Elegy for Brenda Walker (1957-2024)

Memoir

 

            in memory of Brenda Walker

 

(i)

Out walking

the relative cool

 

of the morning

and discussing

 

day’s unfolding

with the magpie tiding,

 

the loss of a friend

emanates

 

from the bush

of Kaarta Koomba

 

and follows the river

up over The Scarp,

 

traces river, brook,

and dry ‘winter creek’

 

to inflect so many

conversations

 

on writing, on how

to make a way

 

through memoir

and remember

 

all we have passed,

all we will sense.

 

 

(ii)

 

In discussing

the possibilities

 

of fiction

when Crush

 

appeared

in a city

 

retuning

or resetting

 

under Moreton Bay

figs in Hyde Park,

 

we extended

the conversation

 

across immediate

years

 

to the poetics

of death

 

and how much

we were both

 

going to make life

work the best

 

way possible,

whatever

 

the circumstances,

the conditions.

 

 

(iii)

 

This agreement

we had

 

about one day

meeting

 

on a street

in New York,

 

just to pass

and say ‘hi’

 

and keep

on going

 

towards

the lives

 

we were writing

into other

 

versions

of a story.

 

Or the agreement

not to say

 

anything after

you had a word

 

with authorities

to free me

 

from the lock-up

after my protest

 

to release

incarcerated animals

 

from their pain.

You merged

 

in and out of the shadows,

but always there

 

if called upon.

Not often, sometimes.

 

 

(iv)

 

So generous

when Tracy and I

 

married, to offer

a plate whose design

 

was a mandala,

an exposition

 

to the building

of a friendship

 

that could follow

the shifts

 

and resolve

however long

 

between messages,

catching up

 

even briefly.

We so delighted

 

in your next life, your

deep bonds.

 

 

(v)

 

Out walking

the relative cool

 

of the morning

and discussing

 

day’s unfolding

with the magpie tiding,

 

your wry, friendly

glance of knowing

 

replaces

a harsh sun

 

with a warmth

of insight

 

to what’s not working

and how it might

 

be made whole.

An impossible day.

 

Remember Iggy and the Stooges

playing riparian static?

 

Not your music,

but you listened anyway.

 

Remember Cambridge,

the river that could be drained.

 

Then later. Much later.

Peppermint tea. Another

 

river pushing

down to the sea,

 

but also looking back

over its shoulder.

 

Then different oceans

away from your

 

recovery, though

reconnecting,

 

through memoir

which was your course

 

I shared. Different

and the same. How

 

we make stories.

And where. And when.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Another Anti-war Poem (you don't have to see the visuals to know what slaughter looks like)

Graphology Superscription 117: administrations

Without viewing

the visuals, you’ll 

likely know 

what killing 

looks like.

And you’ll know

that Biden’s call

for Ukraine to ‘revise’

its recruitment age 

from twenty-five

to eighteen

is an ‘anthem

for doomed youth’

played out by proxy.

An act of creative 

thinking.

And you’ll reason

that increased weapons-flow

is the twist in a presidential 

pardon that serves

next generations.

You are forgiven...

and you... and you.

Thanks very much

(from afar)

for your sacrifice.

Processing, you’ll second-guess

that a new administration

will pursue pet conflicts

under chosen conditions. 

A fresh set of eyes

even if you’re not looking.

Rerouting front lines

for fresher conscripts.

Different audio-visual

frames of reference.

Alternative newsfeeds.

You might re-say that wars

escape their makers,

their sustainers, and their

apologists. That wars ultimately

feed themselves. You might

tick off the days on the calendar

with or without hope.

You might also say that wars 

ache with clichés for slaughter 

even if you don’t view 

that latest footage from x

or y co-ordinates — sicut dixit. 

Edited... or even up-

loaded raw 

and immediate.

And other such

affronts.

And having said all this,

if you do say all of this, 

you might conjecture 

over potential

‘peace talks’; 

memorials;

re-plantings

of torn fields;

post-war 

economies,

strategic

realignments.

Allegiances.

And that hardly

mellifluous saying:

‘adult time for adult crime’.

John Kinsella

'Fibrous Materials' and Chalice Mining

Interview: a poem

 

The local newspaper addresses

a series of questions to Chalice

about NOA (naturally occurring

asbestos) in ‘their’ Gonneville

Deposit (the roots of Julimar

Forest and environs). Answers

fire back without definition,

talking of ‘fibrous materials’

and management per ‘industry

best practice'. You can see

where this is going, catch

its drift, and suffer over time

accordingly. Tracy’s father

had asbestosis when he

passed away. Our lives have

been haunted by asbestos

contamination. And now

the miners talk of spraying

water and having barriers

and air quality testing

as they disturb the spirit

of earth. They talk of such

things being 'typically seen'

at nickel mines in WA.

