Help Save Barrabup Forest... Please!

Some of you will have followed the litany of destruction of habitat at Golden Bay in Western Australia. We need positive, non-violent, assertive action, to articulate a collective poly-environmental/ist approach - 'literary' and/or otherwise. Now Barrabup Forest just outside Nannup is under threat. In terms of preventative action, for those of you not only in Western Australia but wherever, this requires immediate support. See here for petition. Below is a poem written for the forest, and in support of those people working so hard to save it.

For Barrabup Forest

‘assessment of a harvest coupe within Barrabup forest block following public concerns the coupe contained old-growth jarrah forest...’

            Government of Western Australia, Department of the Premier and Cabinet

It’s been eight years since we were last in Nannup,

passing Barrabup with its old-growth jarrahs

holding the world together, and a decade now

since I walked and wrote local forests

and said above all else we must be wary of dieback.

Beyond beauty, this is forest that reaches into identity,

that holds together the spirits of all who come into contact,

who open themselves to its intensity, its purpose.

And now, re-survey reveals the truth of public claims —

43 hectares of old-growth jarrahs, but only 43 hectares of 530

that will be set aside, will be exonerated, will live independently

as if the world around their reaching back, far back

does not and did not exist, as if their survival is not connected

to what they’ve nurtured back into shape, into forest —

as if old jarrahs are indifferent to what’s around them, disconnected,

their fates not entwined to the fate of younger, surrounding forest.

No, they need the support system that’s managed to maintain them,

give home to the networks of life. As the imprint of past visits

makes us who we are, for those who live in the rays of sunlight

filtering through, and the shadows, a knowledge of joy and trauma

entwine, enjamb day-to-day lives, too. Dieback will be let in through the door,

along the hacked and bulldozed road, the desecration of logging will isolate

and entrap, and all life in the realm of the coupe be surrendered

to the interest of profit. To name creatures falling endlessly:

Western ringtail possum, startled Western brush wallaby,

Baudin’s cockatoo, and the Woylie  ringing generational changes

outside human science. And yes, I will be down again soon to experience

the last wildflowers, the utterance of a forest’s claim to aesthetics

beyond human understanding. Will the pink fountain trigger plant

still be with us, telling us its truths? Will the forest still really be a forest?

I have seen so many forests felled to stumps, to nothingness.

We all die tree by tree, coupe by coupe. All of us. All of us.

            John Kinsella

For Beauty’s Sake: Poetry and Activism (Keynote Address, Perth Poetry Festival 2014)

by John Kinsella

I wish to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this country and the non-ownership of this land.

Poetry is so often less about ‘Art’ and more about ‘activism’ than many like to think. The poem that captures a glimpse of ‘nature’, or human loss, or reconstitutes a family memory through an object found while going through the belongings of a deceased relative, might seem to be little to do with activism but everything to do with art. That is, to do with the art of compacting, containing and adding ‘depth’/layering,/nuance to an idea so it creates conduits into other ways of seeing — creating the poem-object. But for me, rather than the ‘artiness of art’, I am interested in the poem’s potential for resistance, not its compliance with a status quo, not as the production of what will become an objet d’art, a thing intended for wealth accumulation and pleasure. Of course, a piece of art can escape its creator’s (or buyer’s) intentions and become subversive through context.

Poetry works the contradictions, the paradoxes, and brings the incongruous and contiguous into alignment, rendering them into shape, pattern and interpretability. That’s art, and this art is about aesthetics, about a hierarchising of perception into a spectrum of ‘taste’.

I’ve never cared much for taste, and most of us would agree beauty is subjective, which doesn’t have to lead us to say aesthetics can contain such difference, because the issue of ‘beauty’, to me, shouldn’t come up in the first place. Or rather, ‘beauty’ as thing-in-itself. Because if our intent is to oppose beauty to, say, destruction, and use it as a symbol of integrity, liberty, and agency, then it becomes something outside the limitations of taste — in fact, to the arbiters of taste, it might well be ‘tasteless’. Beauty in this case, becomes a political point, an act of defiance in the face of damage, destruction, and disempowerment. Beauty becomes a symbol of resistance and possibly its paradox. That’s a point-of-view issue, or maybe it’s actually an issue of empowerment?

