After Storm Katie: a poem

  for Tracy, after twenty years of Cambridge

Getting out. Good for physical and mental health.

And the coal tit ratcheting up so local and yet we know

that refrain from Swabia. Shouldn’t be surprised by this.

Humans validate their omnivorous desire for presence

in the global and the local, the near and far. Polyamorous 

for place. So I am walking the route as if it’s my route 

mapped onto my psyche — out towards Madingley. But 

the gigantic West Cambridge University Estate is becoming

and Seven Pillars arch over the incomplete buildings:

seven yellow cranes facing away from south-westerlies

dying off with sunset. The entire south has been ‘battered’

into a weird submissiveness, and semantics and intonation

and subtext and double-meanings ramp up the translation.

The ground is being trained, the domestic brutalised by

the forces of God which have bizarrely become our forces.

We control the weather by inverted default. We are pantheistic

and pandemic and universal. All at once. I think this, marvelling

the Seven Pillars have stayed upright, their long arms reaching

towards tomorrow’s sunrise as the planet skews a little more,

and those concrete counterweights heavy as security. Into the sun,

then buffering it through the back of my head, the roads hiss

as all come out to play and unbroken daffodils look to their roots.

  John Kinsella

Now that April's (almost) there...

By Tracy

This northern spring marks twenty years since John & I first came to Cambridge together  (we'd been two years married at that point).

Photo by Tim Kinsella

In the grounds of Churchill College

Today, back here after Germany, we met the same beautiful spring weather as twenty years ago (though it's due to turn not-so-lovely from tomorrow).

Churchill daffodils, 2016

Daffodils are out everywhere, and in town the Easter crowds have been enjoying the sunshine.

Here's a section from a poem John wrote in Cambridge back in the early days here, in 1996, and published in Fenland Pastorals (Prest Root Press, 1998)... The poem is called "Triptych: Poems from Churchill College, Cambridge".

3. Seed Cases 

                        for Tracy

Dark clouds thicken overhead

but there's not enough moisture

in the air to prevent the cracking

of seed cases: that crackling

like fire in undergrowth,

or water exploding on hot metal.

A partial collusion of the elements—

only the fifth element missing,

as if the eponymous has no part

in the moment. You hear the seed cases

opening and searching your memory

for a name, a species, find nothing.

But it's a familiar sound—it brings back

Dryandra Forest in the South-West

of Australia. Even the hemisphere

is different. The brain struggles

with location. It's the moment

of aloneness that's captured you,

when nameless plants execute

their cycles. People are absent.

A robin glows nearby. You know

its name and it knows yours. It is wary

and you remain still. The seed falls
and covers friable earth like snow.

And here's one from my early Cambridge days, again an extract from a longer sequence called "Noli Me Tangere", written at Easter in 1996 and published in The Willing Eye (Fremantle Press & Bloodaxe, 1999 & 2000). (Back then I was still working my way out of the Christian faith in which I had grown up; I now have no belief in formal religion. Doubt was showing in the fuller version of this poem...) Note that the fickle Cambridge weather is in there already! The seasons no longer offering stable metaphors were a reference to the fact that climate change was already very noticeable, back when we had no Google yet and email was brand new to us.


5
Faith blows hot & cold
as Cambridge in spring
where late snow dissipates
before reaching any surface
where nothing penetrates

where those who drank in
yesterday's sun
are caught out now, ill-dressed
for this fickleness,

for this world whose seasons
no longer offer
stable metaphors for
spiritual states.

But then you were never
afraid of change
God of transitions
God of this Easter

constant & steadfast only
in your refusal
to be pinned there.


One of the things John likes about Churchill College is that its chapel is ecumenical (in fact his play "Ecumenical" was performed in that chapel in 2012, directed by Tim Cribb).

And here's a pic of the two of us in the early Cambridge days, in the same flats where we are now and have spent much time over those 20 years. (John used to get a lot more sun in those days, before skin cancers took their toll!)

Photo by Bettina Keil

Psychogeography of a Temporary Locality 1

Note: What follows is my first contribution to a collaborative book of micro-essays I am doing with Russell West-Pavlov. 

