Vegan 30th-anniversary poem by John Kinsella (Graphology sequence)

by John Kinsella

Graphology Chronotype 24: Fantasias on Veganism (on the thirtieth anniversary of my veganism)

(i)

I lift the word cadence but improvisation is Bottesini’s

            different calenture, differing application

            of eating utensils: one model

            serves all

this interview with materials used in making an instrument

            the tip of a pool cue

all of it concrete

            variations

remember those ballet shoes you had made? — non-leather

            to dance with the troupe in & out of the wings

or gut of that doubling

I hear and integrate

what to do with, where to go

this Fantastic Voyage via

philosophies adapted to the way

they want to live    ‘They’

belonging to philosophies,

not the life story

(ii)

Not mentioning the craft of insectivore weebills

            so small

staying on track between wattles

in a high wind — you’d think they’d be tossed

and buffeted and dashed on the granites

knuckling through this fast-eroding hillside

but no, they are intact   complete   and don’t need me

and my inherited subjectivity, my wilfulness as they pinpoint

Not mentioning their craft, their particularised

strength to make landfall, line-of-sight

flight to branch on neighbouring wattle

would be to close out web of myth and facts

that might or might not catch all

            as full disclosure

and though no person you know eats weebills

there’s autonomy beyond your ken

and walking into the wind —

            shirt a tattered flag

without denomination —

is cross-referencing, an experientialism

hunkering down against

the ripping sou’westerlies

(iii) Ontologies Dreamed like the Benzene Molecule — an Address, of Sorts...

So, my ethical veganism becomes your ontological

categorisation to offset your own convenience store

of locality to qualify the ecology you know is right?

            Property settlements. Pay-slips.

Factory farm of belief as if it needs to fit your system?

These human dualists drawing animals into the realm

of human compassion, the imposition of separateness!

Flexible templates of locality. The beautiful

hypocrisies of text. Friends and loved ones

will always believe up to a point, or stage

their compassionate interventions. Agency

of each cell is beyond the networks of agriculture,

the grain plains of the Western Australian wheatbelt,

the utility of kangaroo-farming? The factories

of agronomy? See, I can oppose the out-of-kilter

of the plant-based — as much as you can oppose the factories

of animal production and still excuse the use of animals.

Delineating consumerism’s many faces. Threat of nirvana.

            Fetish of communication.

The interweaving of predators to tell a story,

to sinew experience as declaration.

No ecology is above what makes it sounds like an instruction.

Am I suggesting this? Am I ecology as definition,

an ontology of pantheism in which animals walk their way

because humans moved away, told stories

of human and animal selves separating and morphing

            and separating? Our rhizomes?

Kernels and husks, germs and ears of grain. The plains.

This tree arm, the rings of my tender body shedding.

The space about ‘food’ in the mouth:

light trapped in darkness, pockets and cavities

of air and darkness, the watery universality.

            Pure as the driven –ism. Re-

framed as signature terminology. Reference

in any contemporary discussion of veganism.

This infiltration of self. Of self-justification.

            Wholly holy ouroboros —

snake eating itself a dream invented to fit

the new mode of living. Here in the West.

(iv)

The choice

is made

and was made

outside product — each fad that means

fewer animals exploited and killed

is good; but we must

be wary of the product

that brings down

the ecosystem, feeds the state

which will eat animal and plant,

vegetable and mineral,

with an insatiable appetite,

shit out the planet.

An example? Palm oil?

Jungles are cleared

for the sake. These vegan snacks

can mean the death of so many individuals

that the term ‘species’ (as in extinction)

is the only collective noun

that is translatable

here.

So ‘product’

packaging of planet

will salve only desire:

ontologically or otherwise.

And all product is local

at this point, and that.

A mirror.

            John Kinsella

Easy vegan vanilla slice

By Tracy


This one is simple: a no-bake (stove-top & fridge), veganised vanilla slice.

Ingredients:

Packet of plain square vegan crackers
(e.g. Jacob's cream crackers)

Vegan custard made up as follows:
4 tbsp custard powder (Bird's and Orgran are vegan and have no artificial colourings)
2 tbsp sugar
1 pint (about 568 ml) plant milk (I used soy).
(Basically it's an ordinary vegan custard but made with double measure of powder, so that it's thicker)

A cup or so of icing sugar. You can either mix it with passionfruit pulp & juice to the right, spreadable consistency, or use a little plant milk plus a drop of lemon extract -- something slightly tangy or acidic to offset the thickness of the filling.


