Concrete, concretion and installation poetry

Concretion and Damage: a Pre-manifesto (though written after)

John Kinsella


Below this article is a short ‘manifesto’ piece on creating ‘concrete’ texts in ‘natural’ environments or environments in which the ‘natural world’ intervenes, ‘intrudes’, or defines the conditions of viewing. This necessitates a lot of scare quotes because of the problem of mediating the ‘natural’ in the context of human seeing, perception and activity. All human activity is contingent on the ‘natural world’, regardless of how much it attempts to distance itself from the materials and variables of its construction. In the case of the images below, it might entail a spider or some other creature walking over a sheet of paper displaying a poem — the poem/sheet placed on the ground (or elsewhere) in the expectation that something will cross its path, literally. The patience is in waiting to capture the photograph.

The series of poem-texts on sheets of A4 was done near Walwalinj in York between 2005 and 2008. The poems were written and printed and no copy kept (digital or otherwise). They were then photographed ‘in situ’ and the paper recycled. These poems exist somewhere between installations and concretions. Over the last nine or so years I have been accumulating poems that exist as expressions in landscape — accepting landscape is a mediated term in itself, and relates to human presence and intervention with varying levels of impact. Whether printed-paper placed among rocks and scrub, or lines written in charcoal on a concrete path between York gums, or words scratched into a firebreak, none of the creations had more than a temporary presence in the environment outside being captured in photographs. The aim is always minimal impact on the ‘natural’. As we located ourselves mentally (as well as physically) at Jam Tree Gully, as we travelled away and returned, a real sense of concretion developed. The words written on the page, often while looking through a window, typed to shape on a manual typewriter, written in journals, seemed to be one part of a locution of place, an articulation of presence and the politics of this. The aim was to plant (literally trees, but also words) and repair, and to record.

Even ‘healing’ brings its costs, and all impacts generate change and loss. I started forming words on the obligatory firebreaks with sticks, scratching short poems in the gravel driveway with its steep gradient (see my earlier articles on the poetics of gradients). Sometimes I photographed these; mostly I didn’t. And in other places, in other countries, I did the same, recording the concretions in poems: describing activities but with no other record. Walking became a concretion for me, and I stepped the lines across roadways and pathways, through fields and paddocks and along fence-lines, up mountains (literally) and across bodies of water. All of these (from various locations around the world) feed into what is formulating as Jam Tree Gully 4 — a conceptualisation of concretion, a ‘demapping’ (see ‘demapping’ article) of presence that shows the costs of even the lightest impact, and contemplations of alternatives and consequences. They are works of ‘place’, displaced in their presentation.

I have always been interested in handwriting and drawing, and since the mid-90s have been writing ‘graphology’ poems. JTG4 is part of that project, and separate. In absence, as the grass is cut by a family member who helped build our house at Jam Tree Gully, I have been drawing word ‘maps’ of the cutting and tree-growth to ‘be there’. They are mental maps, conceptual maps in lieu of. The absentee reconstruction so when we return I can compare the imagined with the reality, and based on something I’ve done year after year, and bear the calluses on my hands to inform the cartography. But these are ‘de-maps’ because even absent-presence comes at a cost, and the polysituated self absorbs so much — a consciousness that giving back, sharing, and restoring even when away has to be built into the texts.

Which brings to mind someone else's recent project of connecting with place in Wales where a poem was painted onto rock faces in the Snowdonia National Park, intended to be temporary, to be washed away by the rains, but ended up being baked by a warmer than expected September and proving indelible. There are a number of issues here. One is the desire to mark place beyond the moment, which is problematical. But even more so is to miss the fact that climate change will necessarily alter conditions of interaction and presentation. So many of these things are ill-thought-out — a nice notion, but no depth in understanding of causality. So much ‘eco-art’, intended to be of a place and meld with it, merge with it, do no damage, leaves a permanent mark. I recall river installations made from ‘local materials’ that damaged microenvironments then floated down into the sea to join the suspended wastes that are changing the biosphere. The artist’s desire to leave a mark is understandable, but ephemerality has its worth in such contexts. Speaking words that won’t be heard, scratching words in sand that will blow over in a day... there are millennia of such acts. They are more durable than felled trees and carved rock (damaged or ‘used’ in the name of art and knowledge) in so many ways. They enter language and ritual, they inform our movements and day-to-day activities in ways we are rarely aware of.