Does the mining company, such as Bauxite Alumina Joint Ventures, wanting to create a massive open-cut mine at Morangup that would reach to Wundowie almost twenty kilometres away, see the destruction of habitat that it will wreak, in terms of destruction of beauty? Of course not. They see their promised ‘rehabilitation’ of land as a kind of beauty; they see the aluminium goods we consume as a kind of beauty; they see wealth-creation as a kind of beauty. No doubt, like Rio Tinto’s collaboration with the Black Swan Theatre Company, they’ll target ‘the arts’ in their desire to extend their largesse, to manufacture beauty that we can all digest as art.

And poetry? Poetry is occasionally offered funding directly and indirectly by such companies. It’s easy to get caught out, so we need to be wary and understand where the money’s coming from; often, it’s hidden. Business mostly wishes to take beauty and turn it into a form of capitalist activism, they wish to take art — all your arts — and make them subservient to this notion of beauty. It’s called advertising... or propaganda!

But if we accept that the integrity of land, that country itself is intrinsically beautiful, then in the name of beauty we might claim all evocations of natural beauty in poetry as an activist moment, as a resistance to the mining industry version. So poets describing a kangaroo paw, poets evoking a sunset (with or without pollution coloration), poets noticing a birdcall and implanting it in their own aubade, their own dawn love-poem, become activist in a way that resists the consuming of country enacted by these corporate miners.

So activism in poetry is often implicit, unless you celebrate goods, fetishise your possessions for the sake of them being your possessions. No amount of irony can save the poem that’s built around the actual ordering and acquisition of material goods for the literal sake of ownership.

But the activism I am interested in tonight is possibly more direct. It’s a matter of working lyrical and rhetorical registers, of bringing the figurative and didactic into conversation. The activist poem can traverse the spatiality from ‘celebratory nature poem’ all the way to the damning rant, the poem that simply says, in essence, that ‘All mining companies are fucked! They serve their own purposes. The rock they crush was a home to animals and plants. The rock they crush was a story...’ and so on. A poem doesn’t need to be stuck in the consistency of diction, in registers of display, in the packaging that more accords with Rio Tinto’s glossy arts policy. And if it does deploy ‘regular diction’, ‘predictable’ metrics, and a pat rhyming scheme, let its subject matter challenge the very conventions from which such approaches to poetry arise. Or let it connect with them, with the aural roots, the aids to memory that fomented the patterning of words into lyrics, into combinations of lines that become memorable.

Either way, let the poem protest against the constraints that industry, the military, religion, and government would impose on poets, poetry and community. Poems speak for themselves however hard they might rant, and maybe that’s what the governments and corporate cultures fear the most: their unpredictability, their capacity to make non-violent radical change.

It took the American poet Muriel Rukeyser in 1938 to help articulate in ‘The Book of the Dead’ the horror of the deaths of hundreds of labourers from silicosis after they were forced to mine silica without masks when excavating the hydroelectric Hawks Nest Tunnel at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia from 1927 to the late 30s. That’s poetry as direct, unremitting activism. Is there beauty in the poetry? — maybe of a sort touched upon above, but certainly not that packaged by Union Carbide, the company at the centre of the disaster, or any other prodigal of global corporate capitalism. The beauty of product, the beauty of modernity hawked by such companies is at variance with life, habitat, and health of the biosphere. Rukeyser wrote, investigated, reported:

[see her poem...]

I’d like to finish with a few lines from a poem entitled ‘Mining Company’s Hymn’ from the 1977 collection Jagardoo by Nyungar poet and playwright Jack Davis, whose poetry I am lucky enough to be editing into a collected volume at the moment:

The government is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
They let me search in the Aboriginal reserves
which leads me to many riches
for taxation’s sake.
Though I wallow in the valley of wealth I will fear no weevil
because my money is safe in the bank
vaults of the land,
and my Government will always comfort me.

In support of refugees

Poem by John, posted by Tracy


Graphology Heuristics 87: the breakdown of empathy — non sequiturs

The machine smooths the surface
of the gravel road so altered by the blast
of rain: the ‘hill-effect’ in a district
where refugees are damned
in town halls and on t-shirts.

As government and opposition vie
for more dehumanising ways
to treat ‘boat people’; the ground
beneath privileged feet, their islands
in the sky, their moon’s surveillance

drops its cloak-and-dagger motto —
‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ —
since that’s too risky to let in through
the dust left from holes in the ground,
the ore ships passing hulks and wrecks,

sticking to trade routes, buoyant on
Plimsoll’s blood, drops in the ocean.


