By John
We were up in Geraldton last weekend for me to launch a Fremantle Press poetry book (more of this shortly, including the launch speech for those interested), where we saw my brother, visited Flat Rocks, and also the Greenough River mouth, where signs indicate that they are going to clear the entire dunes and surrounding dune ecology between the river mouth and Geraldton itself. The sign even refers to replacing dune ecology with ‘development’. It is brazen and ecologically horrendous. People feel powerless to stop it, as they do so much in this place of bulldozing and laying waste. I have taken notes for poems, and notes for an activist poetics piece, but these mean nothing without direct action. I will write to the Geraldton newspapers and ask if they’d publish an ‘activist poetry article’ about the issue. They might — the year before last, one of the papers ran a series of eight activist articles I wrote about returning to the town of my secondary schooling, a town I am still connected to because my brother lives there.
Poetry for me must work. All the good ideas in the world, all the most finely wrought lines and images, mean nothing if they don’t achieve action. In fact, they become another link in the capitalist chain of production. Value-adding the whole way. Recently I have been reading through essays for an issue of Angelaki I am co-editing, and felt compelled to point out: ‘from an anarchist point of view, collective and individual responsibility are in so many ways one and the same thing, and the obsession with individual action as defining itself against collective responsibility is a contradiction that seems contrived to maintain the status quo.’ I mention this because the personal subjectivity of poetry-making (even within the collaborative) should be read against the communal consciousness of poetics and poetry per se. Whatever form it might take. Poetry is not read in a vacuum.
Lately I have been developing a ‘poetics of gradients’. Now, variations on poetics become absurd after a time, but really the urge to create systems explaining the reasons for writing poetry, and the processes and practices behind this, is a matter of both validating what can seem an impassive activity (outside aesthetics), giving it an activist context, and ultimately purpose. It’s probably unnecessary, but poetry methodologies (or a ‘lack’ of them, according to some — especially when they get risky) are constantly under surveillance (criticism?), and the poetics pro forma becomes an illustration of due process — to show that thought and effort have been applied to a choice.
To cut a long story short, this poetics of gradients concerns writing poetry on a hillside. The physical effort it takes to walk up and down the Jam Tree Gully ‘block’ engenders a different breath, a different instress in the poem. When you sit down to draft a poem on, say, a wild beehive in a split York gum you’ve just seen, you carry the work effort, the work of the gradient into your poem.
Tracy did a wonderful translation of Jacques Brel’s ‘Le plat pays’ — ‘The Flat Country’ — the other day, that really puts the power of surfaces and their angles (or flatness) into a dynamic perspective. There’s this wonderful line (which I give in Tracy’s translation): ‘With a sky so low that a canal lost its way.’ This is describing Belgium. Brilliant. The refrain in the song (poem!) goes ‘The flat country that is mine.’ I have lived a long time on lightly hilly ground at the bottom of a small mountain (or very large hill), with paddocks of stubble stretching out. And now at Jam Tree Gully I am starting to replant a rocky hillside, and to write poems in that space. The differentials, the segment of the line, discovering the nature of the slope, are part of the prosody of the poem’s ‘rise over the run’: m = Δy / Δx (see Wiki on slopes). I have always been interested in maths, and it’s always part of my poetry — sometimes hidden away, sometimes overtly. It’s certainly part of the poetics of gradients, of slope, that I am formulating now. By way of illustration I might copy in a handwritten journal page and include a poem...
from journal: 30/1/2009, Jam Tree Gully, 9.45pm:
Our first night staying over... Kids are asleep and Tracy is in the lounge-room reading (Stendhal). Looking forward to it all being ready for full-time habitation. Lot of work!
Went for an evening walk with Tim and a pair of eagles flew up through the valley and over as perched on large granite boulders — maybe twenty feet over our heads! Incredible. Walking up the steep slope the work on my heart and lungs created the waste, the chemicals, the energy of the poem. A usage of the excess my body produced in providing the work needed to get to the top, to the house. A poetics of gradients, of the hill. You see differently as you walk a slope, you sense differently. The angles of seeing change and you compensate, as does the poem. Even descent brings a work and a caution, the brain creates shorter lines to prevent slipping.