But I am talking about a form of the concrete. A dissolvable, non-toxic concrete. That’s thinking about materials used and where they are from, what will happen to them afterwards, the ink used, the electricity used, the manufacturing implications — everything. In a global-capitalist world that is consuming itself, that glorifies the soldier in war but not the janitor who cleans up the body wastes of Ebola victims, we need to recognise the art of the moment, the poetry that is survival without damage. We don’t need to write out words in places revered for their natural beauty, but we can speak them there and even hold up a sheet of paper with those words, backdropped by the sublime or whatever you want to call it. The marks must be temporary because any more than that and the place will be changed irrevocably. And that it was altered in such ways in the past doesn’t mean we need to continue doing so. All borders are artifices. How we connect to a place is informed by so many variables. We don’t need to mark our connection by undoing the stone of it, itself.

The creation of a text in a natural environment, a concretion, brings into question how close you are/were to the event. I suggest that those performing an act of damage probably have it subliminally or overtly ‘written into’ their poetic language. And in their practice overall. These things are highlighted or hidden depending on how conveniently we can distance ourselves from the impacts we make, the damage we do. In poems of place we inevitably implant ‘locators’ — ‘co-ordinates’/spatial reference-points (tree, rock, mountains) that relate to the terrain of the place out of which the language comes. Without those topographical reference-points, sense of place is lost. Or is it? One could create simulacra in a poem on the page that seemingly have nothing to do with the place they refer to...?

This applies to one of the tenets of polysituatedness (see earlier article) and its larger set, international regionalism. The influx of many other geographical and topographic knowledges doesn’t undermine the fact that any place will have long-associated presence/experience and (spiritual) connectedness that has generated a specific language of that place, that loses something (or something is changed) in its being translocated or invested with new presence. The globalisation of economies (that is, imposing a mode of trade and finance centred on major economic power clusters but consuming and smothering smaller and less robust communities in the process) is vanguard military-capitalist self-empowerment, which is about ensuring that all the conduits feed the wealth of the few. Constructing a shop that sells mobile phones in place of a stand of trees, one might very well lessen communication rather than extend or ‘create’ it. It’s not about egalitarianism or caring, but about wealth-accumulation and control. To go into an impoverished space and create texts in the physical materials of that place (human-made or ‘natural’), without a personal connectedness with that place, is clearly exploitative on many levels; but it might be generative if, say, it brings awareness of issues that leads to self-empowerment. That would be a thread of polysituatedness that is conscious and self-critiquing. Does the end justify the means? That depends...

Poems implanted into the natural world are always about intrusion. They alter the co-ordinates of the ‘poetry’/poetics that pre-exist their intrusion. And there’s always a poetry (‘constructed’ and utilised in various forms and manifestations by people, animals, birds, plants...). To leave your mark is to occlude other marks, equally and maybe more necessary (codes to survival and understanding). If we start from that knowledge, then we can lessen the negative impact and increase the generative (awareness, different ways of seeing, respect). Also, we need to stop thinking of ‘poetry’, or rather the gestural substance of poetry, as a purely human activity. What we might call a ‘found’ poem or ‘artwork’ in nature (from a flower through to a burnt stump in the shape of something we think we recognise), is also nature in-itself.

Listening to a rare bird recently, I was conscious of taking its song for my purposes. It is its song. It’s not an installation. It’s not my poem (though I will make it mine, then altruistically share with other humans), but it might well be the bird’s poem. It’s not a concretion. But it might be something akin, something similar. It’s not all utility, I am sure. When placing a poem in the natural world, we could think of it as collaboration... with nature? But what is the ‘other’ getting out of it, rather than yourself and your audience (people)?

Literal concrete... was already there -- added charcoal

Literal concrete again... charcoal washed off after a week

Paper was recycled afterwards

Stick-writing on firebreak at JTG

Weighted down in high wind

Christmas spider came along of its own accord, after I placed the poem between 2 trees!