John Kinsella

Written by John, posted by Tracy

The Emperor of Ice-cream and his Cronies: the New Transportation


‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’
Wallace Stevens


So...

You WILL be relocated to the mines of Western Australia.
You will ‘join’ the ‘boom’ (as John Forbes wrote: ‘even if we don’t choose to join you, we do’).
You will admit Perth to be the centre of the known Universe.
You will all bow down to the Emperor and his cronies.
You will eat the planet alive and shit it out on the cosmos.
You will consume consume consume.
You will buy off or crush those who oppose.
You will ‘negotiate’ with only one outcome possible: boom boom boom.
You will feed the Fukushimas and nuclear weapons industries.
You will allow him to enslave the unemployed and destroy families.
You will then allow him impose a ‘better’ version of (‘Christian’) family.
You will hear him on the airwaves praising ice-cream. It’s climatic.
You will ‘hear’ what you think you want to ‘hear’.
You will say okay, okay... boom boom boom.
You will attend theatre and opera weighed down with the cast-offs
from over-fed miners’ wardrobes – you, and the companies.
You will gloat and never get the irony of Lucky Country recidivus.
You will enjoy the lifestyle.
You will worship the Queen who is the Emperor’s rep in the Old World.
You will make haste to the mines.



John Kinsella



Written in response to this article, and many others, pertaining to the right-wing corporate rule of Western Australia.

Paradise Lust

By John, posted by Tracy

Here’s an extract from a long-term work-in-progress: Paradise Lust. Obviously coming out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, but also (later) Paradise Regained, this section is from 'Book One', which I have just completed. The final section of my 'Book One' is still in typewriter-script.

I’ve been writing ‘Book One’ on & off over the last nine months — as it largely reacts to local, regional and international political/ecological/social events, as well as to ecological concerns in general, it tends to be picked up when anger rouses me. I don’t intend it to be a diatribe — in fact, it’s more an engagement with Milton’s original (grabbing and reconfiguring his text, conversing with it, or just attempting to outrun its polished inevitability of form and idea).

However, I see it as a case of making a private torment public for a couple of reasons: firstly, the cathartic nature of public utterance, and secondly, in that perversely linked contradiction, the obligating nature of public utterance. A kind of desire to be held accountable for one’s mental and emotional resistance.

The stimulus to this section was the outrage I felt hearing ‘Twiggy’ Forrest speak (on a Four Corners documentary), regarding his desire to get ‘approval’ from traditional owners for yet another iron ore mine in the Pilbara. A very rich white man saying he can identify with the sufferings of local indigenous communities because of having been brought up in the same area seems to me classic colonial paternalism. Surely he does not know, because surely he can’t know.

I’ll say no more because I actually think the poem says it better. Poetry is the ultimate pacifist vehicle, I feel: its volatilities are tempered by the constraints of language and distance, which leads hopefully to more constructive outcomes.

Which is not to say I don’t think that one should stand up in person and clearly articulate an opposition — I certainly do. But reading a poem in person can often be a whole lot more effective than either speaking or yelling at the brick wall of self-interest (especially when it’s dressed up as ‘caring’: e.g. as soon as you here the words ‘training’ and ‘employment’ in the context of working in one’s own mines, you have to worry about motives, as much as the predictable questioning of the value of handing over money to ‘those’ people).

Poetry is action, and the story of Satan’s fall and battle with the legions of God, and his corruption of Adam and Eve, is the vehicle par excellence for dealing with issues of greed, exploitation and the capitalist desire for ‘choice’, and also the folly of pride, in a colonial context. For any who might think that the days of Australian colonialism have passed, think again. It happens on a private and state level most days, especially in Western Australia, a truly exploitative and paradise-lusting state.

I might add that the mining billionaires around here don’t merit Milton’s ‘glorious’ epic rendering of Satan (with his human depths and complexities!). And they are as much the ‘princes, potentates, and warriors’ of Heaven as they are of the sulphur of Hell. Whichever ‘side’ deploys military metaphors as signs of pride and worth is going to be suspect.

I am justifying the ways of no one, but I am justifying the rights of the exploited and the wronged (human and non-human) more than those who want to manufacture a ‘paradise’ in images of their own desires!