And here’s some poetic work done a few weeks prior:
First Lines Typed at Jam Tree Gully
To hold the walls of valley
downthrust limbs of York gum
liminality, flakes of granite
and lichen scored as sun inland,
glitterati, this Toodyay stone
broken where the building
has opened precipice,
erodability, that movement
where we walk, dislocating
weight of conversation, even
meditation, to contravene
our visibility, perched
up on high, sidereal.
A drawing out, the day
lessens, rampage
of dead and living trees,
entire collapsed structures,
signs of fire as jam-tree bark
blackened crumbles with touch,
all working shadows thin up
the hill, the hill. Kangaroos
stir from their shady places —
the heat so intense at midday
they don’t do more than lift
their head as you approach.
In the dirt, laterite smudgings,
hard-baked patches of sand, coarse-
grained breakdown of quartzite
in its granoblastic glory, a sheen
of mica and feldspar configuring
a sandstone past, a declaration
of origins; what grows in what
was here before? It demands
reconnection or the hill
will despoil to its granite
core and nothing more,
nothing more. Dazzling
anomaly of pyrites, breeze
sharpened with ‘fool’, ‘fool’...
welcome here... don’t cling
together, give us roots
to nest among, cling to.
Common bronzewings heavy across the blank
of an arena we will fill with trees: sandy
spectacle, where horses rounded
on their tails: I see them twitch.
Internal fences down and out. Fewer
divisions. To predict a fate, changes
sweeping over an old old place; ring-
neck parrot feathers no divination.
What has chiacked in place
of undergrowth?
Weebills are here! And mistletoe birds
have been where mistletoe fruits have prospered,
have seeded the jam trees, where nectar-hungry
birds of many varieties test the hardy flowers
drooping in swatches from thin, straining necks;
the parasitic engenders its own chains of being.
I am not asking to be part of it. With time,
something will click, I have no idea what. No
second-guessing, despite the weight
of hexagrams, I-Ching. What else
I might read. Weebills are here!
Horseshoes and sheep skulls strewn across the block.
rare new growth, so late and odd. Fire wardens
watching afraid of vegetation? They have their own
version of prehistory, their own version of growth.
The making of place as a dynamic of couplings,
as if love and trust are omens, odds in your favour.
The sun burns but also fringes the leaves.
John Kinsella
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Bushfires
By John and Tracy
Like everyone else, we are overwhelmed with sadness at the disaster that has taken place in Victoria over this last week, and want only to express our condolences and support for everyone affected.
There are practical ways of helping: you can donate money through various means, including the following (courtesy Sydney Morning Herald):
Red Cross Call 1800 811 700 or go to redcross.org.au
Salvation Army Call 137 258 or go to salvos.org.au
NAB relief fund call 136 622
and the Bendigo Bank and Australia Post Office here where we live are also accepting donations, so we assume that would be the case elsewhere too. Myer stores are apparently accepting donations, and some charities will take goods (clothing etc).
Like everyone else, we are overwhelmed with sadness at the disaster that has taken place in Victoria over this last week, and want only to express our condolences and support for everyone affected.
There are practical ways of helping: you can donate money through various means, including the following (courtesy Sydney Morning Herald):
Red Cross Call 1800 811 700 or go to redcross.org.au
Salvation Army Call 137 258 or go to salvos.org.au
NAB relief fund call 136 622
and the Bendigo Bank and Australia Post Office here where we live are also accepting donations, so we assume that would be the case elsewhere too. Myer stores are apparently accepting donations, and some charities will take goods (clothing etc).
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Robert Drewe's "The Rip"
By Tracy
I've just finished reading Robert Drewe's latest collection of short stories, The Rip, and know that I won't be able to get it out of my system for a long time. It's a hardback of thirteen stories, one or two of which I'd already read in journals or elsewhere, though they take on an even stronger resonance in this context.
The stories hang together beautifully, though the only recurring "character" is the setting, mostly on the Pacific side of Australia, but there's a bit of the West in there too, in the devastating "Stones Like Hearts", which takes place at Shelly Beach, covered in stones "after those savage winter storms off Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern Oceans collide in a maelstrom of tides, spindrift and stinging winds..." (p. 77). It's a story that demonstrates excruciatingly the kind of thing life is too short for, that places the petty but cruel interactions that can happen between human beings in the context of a larger, more anonymous darkness -- but I'm misrepresenting here, because the story's also imbued with Drewe's typical satirical humour -- aimed frequently but not unkindly in these stories at the "New Age" element -- deftly offsetting the pain.