I have been here before. That was in 1999. I wrote a sequence of poems on the war in the Balkans. Those poems claimed Hölderlin was not mad. I am here now. Writing this. This visit is less temporary than the last, which was for a conference and only lasted a week. This one is around eleven weeks. Eleven times longer, at least. Duration and exposure. And this time I am with Tracy, and Tim who is thirteen, and so when I was here last time not part of the ‘messages home’ I sent every day. That home then was Cambridge, but Cambridge inflected through the Western Australian wheatbelt. Two different environments. And by environments I do not mean that which Lefebvre mocks as an ambiguous and non-defined space. What did he know about space, caught up in his urban ‘second nature’? Environment in the way I meant it, and mean it, is agency of the non-human as much as the human. The fens, caught, managed, made, turned into the vegetable garden of Britain, were and are still environment. I watched birds; I walked through the fens. I saw reclamation projects taking place, the growing of Wicken Fen again, beyond tourist curio to hard-core nature reserve. And what potlatch is still disinterred from the peaty ground of the fens. And now, as I build a multi-dimensional model of a damaged place, a place where Nazism is still close to the surface, where the polymorphous perversity of a Romantic god-poet, and forest reserves where the great crested newt struggles to breed, and the memorials of loss and butchery sit alongside the naming of the fuchsia and the spirit of a pastor who spoke for years against Nazism and was killed by it, where Cemetery X holds the body-parts of those experimented on, where bats move from attic to cellar to evade wood-preservative poison, where outdoor theatres can only open after a specific summer date and then only show silent movies to help protect that very bat, where deer antlers over doorways are warped cathode and anode to an organic-vegan alternative movement in which all nature is nature and environment is clear and definable. And now, writing in ambiguity, I search for the concrete. And that, and this, is inflected through where we came from by road and ferry and road and ferry and road — West Cork in Ireland via Cambridge. And always the mental space, the spatial configuration and underpinnings of Jam Tree Gully. Where late storms will stir fire memories, the absolute fear of excoriation and conflagration, the easterly and northerly driven firestorms of the Australian wheatbelt summer. The place where temporariness is our absence, and where we’re always expected back, whether we belong or don’t. Here, now, attempting to collate vocabulary, parse sentences in a language Celan broke into fragments, which others have reconstituted, I listen to Tim gather it to him with critical consciousness like rainwater off our Jam Tree Gully roof. It’s not a romantic image – that rainwater gathers the dust and the bird-droppings and all else deposited across the corrugated roof-planes, gathers the pristine and the contaminated from its functional open and occupied space, made invisible as it collects in the great 90 000-litre tank, is pumped into the house, issues forth visible again from the taps. As is language. No Bauhaus moment. And Tracy, shifting from language to language with ease. ‘Flies through the air with the greatest of ease.’ I cannot use anyone else’s words here to support my argument. I offer no quote, no external authority. But I know that enough days have passed for the sound of the Great Tits singing on the bare trees, and the sight of the Schloss with its collection of antiquities, with its animals carved from animal, a lost animal, a great animal, are familiar enough to place a lacuna in temporary. It’s there I will go, and it’s there I will retreat.

           John Kinsella

Poem from residency at Newton Institute for Mathematics in Cambridge

Surreal Möbius Elegy

Surreal numbers locate the real

global curve assigned to the shelf

for forty years to be lifted wholesale

by Einstein for his general theory

of relativity, his lights deflecting

off the rippling band of a mountain

lake, two sides to one story — band-

wagon I want to share with the lost,

with the obsessive of a pure discipline

who were laughed at, their theories

consigned to dark shelves; to locate

paths any error offers, to find a living

Minerva in plain song, the common

tongue — no display of dead wings.

Earlier, before this conversation, I had

been laughing over long-past and slightly

painful memories of a shake-the-foundations

poet, an American in Paris, an American

poet rowdy and disruptive around

ancient buildings he seemed to love —

a boat colliding with all other boats

on the narrow waters, resetting the word —

to be told he might in fact now be dead.

I changed tone and tact and turned one-

hundred-and-eighty degrees to reconnect.

I am shocked to find that he’s been

dead for months. Day turned end-to-end.

A ‘one-sided nonorientable surface’ —

endurance where the easier band

fails. And not having thought of this

poet for some time, the idea of him

had already manifested in yet an earlier

conversation with another party

earlier today. In this six-coloured life

I have painted myself out of focus.

Cold is finally coming, it’s said.

Encircled by surreals, I feel close,

so close, too close. And I saw

a bloodied bird’s wing on a path.

And I looked for words instead

            of numbers.


           John Kinsella