Method:

Place one layer of crackers in the base of a deep-sided rectangular tray. You may have to bevel the corners to make them fit; you can see I also used some thinner strips at the edges. On a pyrex dish, I didn't need to grease the base.

Make up your vegan custard to the thick consistency you see in the picture:

Spoon the custard as evenly as you can over the base. You have to act quickly or it will get too firm:

Place the next layer of crackers over the top of the custard and press down to get it as even as you can. It doesn't matter if your "paving" is slightly bumpy because these are the lines you will cut along to serve, anyway:

Quickly mix up your icing and spread it over the top layer of crackers. It doesn't matter if the icing is quite wet, as the crackers will soften by absorbing some of the moisture from below and above.




Place in fridge to set and chill. The longer you can leave it, the better the crackers will soften. Using the crackers is a lower-fat approach than using pastry (and no baking involved), and you virtually can't taste the difference.

Ghent goes veg... once a week

By Tracy

The UK's Guardian reported last week ("Day of the Lentil Burghers") that the Belgian city of Ghent (Gent/Gand), as part of its contribution to fighting global warming and to improving human health, is going vegetarian one day a week. They began last Thursday.

According to the report:

"The city council says it is the first town in Europe and probably the western world to try to make the entire place vegetarian for a day every week. Tom Balthazar, the Labour party councillor pushing the scheme, said: 'There's nothing compulsory. We just want to be a city that promotes sustainable and healthy living.'

Every restaurant in the city is to guarantee a vegetarian dish on the menu, with some going fully vegetarian every Thursday. From September, the city's schools are to make a meat-free meal the 'default' option every Thursday, although parents can insist on meat for their children. At least one hospital wants to join in."

This is a great step in the right direction. And as one who's always believed that one of the best ways to encourage people in our spoiled, well-fed countries to try going vegan is to make them great vegan food, I was interested to read how it started:

"The Lib-Lab coalition running the city was persuaded to back the idea when Philippe van den Bulck, an outstanding culinary talent, served up a veggie gastronomic tour de force at the town hall. He is one of Flanders's top chefs and food writers, doing time at El Bulli in Spain, to many the best restaurant in the world. He is also a vegetarian."

There's a vegan quoted in the article too, and as the emphasis is on "tapping into a zeitgeist awareness of the cost to human health and the environment of intensive meat and dairy farming", and the sample food mentioned in the article includes egg-free mayonnaise, there's evidence of a vegan consciousness in the exercise too.

Dorothy Porter

We are both sad at the news that the poet and fiction writer Dorothy Porter died yesterday. It is hard to imagine Australian literature without her.

John: Dorothy once wrote that poetry was her “response to the delight and dilemma of awareness”. She was a poet always searching for the spark in language, and cared deeply about keeping her readers entertained and interested. She was a remarkably generous and energetic writer, and a very liked and respected person. I’ve read in public with Dorothy over the years and always found it an enthusiastic and mutually supportive experience. She believed that poetry and poets mattered. I first had contact with Dorothy after my book Night Parrots came out in the late eighties, when she wrote to say she had published a book entitled, The Night Parrot. For some years, she addressed and signed her letters to me, The Night Parrot. She had an incredibly strong and wry sense of humour, and was overwhelmingly good-natured. We also shared an interest in animal rights and conversed on issues important to the vegetarian (her) and the vegan (me). As a poet, she is unique in Australia for energising the verse novel form and writing a poetry of both immediacy and mythological depth, and also reinventing “genre” in a poetic context. She was one of Australia’s greats.

Tracy: I can’t come to terms with speaking of Dorothy in the past tense, such is her force and presence as a poet and woman. Here in Western Australia, as elsewhere, she made a huge impact with her dynamic performance and her memorable books. I’ve taught her poems to students everywhere we’ve lived, and they were immediately popular. Always down-to-earth regardless of her huge success and talent, always passionate about poetry and keen to revitalise it, bring it to new audiences – she will really be missed.

Vegan cake

By Tracy

How to cheer up a kid who's been home from school
not feeling too good --
but whose appetite is just fine...

Veganic Gardening Poetics

Time to get the garden going again. It’s hard to believe that it was a high-yielding vegan wonderland only two months ago. It’d been producing for nigh-on ten months and I felt it was time to let the land lie fallow for a while. Over the next couple of weeks I will dig/hoe the weeds in, turn in dry compost, water it to let the weeds emerge then turn them back into the soil after a week or two as green compost. I’ll leave it sit for another week, water, turn it again then plant with “original” organic/veganic seed.