Drewe doesn't focus only on the quasi-hippy/New Age/finding-oneself brigade; he's equally sharp-eyed yet still fair toward the conservative farming type alongside whom they often live in these stories -- in fact, in some instances, these divergent social sectors have to pull together despite themselves, or end up doing so out of self-interest of one kind or another.
It's impossible to pick out favourites in this collection, because though there's great variety within the thematic cohesion, they're all, to my mind, of an equally high standard. Drewe accomplishes in prose fiction what I often (perhaps my limitation and not the genre's!) think is only possible in poetry: the suggestion of so much more than is actually told. That's not to say the writing is "poetic" in the sense that people often intend when they complain of "poetic fiction" -- the diction is clean and muscular, to the point, carefully chosen and "clear" enough to please any reader.
But over and above (or even underneath) this beautiful clarity, there's a metonymic expertise that makes each story greater than itself, that points up for us aspects of our society, our psyche even, that are in need of facing. On the most minute level, a tree or a plant or an animal in this work is at once specifically itself and of its region -- Drewe's an artist of precision, there's no bald, generic, lazy backgrounding here -- and also symbolic or suggestive of the human folly pressing in upon it from all sides (the camphor laurels of "The Lap Pool" are one example). The folly, however, is observed with enough neutrality that it invites compassion (the satire never strikes me as mean).
At the same time, there's genuine narrative drive and suspense, but I won't go into too much detail on that, because I don't want to spoil surprises. Drewe makes it look so easy. The Rip is perfect reading, if at the same time daunting for the would-be fiction-writer who reads it, and feels in awe ("why bother trying when he does it so well?").
Many of these stories explore a more or less middle-class milieu, but they are completely subversive of the kind of fiction I associate with the narrower version of middle-class taste, the fictions in which women are supposed to admire the "Sargassos" of this world ("Sargasso" is a character -- or a quintessence! -- in Drewe's final story, "The Life Alignment of the Coffee Grower", a caricature designed perhaps to put paid to any lingering fantasy of romance about the so-called S.N.A.G. who still pops up in women's fiction and movies. And even in life?)
I could say so much more about this book, but now I'm going to pass it on to a family member I know will love it...
I've just finished reading Robert Drewe's latest collection of short stories, The Rip, and know that I won't be able to get it out of my system for a long time. It's a hardback of thirteen stories, one or two of which I'd already read in journals or elsewhere, though they take on an even stronger resonance in this context.
The stories hang together beautifully, though the only recurring "character" is the setting, mostly on the Pacific side of Australia, but there's a bit of the West in there too, in the devastating "Stones Like Hearts", which takes place at Shelly Beach, covered in stones "after those savage winter storms off Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern Oceans collide in a maelstrom of tides, spindrift and stinging winds..." (p. 77). It's a story that demonstrates excruciatingly the kind of thing life is too short for, that places the petty but cruel interactions that can happen between human beings in the context of a larger, more anonymous darkness -- but I'm misrepresenting here, because the story's also imbued with Drewe's typical satirical humour -- aimed frequently but not unkindly in these stories at the "New Age" element -- deftly offsetting the pain.
Drewe doesn't focus only on the quasi-hippy/New Age/finding-oneself brigade; he's equally sharp-eyed yet still fair toward the conservative farming type alongside whom they often live in these stories -- in fact, in some instances, these divergent social sectors have to pull together despite themselves, or end up doing so out of self-interest of one kind or another.
It's impossible to pick out favourites in this collection, because though there's great variety within the thematic cohesion, they're all, to my mind, of an equally high standard. Drewe accomplishes in prose fiction what I often (perhaps my limitation and not the genre's!) think is only possible in poetry: the suggestion of so much more than is actually told. That's not to say the writing is "poetic" in the sense that people often intend when they complain of "poetic fiction" -- the diction is clean and muscular, to the point, carefully chosen and "clear" enough to please any reader.
But over and above (or even underneath) this beautiful clarity, there's a metonymic expertise that makes each story greater than itself, that points up for us aspects of our society, our psyche even, that are in need of facing. On the most minute level, a tree or a plant or an animal in this work is at once specifically itself and of its region -- Drewe's an artist of precision, there's no bald, generic, lazy backgrounding here -- and also symbolic or suggestive of the human folly pressing in upon it from all sides (the camphor laurels of "The Lap Pool" are one example). The folly, however, is observed with enough neutrality that it invites compassion (the satire never strikes me as mean).