Paradise Lust 5 (Book 1)

Hesperian Celtic utmosts, island
to island I am not a person, prevalent
and prevaricating point-of-view: we are
what we watch with sore and running eyes,
get-back-together myth a rubric and flocking-
cause, damp walls I read of to go to: flight,
hypocritical hue or due: highest word orders
traipsing attention-seekers (ordnance)
reared in standard courage: clarion trumpeter
vengeance to perform, scrupulous as lustre
I cannot express my need for birds beyond
the window at dawn: sonorous and true,
‘martial sounds’ I make what I will of: damn me,
I am sure you will! Nightfright is explosives
and butane cannons a valley-fright, nightline
gone wrong at head of bed: I dreamt a cube
you looked into and there was an explanation
mark floating in analgesics — all those banners,
all those labels ‘with orient colours waving’:
hideous namesake who would locate and blame,
‘geek’ is the New Right with righteous indignation
flowing offhand, enlivened by microwaves,
phalanxes of digitisation, I escape to granite
folds where radon broods and alters ‘gift’
as much as birthrighteousness; none makes
from attack to battle traps clawing ankles
in the ‘firebugs’ storm of calling: who
are these dazzlers who surround me?
Who files and anglegrinds the view away?
Who cuts the heart out of the hill?
I place inside an empathy: I am mosquito
and gnat flayed less beautifully and with lesser
advertisement (never mind the samples, here
come the augmented profit programmes);
metaglories & heroic rage: O namesake disgrace,
race you to atomic or armoric knights, a flooding
of baptisms, a jest of clubbing: I cannot replace
the lifetime story I saw in a friend’s look,
acknowledging progress, a swirling of planet
faster than any measurement of orbit, any
counting down of days: we saw the juggler,
and the seat we sat at: a smile, a wave,
a passing over: I won’t say your name, I won’t
say it yet: names are more than I can bear: a pun
is worse than a lie to outflank the eye, resolution
of pictorials: a peerage of atoms and all their
(wasted? never) space; mortal shape immortal
or eminent, loss of tower and language
bright beneath the weighty beams of forests
turned to ships: ‘behind the moon’ in stunning
eclipse, a theft of archangel’s ruins; camera
obscura lumière of twilight sheds across the valley
which will never be tolled though thunder will
come tomorrow diastole in bloody pressure
not a sign of cheek fading to wet wood or thinking
ahead to flames. Passion in those billion spirits.
Heaven-blame is a scathing of forest and heath
and even clumps of spinifex edging rolling desert;
each battlefield mock-up to feel terrain sucked
away (a new uranium mine will open deep
in Western Australia) to little denial, little
weeping or bursting of the ranks; think:
what is work and who does work work for?
My father was a workaholic, my mother
works into her senior years, I work through
the night, and shiftworkers flying around the clock
make life about the life-altars of uranium oxide:
I was hideously exposed in my teenage years.
Myriad double-take, retaking of taken land:
firesale and compensation: digging deep to test
depth of the sign, marker of land and lines.
Lacking skin, lacking totem, lacking expressions
of light where growth begins, nothing is glorious;
those legions of state that would empty me out
into the borrow pit, so shorter days getting longer
in penumbra, exile outcast to blow channels
wide open, to excise and ‘repossess their
native seat’ — no question, just deliverance
of paternal facts (witness Four Corners forrestry);
throne; who sits where sits paternal overhang,
extended through funeral claims; who knows,
maybe pity beats deep unless profit plays havoc,
plays variations or riffs on stories: evidence
is the court’s maverick play, is the specialist’s boon,
is the shunning arriviste counterseal to have
a workforce, a New Slavery where pay is all prophecy,
is all Brave New Worlds and Nineteen-Eighty Fours
rolled over: New Slavery landless in ways
that count; repute custom consent regal concealed
billionaire monarch butterfly off course
aflame; rife rife rife rife rife rife rife rife
as sons as generations of hymns and songs
and daughters left in shade where the hills have
gone concave; onward Christian soldiers all things
bright and beautiful in your backyard you measured
out and made yourself; ‘spirits in bondage’ take your
seats at the table, this is the best offa ya gunna get: work
choices red as iron, red as the lips that tell you what’s
good for you: ‘money is not the answer’ from the obscenely
rich should shake the bones supporting such lips: Warhol’s
factory implosion: abyss war abyss: who spake?
Flaming swords — billions — are inevitable
in the swirl of being heard and lullifying:
the cherubim’s glorious cancelling out,
‘illumined hell’ and the hill hideaway
flattened out by the rolling smoke,
grisly leftovers of the hunter’s assignation
(one of the BOYS tried to run me down
but covered his action by keeping his line
and not following my steps onto the gravel).
The surveillance aircraft that grids us flies
its ‘glossy scurf’ of boundaries, and the truth
of womb envy plays out in HIS great ore
belly, his cultural involution he makes us
understand: capitalising sulphur, who could
speak more clearly of mining worship: ‘pioneers
of spade and pickaxe armed’: trenches and
all the metallic dead, all the metallic dead.