It is an entirely veganic/organic garden, with no animal manures or products, no pesticides or herbicides or artificial fertilisers. The soil is quite acidic, so I do use plenty of wood ash. The wood ash itself comes from our bush stove which we run during winter, burning only storm-felled wood. We do not “harvest” wood that has obviously settled as habitat for insects and animals.

Last summer’s tomato crop (planted late) was still yielding in June! Even the Chinese cabbages were going into late autumn. The frost finishes things off when winter really sets in, but the dramatic seasonal shift brought on by climate change means long late summers and autumns. We also had a sizeable harvest of butternut pumpkins, masses of snow peas through winter, a winter and autumn continual harvest of sugar-snap peas and broad beans, excellent winter broccoli, silverbeet throughout the year, even in the middle of winter, late carrots and beetroot, autumn chillies and capsicum, plus various herbs (exquisite oregano and basil).

I went out to survey the garden beds today — it’s not so hot, reaching only the low 30s. A couple of weeks back it was in the mid-to-high 40s! That’s around and above 120 Fahrenheit. Sears gardens. Anyway, I checked out the ground... dry and dusty with a jungle of wild oats that came up late and were left, obscuring all. Amazing after months of no water that some things that weren’t harvested, because they didn’t finish in time, or weren’t quite up to scratch, still struggle on. Especially cabbages. Lots of dried and split broad-bean pods, spilling beans on to the ground. Will collect those. A bean so sun-affected that it caught my eye, had gone from its regular brown opacity to a transparent redness, like a fierce eye glowing at night.

I took a couple of photos (below) of part of the garden:


When it’s thriving, it attracts a large numbers of birds — all are welcome. They work out insect issues (insects are also welcome), and also naturally fertilise the ground. If it falls there without human intervention, I’m okay with it!

When I am working out there on warm evenings, willie wagtails hang around, and often a pair of red-capped robins. The 28 parrots have eaten most of the seed from the vegetables I left to go to seed. I harvest enough and they get the rest.

The garden area is quite large and spreads along the flat. It will take a lot of work to prepare but it yields enough to feed two or three families daily, once it’s up and running. If I had my way, I would spend my life growing organic vegetables for a community. Maybe down the track! Oh, that garden is the source of many poems. I have a garlic poem from six months ago I haven’t published yet. I include it below. A veganic garden is a poetics.


Planting Garlic During a Dry Winter to Ward Off


Break the corms —
separate cling-wrapped
inner growth, free succulent
cloves, organs that open to dry
winter air. Make happen.

Cloves, curved as half-moons
out from the turntable of roots,
rotating out of the stalk core,
unsteady walking stick,
nervous maypole.

Give of tension, therapy,
cure-all for colds and plague,
torn from the dry cradle,
broken-skinned, into
the earth’s crumbling

encapsulation. Purple-
veined, as if all paper written on
still pulses with life. Ink blood
we read against, white intrusion
of page, of gleam.

An action less
than snapped apart, no more
set adrift, upright from parameter
to tip, mimic-thrust from boldness
to discrete finger up,

pointing. Thrust down, cold
to curve away from straight and narrow,
rupture surface, displace
fate. Attract rain.
Make warmth.

The sun, low, insists
its sweep across the winter dry,
stenographer’s growth,
politicising nurture,
meliorating.


John Kinsella

Nightlight pleasures of the State

Been a strange day for me. Have been concerned over war-profiteering of language. Of good intent on the surface that really operates as self-confirmation or emotional profit. Have also been thinking about how I can’t write my “old life”, the decade or so I can barely remember. I don’t want to, but maybe I should. When I do recall, I seem to recall amiss, according to those who claim to have seen and known it better. Last year a friend died with whom I’d spent a lot of time during these “phases”. See, I am only left with euphemisms. I have wanted to write an elegy — a memory of her — but haven’t been able to. I think Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle takes the typically easy path when he writes: “With writing there appears a consciousness which is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living: an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, Detroit, 1983, 131). There are not a few poets who would agree with this, but it is a typically “Western” text-entrapped conclusion come out of a struggle with State, that ultimately has given in before it has begun a resistance. The pat quoting of Novalis after this statement, “Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory”, plays the stock-epithet game. As a “saying”, it works, but as fact, it is unsupportable. The poem below — an elegy for K who died in very bizarre circumstances, made generic by the culturally-deleting “somewhere in South America” — is a processing of this. The record of K’s death is debatable in ways that aren’t mine to discuss, but nonetheless have become part of the conversation about her living life as well as her living death (many of those close to her celebrate her life rather than lament its loss). It’s also a poem about “place”. She liked to visit “the bush”, though I never saw her here. The poem is about contradictions, I guess. I once played war-games as a teenager. I also designed a war-game (or two). I then became an anarchist. Some years later (some would say many years later), a dedicated pacifist. I fought addictions and am proud to have overcome them, over a decade ago. And today I wrote this poem:


Graphology 788: Nightlight pleasures of the State

Dead-ringer, eidetic rough that sloughs
my slump, an ethics trap, sure, buster,
as K was cut up “somewhere
in South America”, culture dares

its weight, night when iron shakes,
rumples hoods to notch up fearfulness:
numb as paradox I was, and she said
hit the adrenalin, oxymoron for this

body type, beautiful in narcotics,
slam-dunked before the gates, left open,
struggling to close before sheep
stampeded, forced their way

announcing — alone — poor dittums.
I trowel those traumas, sweat that
serves my nakedness with hesitation,
embarrassment, as might have taken

root among the parrots, speaking their chat,
as I can, honestly, short-skinned,
downing long-necks in early morning,
traipsing out of sins and deals,

dead-loss conniving to empty
all accounts, cherishing sea-urge
of gulls who’d rather fossick
slightly in, in from the coast,

knowing the coast is contraire, less viable;
what if I sign up on the Sea Shepherd,
nibble before an action, come out
rough to trot, latch distant cheek by jowl,

stare long and hard, maladroit,
stretch those gibbets of gravity,
educe a tipple, violate tilt
of methylated spirits, cleaning toilets —

needle-stick around the bend?
That’s me — if known, truly known,
I’d be out on my ear, searching
for the residue of K. She

liked me and I her. I thought to be liked...
is decent. Thanks. Country night
fills country air, mercury lamps
the screen. I look out, nightlight,

barely structuring war-profiteers,
selling peace at margins, visoring lipid
sunsets in graphic programmes: she
would have temporarily

liked it out here — sequestered —
wiping aside the drool of electricity,
quaint alpacas wondering why
“sexy” is barely mountainous,

a gene-scene, remote
carpet-bagging sensibility,
the way the powders
came in from “overseas”,

cut to the chase, the drowsy
pin-cushion, vein-chase, cook-ups
when there was plenty. I barely
came out alive. Had to go, sorry.

A dog is barking. A small dog
barking high-pitched into the night.
Yapping — it is irritating,
more so because so distant.

Alone here. A country separation
like a planned pregnancy. The dog’s
pain would have irritated you
more than its barking. Music

stops and you start to worry.
Anything to keep it going. Rambunctious
crowds. Loopholes in the rapid.
Glasses that shut down 3D.

That’s eye to eye. Spectacle.
Warding off a deal with Novalis:
these archives, that memory.
I am cleaning up my act...

Half-weight annihilation.


John Kinsella

Introduction

Welcome, all. This is a dual blog by poets John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan. We intend to talk here about many diverse issues from poetry through to politics and anything else that takes our interest from day to day.

We are both committed, long-term vegans and pacifists, and John has called himself an anarchist since his teenage years. He is a strong believer in community living, decentralisation and living without the intrusion of the State. He has developed a term or a theory he calls "umbrella anarchism", which he uses to denote coexistence with the State while not condoning the activities of the State, with a view that eventually the State will dissolve through its own inadequacies, injustices and oppressions. He feels that consensus is the basis of any just community.

Further to this, he considers himself an international regionalist (his term), which in essence means he proposes international conversations between places, while respecting regional integrity. He is a deeply committed environmentalist and activist who aims to decrease human intrusion into the "natural world".

He believes strongly in indigenous land rights around the world.

Tracy writes fiction as well as poetry, and shares John's environmental and political concerns. She has a background in language studies and is keenly interested in all things related to language-learning, translation and linguistics in general. Consciously feminist since reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in her twenties, she continues to be interested (though often with disillusionment and frustration) in feminist writings and ideas. As a mother of two, she is also preoccupied with how we might equip children to survive in an increasingly damaged and disordered world. She has a passion for vegan cooking, especially baking, and for understanding vegan nutrition.