At the same time, there's genuine narrative drive and suspense, but I won't go into too much detail on that, because I don't want to spoil surprises. Drewe makes it look so easy. The Rip is perfect reading, if at the same time daunting for the would-be fiction-writer who reads it, and feels in awe ("why bother trying when he does it so well?").
Many of these stories explore a more or less middle-class milieu, but they are completely subversive of the kind of fiction I associate with the narrower version of middle-class taste, the fictions in which women are supposed to admire the "Sargassos" of this world ("Sargasso" is a character -- or a quintessence! -- in Drewe's final story, "The Life Alignment of the Coffee Grower", a caricature designed perhaps to put paid to any lingering fantasy of romance about the so-called S.N.A.G. who still pops up in women's fiction and movies. And even in life?)
I could say so much more about this book, but now I'm going to pass it on to a family member I know will love it...
Thursday, January 29, 2009
From the land of plenty
By John
Figurative language can be a con — a way of having it both ways. I don’t mean an ambiguity that suits a fencesitter, but both ways in terms of ‘artistic integrity’ and making a political stand about an issue. As if the two are mutually exclusive. There needs to be a para-figurative language that denotes specifically without ambiguity (which I usually aim for in a poem!) in terms of tone and aim of critique, but that also allows for a flexibility in range of ‘message’, effect, and, indeed, affect. Somewhere between agitprop and the tone poem.
Here’s an example... The poem below is an out-and-out attack on GM crops which the latest government (a right-wing government) has imposed on the people of Western Australia. A ramping-up of larger-scale GM canola trials. They’ve been going on small-scale around here for years. GM culture has infiltrated in so many ways. Lies about ‘feeding the world’, when in fact the GM companies mean lining their own pockets, don’t wash, I’m afraid. That GM crops contaminate non-GM crops, and the non-GM environment at large, is well attested.
I have always found it somewhat ironic that some scientists accuse the anti-GM activists of defending organics as an act of class sabotage — claiming that organic food is a trendy middle-class fad irrelevant to the real world of commercial and mass cropping to feed ‘the masses’. I feel everyone has the right to clean, unadulterated and non-GM food. The ironies multiply if one considers the middle-class privilege and appendages (cars, televisions, playrooms full of fads, conference dinners...) enjoyed by so many of these scientists themselves. Actually, scientists often consider themselves a class apart. What’s more, the damage inflicted by their monocultures is visible and obvious. Something isn’t working. Greed, government and corporate power, profit-taking even outside the Gordon Gekko realms, is part of it.
Gene patenting isn’t altruism; it’s research grants, jobs, kudos, flat-screen televisions and snappy four-wheel drives for inner-city driving (sorry, plus the odd drive out to check field trials). I rant because I want to indicate the passion behind writing the following poem. I mean business. I am being critical. However, I do believe in exchange and conversation, and have conversed with many a GM scientist about these issues. Of course, they can send plenty of criticism back my way as well, and I take that on board. So, though I am certain in my opposition and criticism, for this opposition to work in poetic form, it must let the language ironise somewhat my own certainties. To ‘lose’ the poem in vagaries would be against the aim, but to damn and leave no room for figurative language to take the reader elsewhere, to allow an escape or points of entry that are about their own way of seeing, I might as well not bother with using poetry at all.
Thus, I have written this in what I am calling a para-figurative mode (a poor coinage, but a pragmatic one), even if it tilts closer to the agitprop than the metaphoric. Main thing is, the figurative (however slight here!) works like a sheet anchor, dragging the bottom rather than holding the boat firmly in place. The ownership of ‘plenty’ is one that allows me to use this technology (the Net) in the comfort of a private (if shared) dwelling, with land around me that state law says is protected from trespass. Thus the ‘para’. It’s not a desirable state, but a critique of the certainties of agitprop. I have plenty, compared to many. I still believe in the dissolution of the state, in the absence of government, in the value of community consensus, in veganism, in pacifism, in a non-GM organic world, in the conservation of flora and fauna and so on. But I have plenty, and that needs challenging. (I will add a second poem beneath this to illustrate a more figurative version of the 'para-figurative' political poem.)