Another Graphology in a different form

One of many gravel concretions that change shape over days

Demapping — Jam Tree Gully 4 Concretions Manifesto 1


Jam Tree Gully 4 is a visual accretion of concrete poetry/visual poetry material, sound files and other materials from the last decade of creating artworks 'in situ' — that is, at the place of conception and awareness. In essence, Jam Tree Gully 4 can only come into being in a public space — I see this 'book' as a curated art space rather than the conventional printed page (though a catalogue would work well to accompany the installed materials).

The map poems are part of a 'concrete' line of work that I have been investigating for many years. They include poems written and printed (and then deleted from the electronic 'record' - these large-font printed poems only exist in this form), poems photographed 'in terrain'/in-situ (including rocks, clay, even ants 'randomly' walking across them) at my mother's place below Walwalinj (Mount Bakewell) in York, Western Australia; literal maps of Australia with text inserted, and poems created from text that 'map' a place - i.e. the words working as figurative and representative acts - standing for, and spatially in relation to, the place itself. I have also included images of texts scraped into the dirt and word poems ('graphology') made from sticks laid out on a firebreak at our place (Jam Tree Gully in the Western Australian wheatbelt). I have worked on concretions in the southwest of the Republic of Ireland which will become an extension of the Jam Tree Gully scenario — an ironic 'annexe' to the place of 'home'.

I am particularly interested in materiality of 'presentation' — the 'etho'/'ethical'-politics of deploying waste materials; of using, say, charcoal taken from a bushfire that went through the zone years before, of writing on concrete scribbled out on rough ground as a track when the rains (eventually!) come, the yellow sand brought in from elsewhere to break up soil for a vegetable garden or laying a driveway. Equally important is a respect for the intactness of rocks and eucalypts, the passing insects and animals — these are 'caught' in photographs and in textual imaging, but left unhindered in their place of origin.

This all fits into a politics of what I term 'demapping' colonised spaces and looking to different ways of configuring space outside of survey (indigenous Australians have numerous traditional and post-traditional methods — verbal and visual). When I say 'etho-political' I am playing on ethical, ethos, ecological and so on. In creating 'spatial poems' in which I 'map' our place at Jam Tree Gully, I enact ‘return’ as well as retrieval: this is stolen land which cannot be ‘owned’, and by acknowledging that the colonising language is overlay, I also acknowledge other languages exist/pre-exist as well, and are indeed primary. I do not use strings of indigenous words in order not to appropriate. The act of concretion is a recognition of the totemic, of the indigenous, and of the fact that I cannot lay claim to the material, spiritual, or conceptual co-ordinates of this space. But I can witness, observe, and ‘present’ (not ‘represent’).

So the 'mapping' poems become a process (even 'methodology') of/for breaking away from the constraints of mapping for control, occupation, dispossession and other power-ploys. The map defies its own purpose, its own subservience to 'usage'.

Jam Tree Gully 4 is curated space. A curator 'spatialises' it within the conceptual (and real) gallery. In essence, it is an exhibition of the creation of ‘the book’ in curatorial space.

More on a Poetics of Gradients

by John

I find this blog space useful (at the moment) for ‘thinking aloud’. I have been filling my journal — my hand-written journal! — with notes about writing poetry and living on a steep hillside block. The physical effort to move around the block is rewarding but exacting, even if one is reasonably fit and healthy. The string of poems arising out of this experience, this interaction (how could there not be poems? — angles are what we deal with every day...) is becoming central to the manuscript I am working on. Not all would enjoy walking ‘our’ place — some would come and look and leave before they had to negotiate the steepness, even with the many trees and rocks to assist in their movements. The landscape I am writing is in counterpoint to the landscape of Thoreau’s Walden.

