.

The hunting towers

of the forest are not

those towers, and yet

they perform a similar

and equally deadly function.

How you rate an animal

in the schema of persecution,

how qualify rights and history,

will determine your perception,

The lack of critique

resounds with the movements

of swine and deer in the crepuscular

valley. In the folkish fantasy 

of woodsman architecture.

Daniel Richter’s towers

seem to be human lines

of oppression: the watch,

the fence, the zone

of destruction.

(May, 2023)

Now it’s over to Russell, and I am looking forward to where he does and doesn’t go with this, and to what further conversations ensue. And whatever happens, he will take things through proximities and interstices that I will inevitably find surprising and generative! Here's a manifesto of a particular approach to collaborative poetics in medias res.