Plenty
In anticipation of the moratorium
being lifted, farmers and their families
(because it’s school holidays),
fly east to witness the first GM canola crops
planted for commercial gain in Australia.
The families follow the GM farmer (and the farmer
of GM) and snack in tents on not-yet-GM food.
This is the science that will feed the world.
And this is our ‘proficy’. It’s technology,
like your kids’ Playstations
or the GPS in your four-wheel drive.
Food technology is stimulating.
The company supplies the seed
and a compatible herbicide; soon they’ll meet
our needs for frost and even drought-
resistant strains. A company for the times.
Canola will thrive in dust. We’ll feed the world
(if they can pay). It’s scare tactics
when they rave about grain alcohol fuels
leaving Haitians feeding their kids
cookies baked out of mud and salt.
Enjoy the new science of the new
Western World: internationalist,
profit spread through ‘starving
countries’ where GM companies
have subsidiaries, outlets, local
scientists, shining offices, advertising
agencies, military affiliations,
farmers willing to feed us all. Back
in the West, spread the word,
let the kids brag about it at school,
topdress, lead the people to plenty.
John Kinsella
Malherbe’s Genetic Modifications: A Classicist Doctrine
Hey, I just heard the CEO of Monsanto
make odes out of genetic modification:
in steel rooms new crops make new promises,
their rules unclear, though we know
what he means, making doctrine
out of old-school plants, growth
pushed to the cultivatable limits.
Classical rules arise out of what’s planted.
Farmers feeding profits,
engineers of rhyme and reason,
seeds and flowers inspiration
without imagination. Same locally,
though subtextual: wheedling
away in the background, test sites
embedded in crops, ribboned
and star-picketed. In the East,
the moratorium has been lifted,
and the West itches to follow suit.
Hunger doesn’t have eternity,
and the body is a laboratory.
Clear as a world without imagery,
yellow canola fields effuse bienséance.
Direction as generic as pollen,
as seed in seed banks, as tailor-
made poisons in realms of poison
and lip-service; if you examine
the lubricity of canola seed, traipse
from one paddock to another,
it spreads its signature,
its overconfidence.
John Kinsella
Figurative language can be a con — a way of having it both ways. I don’t mean an ambiguity that suits a fencesitter, but both ways in terms of ‘artistic integrity’ and making a political stand about an issue. As if the two are mutually exclusive. There needs to be a para-figurative language that denotes specifically without ambiguity (which I usually aim for in a poem!) in terms of tone and aim of critique, but that also allows for a flexibility in range of ‘message’, effect, and, indeed, affect. Somewhere between agitprop and the tone poem.
Here’s an example... The poem below is an out-and-out attack on GM crops which the latest government (a right-wing government) has imposed on the people of Western Australia. A ramping-up of larger-scale GM canola trials. They’ve been going on small-scale around here for years. GM culture has infiltrated in so many ways. Lies about ‘feeding the world’, when in fact the GM companies mean lining their own pockets, don’t wash, I’m afraid. That GM crops contaminate non-GM crops, and the non-GM environment at large, is well attested.
I have always found it somewhat ironic that some scientists accuse the anti-GM activists of defending organics as an act of class sabotage — claiming that organic food is a trendy middle-class fad irrelevant to the real world of commercial and mass cropping to feed ‘the masses’. I feel everyone has the right to clean, unadulterated and non-GM food. The ironies multiply if one considers the middle-class privilege and appendages (cars, televisions, playrooms full of fads, conference dinners...) enjoyed by so many of these scientists themselves. Actually, scientists often consider themselves a class apart. What’s more, the damage inflicted by their monocultures is visible and obvious. Something isn’t working. Greed, government and corporate power, profit-taking even outside the Gordon Gekko realms, is part of it.
Gene patenting isn’t altruism; it’s research grants, jobs, kudos, flat-screen televisions and snappy four-wheel drives for inner-city driving (sorry, plus the odd drive out to check field trials). I rant because I want to indicate the passion behind writing the following poem. I mean business. I am being critical. However, I do believe in exchange and conversation, and have conversed with many a GM scientist about these issues. Of course, they can send plenty of criticism back my way as well, and I take that on board. So, though I am certain in my opposition and criticism, for this opposition to work in poetic form, it must let the language ironise somewhat my own certainties. To ‘lose’ the poem in vagaries would be against the aim, but to damn and leave no room for figurative language to take the reader elsewhere, to allow an escape or points of entry that are about their own way of seeing, I might as well not bother with using poetry at all.