So, I have already written and published a number of poems about this, but I have also been keeping an ear and eye open for poems about climbing hills. For hill, valley, and high places, early (in particular) R. S. Thomas is superb. I am deeply attracted to his negative affirmations, his ‘grim’ negotiations with loss, and his beyond-irony observations of the imposition and liberations of patterning, mapping, demarcations (of nation, myth, labour, failures of belief and refusals to conform to imposed ‘belief’):

There’s a man still farming at Ty’n-y-Fawnog,
Contributing grimly to the accepted pattern.
The embryo music dead in his throat.

(R. S. Thomas, ‘The Welsh Hill Country’)

The Reverend Thomas’s centralising of the human within ‘creation’ is always displaced (certainly in the earlier verse) by a discomfort with the relationship between human, nature, and creator, and often a questioning of what divisions exist between these. The hills themselves are an interesting case in point, almost existing outside the triangle, operating at a tangent (and gradients) to the will of things.

This morning I came across another poem that seemed apt in many ways. It’s from a book I just received for review from the Sydney Morning Herald — The Other Way Out: New Poems by Bronwyn Lea (Giramondo, 2008). The poem entitled ‘Red Hill’ combines a clarity of affirmation offset by a haunting sense of threat that comes no matter the familiarity of climbing the same hill over a long period of time. It’s a poem that has the language of gradient (though it doesn’t specifically use that more mathematical descriptor/definition), poised to a point of absolute concision:

— the acute
angle of the world
to my cheek
rising as if to slap or kiss me
even to lie
down I am near
vertical & filled with steep
inclination —

(Bronwyn Lea)

The physicality of both body and spirit and the intellectual processing of the co-ordinates are deftly handled.

The hill we live on would not ‘slap or kiss me’ — it is too stony and too ‘defiant’ to register me/us in that way. Strangely, I know no matter how long I walk its slopes, it will resist me, but do so with indifference.

Gradient poems will always deploy words like ‘steep’, ‘incline’, and terms related to angles (‘acute’, ‘obtuse’, ‘right’...), but the point is how these terms relate to the emotional, social, political, and ethical space of the poem. The specificity matters and brings different impressions. An acute angle makes for a very different tension to an obtuse angle: not only in the different description of place, but also, obviously, in the effect the angle has on how the reader ‘feels’ the description. You can climb a steep angle but you have to scale a right angle, so to speak. I am interested in the inside of an angle as much as in the outside. The radian of an angle is part of the world I am examining: part of the sphere, part of the 360 degrees of a conceptual (and a literal) ‘planet’ I am trying to create around the specific place, around Jam Tree Gully, around this de-mapped ‘Walden’ (or not Walden).

What I am getting at, under the weirdness and irrelevancies, is that when we paint poetic portraits of place, we in fact create a very real mathematics of that space. In so many fantasy novels, writers include maps — and indeed it was the maps that originally attracted me so strongly to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings when I was at high school (I went on to read the book twenty-six times and to write my final Year Eleven school paper in literature for my teacher Bill Green about it) — as a validation of the ‘fantasy’ (and/or speculative fiction) writer’s imagined world, of its ‘real spatiality’, as if the map makes concrete the projected imagined.

But I want to do the opposite — in my maths I want to de-map, to undo the recording of topographical features and the routes between them by allowing those features and routes to appear as they ‘naturally’ do on any given occasion: to alter and morph with erosion, changing movements of animals, new growth and death of old trees, and so on.

I have mentioned my problem with people disturbing the bush by using GPSs to go off-track, to make new routes between points. I am not advocating the arbitrary making of paths through spaces, but rather the following of paths as they grow and change. A lot of what I walk along are kangaroo paths. No map can be ‘real’ outside the moment of its making. It needs constant adjustment. Google Earth is an imperialism of mapping, not a liberation from its strictures, in the same way as GPS denies what’s there to follow points given without subjectivity via a satellite. How the satellite looks is relevant: whether it’s speaking electronically to a GPS or we’re examining pictures taken. The use of angles, the use of circles, the use of poems written out of the line (out of Eudumus), out of rays, is an alternative to merely creating a ‘map’. It is active and changing. Adjustments can be made.