The local newspaper’s

questions seek to pin

the miner down, and though

each answer is evasive,

they confirm as well. ‘Local’

is disposable once profits

and ore are dispersed

around the globe. When

litigation comes decades

later, dynasties will have

risen and fallen and every

battery will have lost its spark.

 

 

            John Kinsella 

Black Cockatoos are Starving

Over the last couple of weeks we've been noticing a dramatic shift in the usual flight patterns of white-tailed black cockatoos over the valley. These magnificent, endangered birds are known as Ngolyenok in Noongar, and as Carnaby's in settler-speak. Sometimes we see 'Baudin's' as well, but usually on the other side of the river to the south-west. I say flight patterns 'over' the valley because, with rare exceptions, this has been the case for all the Sept/Oct periods (from the end of Djilba to the beginning of Kambarang) we've been here across fifteen years. 

Usually it's a migratory flight from north of here, with occasional pauses/perching before moving on to nesting hollows in wandoos at various points around the region (frequently bulldozed or cut down... it's an ongoing struggle to preserve nesting trees), or onward to the coastal plain to feed on banksia seeds. But this year is dramatically different — the 'wee-oo/wee-oo' calls have become a string of presence rather than snippets of audio. They have flown over, arced back, and hung around. Wing to wing, shadow by shadow, they are low overhead in cycles. 

We wondered if they were making use of flooded gum hollows down at the base of the valley for nesting — these flooded gums were largely destroyed years ago by a devastating 'controlled burn' that got out of hand and ignited dead leaves in forks and took out hundreds-of-years-old trees. But some remain basically intact, and others have grown back from the base of what remains of trunks (essentially chimneys). 

We are hearing the cockatoos constantly, and they are looping overhead throughout the day as they search for food. They are using York gums here as roosts (unusual), and astonishingly have started feeding on wild oats from the ground! I've also noticed on neighbouring 'properties' (what a word!) that they are foraging on animal fodder/feed in paddocks. 

I was quite literally writing a poem about this earlier today, when Tracy sent me an article by Emma Young and quoting botanist Kingsley Dixon about the paucity of food on the coastal plain for cockatoos visiting Boorloo/Perth due to the heat-stressed banksias not seeding as usual (late rains were another complicating factor) — further consequences of human-induced climate change. Everything suffers. To think that Chalice mining would wipe out cockatoo habitat to mine 'green metals' at Julimar (nearby)!— the contradictions are legion. 

As cockatoos starve, they search for alternative food sources, but this is an act of desperation. Unless we stop the war on nature (and on human life itself) in all its forms, we consign species after species to death. We simply don't have that right, and need to act on what we observe. A life of recording change brought about by human rapacity (and indifference) in poem after poem is confronting even for me. And the poem here speaks about the work necessary for all of us, myself included.

Ngolyenok —White-tailed Black Cockatoos — Have Become Part of My Quotidian

 

The feeding honk of cockatoos

that could be ‘contentment’ or pragmatism

is reworking my brain’s storage facilities,

 

multiplying in memory beyond the  2.5 petabytes

the Scientific American claims as capacity,

opening new pathways into non-neural tissue.

 

My hands and feet as repositories, to do the work.

Where for fifteen years they have passed over

at this time of year, cockatoos are demi-resident

 

and claiming something deeper, or opening

new possibilities given the impacts on their

habitat. Now I hear (more memory

 

will be required) that banksia woodlands

down on the coastal plain have failed to seed,

and these honking grazing cockatoos

 

are desperately feeding on wild oats

that grow outside the spray zones. I will

delay grass cutting a little longer

 

so they can augment their memories

with new possibilities, new scenes.

Then maybe the banksia will rise again,

restore memory to its optimal setting.

 

 

            John Kinsella

On the Corrosive Nature of Vows of Vengeance

 

Vow

Eternal cycle of vengeance

till the cycles ends in nothingness.

When the coding was done

either someone copied it down

wrong, or it was corrupt

in the first place. To attest

revenge is a vote of confidence

in one’s own ability to despise;

and to vow ‘dedication’ is to promise

to live under the light of a premise.

And when the asseveration to clip the wings

of any bird that sings a different song

comes into play, watch the sky crash

and the vowers gloat over their success.