John Kinsella

The Performative Activist Poem?

Written by John, posted by Tracy


I see the term ‘activist poem’ is spreading, or spontaneously appearing. No doubt it has many individual usages or histories I am unaware of. However, I want to differentiate because it bothers me that it might be used generically to indicate a poem noting a problem that requires addressing or even rectifying, that it serves the purpose only of creating debate and awareness.

For me, the activist poem is a ‘performative activist poem’: one in which action is an implicit part of the writing, delivery, and hopefully the reception of the piece. I am extrapolating from ‘performative verb’ whereby the act is performed by writing itself (or speech). The poem becomes a literal act with cause and effect. Its action cannot be denied because it is an implicit part of its creation (and delivery).

It is not about delivering a window into ‘history’ (I think ‘history’ has failed as an activist prompt) or an overview of a situation that merely provides knowledge or alternative ways of viewing the situation. Rather, it is an intrinsic part (a contrary part) of the situation it critiques. Born of the place it seeks to protect and preserve. A part of the moment, of the whole.

I am not using the expression in the sense of ‘performative writing’ (though an activist poem might deploy aspects of this), nor of Austin’s ‘performative utterance’, though ‘utterance’ is certainly part of what I personally do. Maybe it’s best to quote that ultimate system of systems, the OED (that through adding new words and ‘pop’ expressions creates the illusion it’s growing and flexible when in fact it’s reinforcing the terms of its own creation and duration) regarding ‘performative’:

‘designating or pertaining to an utterance that effects an action by being spoken or by means of which the speaker performs a particular act.’

It’s the ‘effects an action’ that is key (or pertinent) here: the poem needs to come out of the situation and work to resolve the problem. I don’t mean merely an act of nominal intervention or disruption, or an ‘artistic moment’ that enters discourse and brings change according to a socially self-supporting (cadre) system, but a poem that puts itself out there to suffer the same alienation and potential damage suffered by the subject (the ‘wronged party’) it is trying to protect.

From an ecological pacifist perspective, this would be the poem in front of the hunter’s guns, or the poem coming out of the bush that’s being bulldozed, spoken in front of the bulldozers. I am being quite literal. The activist poem requires its moment of activism, rather than being written in a protected space and hoping people will ‘hear’ (they won’t). A few academic or poet-mates might hear and back slap a bit, but nothing will change. Okay, collect these moments post-event, but accept they then become something else. They are no longer the performative activist poem, but rather the subjunctive activist poem.

If you’re vaguely interested in where I’ve discussed the writing of activist poems, you could see my book Activist Poetics or go to the article (one of a series I did for Poetry Review): Kinsella, J.V. 2007, ‘Lyric and Razo: Activism and the Poet’, Poetry Review, 97, 1, pp. 66-79.

A few notes from recent conversations might further illustrate my point. One of my very sharp correspondents rightly differentiated what I am saying from ‘situationist’ moments (which he said were a ‘good model’ but weren’t about poetry per se), which pleased me. These are some of my words from that correspondence:

I just don’t see history as being as useful... in terms of an activist text — I want to enact resistance immediately — (rhetorical) lyric as gesture and literal action-intervention.

...’history’ is there, but in the moment of intervention it becomes either overshadowed or deleted. Violence if you’re on the receiving end annuls most things. Seems a privilege of writing locale to me that I find deeply bothering. If you write the war zone, then confront it and try to stop it (in a pacifist way) immediately. Too much conjecture, too much wandering in text. Text should be there, here, now!

and

That’s what I am on about re making the poem a live part of protest and resistance rather than a record or even a prompt to discussion (they’d like to think action, but it’s only coterie action when and if so).

So, poetry is part of it, not just a tool for analysing the wrongs (and at best promoting discussion among like minds). I suppose in the end this might seem like hair-splitting; surely any poem that claims to be activist and that is working to rectify inequalities, bigotry, exploitation, and damage is a good thing. But there is a difference in modes of approach, and ‘activist poem’, as a term, is always going to wear too many faces to retain emphasis.

John Kinsella