Maybe pertinently, a couple of days ago we took young Tim to the Maritime Museum at Fremantle. Actually, we took him to see the Bon Scott statue, but after that had some spare time so thought we’d take him to see the harbour. One of the exhibitions was based on French exploration of Australia, and the display of early maps was fascinating. Curatorial paraphernalia confirming the drives of ‘exploration’ rang loud, and the stuffed animals spoke their own refutations, but the early maps of the southern land with their mix of hypothesis, guesswork, and solid charting, affirmed for me that the Idea (Platonic Forms, in some ways) of place is more accurate than the material. The maps, the more confirmed they are, become imitations of the land itself, and through imitation become separated from cause and effect. In other words, the map, though made through the senses, actually desensitises response to place.

Over the last week the locality around Jam Tree Gully has been assaulted by scramble and quad bikes hacking up the reserve firebreaks and along the boundaries of where we live. In swathes of ecological destructiveness, these violent pleasurists (along with the shooters around the place), use intimidation and aggression to impose their sense of control and mapping on animals, plants and humans of the place. I am told that many of them are city blokes come up during holidays to stay with other motorbike enthusiasts, getting overexcited at the ‘space’ and consequently ‘cutting sick’. I understand their compulsions, and would be a hypocrite if I didn’t acknowledge that as a kid around the farm I did similarly, but by the time I was in my mid teens I’d come to the conclusion that the destruction and violence of the activity cancelled the thrill and the pleasure.

Okay, that’s my learning curve and why should it be anyone else’s? Because there’s a growing awareness that such destructions have consequences far outside their locality and that it affects the riders as much as anything and anyone else...?

Is there an activist position to be had here? What do I do? Confronting them and declaring the wrongs of it likely means being targeted — I am told this has been happening lately. You’re selected (I use the word specifically) for special treatment. Okay, so I will try and dialogue with them. Will the riders listen? Who knows. But that’s the first activist step: dialogue.

Second and concurrent step: I will write poems, and maybe even read one to them. Seriously... sometimes it works. Poetry can really matter. Many bike riders of whatever modus operandi are operating as ‘outsiders’. I’ve known a few patch-wearing bikies in my time with whom I’ve had some excellent conversations about music and lyrics. In a territorial organisation, aesthetics and decodings are vital. I will certainly read poems to others around the place who are concerned about this damage (soil diseases/pathogens are also easily and readily spread via motorbike wheels). The terror and trauma being inflicted on the kangaroos and birds in the reserve, along with every other living thing, must be extreme, and needs to be countered. From the ‘official’ point of view, the riding of two-strokes through long grass is a fire risk, and this is another concern to all who live there.

But I mention this for another reason. One of the things that attracts riders to this place is the topography: the firebreaks cut through rocky ground, through treed slopes that become incredibly steep in places. It’s a rough and no doubt exhilarating ride. The riders charge down one valley wall and loop up another. The roar of their bikes shatters the valley air with a ringing that is beyond any ‘for whom the bell tolls’. The riders communicate with revs from one point to another. Triangles bend in 3D space. The rush down to the base of the valley (which is not broad) and the massive impetus downwards, then pulling up and slowing before impelling the machines with more revs to charge up the other side, is like a random and cut-loose amusement park ride. The down-up-down thrill. The bike does the work, but the rider’s excitement and consequent bodily activity work in parallel, or in unison.

In the act of thrill, the riders’ is a poetics of gradients as well. Not about conservation (as I hope mine is), but about concentration, focus, and separation from real-time, from the apparent limitations of ordinary movement (without the aid of a motorbike or other machinery). A kind of simulacrum of natural movement (the riding of a motorbike more in contact with the elements than the driving of a car) that multiples the adrenaline outcomes with less of the physical exhaustion.

The experience is repeated over and over until it sends those experiencing its side-effects around the twist (sorry, but it does). A machine poetics of gradients. If a bike travels up a hill at x speed and the hill has a gradient of...? It’s their outlaw poetry, but what I want to tell them is that it’s actually conservative and predictable: the outlaw act is, rather, to try to protect the ecology and to resist the urge of adrenaline, endorphins, and ‘pleasurism’ and ‘leisurism’, no matter how dark its origins, no matter how angry its rationalisations, or, conversely, how much ‘fun’ it might be.