John Kinsella

Eclogues 3

           John Kinsella

A third and final post (for the time being) on eclogues. This is an intertextual eclogue I wrote around May last year making use of an Emily Brontë poem. There's a conversation going on with the text and contexts of the original Brontë poem, but there's also a commentary on eco-collapse. It should be noted that by the time Emily died in 1848, the Industrial Revolution had so accelerated Anthropocene climate change that she was embedded in the damage in ways that might have induced a sublimated form of anxiety about 'human progress' if not a material resistance because of awareness. 

Mind you, it was only eight years later that Eunice Newton Foote made observations about climate and carbon dioxide, and towards the end of the century (1896) when Svante Arrhenius noted the effect carbon dioxide could have on temperatures on earth. So even though there's an absurdity implicit in culture jamming across very different eras, it's maybe not so absurd when we consider the import of 'progress'. Juxtaposing Brontë's (anomalous in many ways) 'conservative' politics in conversation with an (Audenesque) 'age of anxiety' resistance voice is belied by the far-sightedness of her insights into the self with regard to 'nature', and the deep passion for the interconnectedness of life. 

This is not a song competition à la Virgil's Third Eclogue (which drew on Theocritus, of course), but rather a 'song fusing': a discussion that becomes the figurative annealing of a problem that goes back to the mass destruction of forests, the rise of metals, and the entrenching of the military state in all its forms. There's no third speaker in this poem acting as judge, but maybe the reader is playing that role: as much over their own role in climate change and eco-destruction as over the validity of the two voices. 

Over the years I have used intertext a great deal, but as I always note, there are problems attached to doing so. Brontë isn't given a choice, of course, but I think the need of the planet outweighs such proprieties. As one who opposes AI usage of writers' work but am also opposed to anyone owning words or even combination of words, it might seem straightforward that I believe such jamming is an automatic 'right'. Further, as I use what I call 'templating' to intertext with 'canonical' works in order to contest the control mechanisms that deliver them to us as 'authoritative' (in whatever way), it might seem that I am entrenched in this 'freedom'. 

But it's more complex than this: there are many texts I'd never touch (especially if I felt it culturally appropriative), and when I do it can be either out of massive respect or massive disgust. It's not an easy picture. Suffice it to say in this instance that Emily Brontë's poetry accompanies me everywhere I go (I literally carry her collected poems with me everywhere). Oh, and competition has been a big part of the destruction of the biosphere. There is no competitiveness in this!

Eclogue With Emily Brontë’s ‘Shall earth no more inspire thee’

 

 

EB: Shall earth no more inspire thee,

Thou lonely dreamer now?

Since passion may not fire thee

Shall Nature cease to bow?

 

JK: I speak plainly: I’ve been keeping

records of failure, of diminishing rainfall

            and defoliation, of contaminated rivers

and erosion. Anti-inspiration.

 

EB: Thy mind is ever moving

In regions dark to thee;

Recall its useless roving—

Come back and dwell with me.

 

JK: I’m working on it. Where

I come from and don’t belong,

            I am trying to save a forest

from a ‘green metals’ miner.

 

EB: I know my mountain breezes

Enchant and soothe thee still—

I know my sunshine pleases

Despite thy wayward will.

 

JK: They do, maybe now

more than ever, but facts mess

            with the imagery. There

are mountains being converted to ore.

 

EB: When day with evening blending

Sinks from the summer sky,

I’ve seen thy spirit bending

In fond idolatry.

 

JK: I idolise the earth,

not the idols of capital —

            a ‘summer’s sky’

is a broken thesaurus.

 

EB: I’ve watched thee every hour;

I know my mighty sway,

I know my magic power

To drive thy griefs away.

 

JK: True, I rely on you.

But there’s less room for rhyme

            outside of advertising:

gadgets, oil particulate, fate.

 

EB: Few hearts to mortals given

On earth so wildly pine;

Yet none would ask a heaven

More like this earth than thine.

 

JK: Yes, that’s it  — ask no more

of heaven than we have around us,

            or had... going going but not gone.

A tree lost it seems too easy to forget.

 

EB: Then let my winds caress thee;

Thy comrade let me be—

Since nought beside can bless thee,

Return and dwell with me.

 

JK: Seems like we’re arguing

when we’re not — the flight

            of a pigeon is as glorious

as that of a goshawk. I love both.

 

 

            John Kinsella with Emily Brontë

Anyone interested in my eclogue work might look at poetry collections such as The Hunt, Visitants, Peripheral Light, The New Arcadia, Supervivid Depastoralism and The Pastoraclasm (essentially a book of eco-eclogues).

Anti-Colonial Anti-Pastoral Eclogue 2

Moving from the ancient Greek of Theocritus, to the Latin of Virgil, I am ‘reminded’ of Lisa Robertson’s anti-genre, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchy and anti-pastoral and feminist poetry work XEclogue. In her ‘Two Pieces’ Commentary in the context of this work, Robertson writes:

 

Certainly on this 500th anniversary of the so­ called New World, we must acknowledge that the utopian practice of Liberty stands now as a looming representation of degrading and humiliating oppressions to the (pastoral) majority, and that pastoral utopias efficiently aestheticize and naturalize the political practices of genocide, misogyny, and class and race oppression. I consider that now pastoral’s obvious obsolescence may offer a hybrid discursive potential to those who have been traditionally excluded from utopia.

 

I ‘feel’ the same, of course, even if I come out of a different gender construct and might be assumed to occupy a different reality in that construct. In the critical processing of voice and privilege in the uber-gendered canonicals of historic Euro-centric verse, it might also be assumed that I have been more easily ‘resolved’ as a ‘male’ (though I deplore many attributes of ‘maleness’ and probably all of ‘masculinity’) into a line of pastoral discursiveness through the ‘raw ingredients’ of body and the ‘geographical demographics’ of speaking from a rural ‘location’ (she might or might not speak from the ‘rural’ now or then).

 

The dialogues of the eclogue are based in a privileging of the male voice (as Robertson notes and deconstructs), especially in rivalry/competition. Her intervention into the ‘form’ is so essential because it generates new hybrid possibilities for not so much reclaiming as disclaiming the values of possession and occupation. This speaks to colonised spaces conceptually, but I imagine can be enacted through invited reading on country as well. This is about undoing the literary trope of pastoral, and also undoing the pastoral as an enacted mode of controlling responses to capital, control of land and control of people through wealth, class, gender and ethnicity. She also notes:

 

Historically, from Virgil to Spenser to Goldsmith, the pastoral poem narrated the exigencies of land tenure, labour’s relation to the state and capital, and the establishment of a sense of place as a ground for philosophical being and discourse. The trajectory of the pastoral poem has prepared a self congratulatory site for the reproduction of power.

 

I also strongly concur with this, and in the Australian context have only been able to read pastoral impositions in such a way. In tracing the invasive and destructive forces of colonial agricultural practice in wheatbelt Western Australia and juxtaposing that with ‘landscape poetry’ acclimations of non-Indigenous presence on country (maybe the dominant subtext of settler-colonial poetry in Australia), I have tried to de-map the routes of exploration and redefine (and contest) localised colonial notions of ‘Liberty’.

 

The anti-pastoral eclogue might introduce non-colonial voices, but contained in its construct it risks imprisoning those voices. Even in, say, a collaboratively composed anti-eclogue, the fact remains the eclogue breaks down and the pastoral dissolves because it has to — being the only ‘legitimate’ outcome of such a process. The poem dissolves into a concrete return of land to its people/s without caveats and disclaimers, without footnotes that are catches. Robertson mediates via Mary Wortley Montagu (the ‘Lady’ being part of the problem, I won’t prelude her name by inserting it in a syntactic way), which reinvents potential utopias as active fields of engagement in the face of versions of oppression (class, gender, ethnicity, wealth, access to disseminating ‘views’...).

 

One thing that seems ‘worth’ considering is the fracturing of pastoral as a mode of valorisation across ‘food production’ and other ‘primary industry’ allowing us to see the toxic ‘values’ underpinning its authority. Literary pastoral is a copywriting arm of the agrichemical industry, of farming advocacy groups, and conservative ‘family’ valu(ation). In other words, making (anti) pastoral works allows us to expose the modernising and adapting versions of pastoral that hide themselves in ‘greenwash’ (such as mining ‘green metals‘ and destroying habitat to ‘reduce carbon’).

 

Robertson might (I am guessing) also claim that weather (which greatly interests her, too) is not climate, but I expect that the rhizomes of her brilliant XEclogues would reach into the privileging of discussion and action around climate to show that it becomes the weather report that vested interests want to hear. The nuclear industry uses climate change to put the planet at ultimate risk, the ‘battery miners’ cloak consumerism with saviour narratives. They each have a deep ‘investment’ in the idea of peril yoked with the promise of ‘rescue’. And it’s all about the weather. And discourse/contests/declarations/public relations in the eclogues of power. That’s what we want to contest and rewrite to the point that the ‘genre’ cannot be wielded as propaganda by the state, military, corporations or other institutions of control.

 

 

            John Kinsella