Thus, I have written this in what I am calling a para-figurative mode (a poor coinage, but a pragmatic one), even if it tilts closer to the agitprop than the metaphoric. Main thing is, the figurative (however slight here!) works like a sheet anchor, dragging the bottom rather than holding the boat firmly in place. The ownership of ‘plenty’ is one that allows me to use this technology (the Net) in the comfort of a private (if shared) dwelling, with land around me that state law says is protected from trespass. Thus the ‘para’. It’s not a desirable state, but a critique of the certainties of agitprop. I have plenty, compared to many. I still believe in the dissolution of the state, in the absence of government, in the value of community consensus, in veganism, in pacifism, in a non-GM organic world, in the conservation of flora and fauna and so on. But I have plenty, and that needs challenging. (I will add a second poem beneath this to illustrate a more figurative version of the 'para-figurative' political poem.)
Plenty
In anticipation of the moratorium
being lifted, farmers and their families
(because it’s school holidays),
fly east to witness the first GM canola crops
planted for commercial gain in Australia.
The families follow the GM farmer (and the farmer
of GM) and snack in tents on not-yet-GM food.
This is the science that will feed the world.
And this is our ‘proficy’. It’s technology,
like your kids’ Playstations
or the GPS in your four-wheel drive.
Food technology is stimulating.
The company supplies the seed
and a compatible herbicide; soon they’ll meet
our needs for frost and even drought-
resistant strains. A company for the times.
Canola will thrive in dust. We’ll feed the world
(if they can pay). It’s scare tactics
when they rave about grain alcohol fuels
leaving Haitians feeding their kids
cookies baked out of mud and salt.
Enjoy the new science of the new
Western World: internationalist,
profit spread through ‘starving
countries’ where GM companies
have subsidiaries, outlets, local
scientists, shining offices, advertising
agencies, military affiliations,
farmers willing to feed us all. Back
in the West, spread the word,
let the kids brag about it at school,
topdress, lead the people to plenty.
John Kinsella
Malherbe’s Genetic Modifications: A Classicist Doctrine
Hey, I just heard the CEO of Monsanto
make odes out of genetic modification:
in steel rooms new crops make new promises,
their rules unclear, though we know
what he means, making doctrine
out of old-school plants, growth
pushed to the cultivatable limits.
Classical rules arise out of what’s planted.
Farmers feeding profits,
engineers of rhyme and reason,
seeds and flowers inspiration
without imagination. Same locally,
though subtextual: wheedling
away in the background, test sites
embedded in crops, ribboned
and star-picketed. In the East,
the moratorium has been lifted,
and the West itches to follow suit.
Hunger doesn’t have eternity,
and the body is a laboratory.
Clear as a world without imagery,
yellow canola fields effuse bienséance.
Direction as generic as pollen,
as seed in seed banks, as tailor-
made poisons in realms of poison
and lip-service; if you examine
the lubricity of canola seed, traipse
from one paddock to another,
it spreads its signature,
its overconfidence.
John Kinsella
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Bluff Knoll and the south
By Tracy
Just back from Albany (where the much cooler days were a relief -- though still warm enough to swim) and the Great Southern.
On the journey south, we stopped in the Stirling Ranges and I took this snap of the top of Bluff Knoll, which is the highest peak in the Stirlings.
Just back from Albany (where the much cooler days were a relief -- though still warm enough to swim) and the Great Southern.
On the journey south, we stopped in the Stirling Ranges and I took this snap of the top of Bluff Knoll, which is the highest peak in the Stirlings.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The terrorism of states
Written by John, posted & shared by Tracy
The machine of the state is essentially militaristic. The state of Israel is a fully military colonial machine. The destruction of the Palestinian people is its core aim — to create space for itself, to assuage its own guilt at its mistreatment of those who do not ‘enjoy’ the privileges that come with participating in its statehood (and who resist its expansion/consolidation), and to ensure its own survival.
All states defend their own existences, and the existence of Israel has its obvious historical reason for being (and in some ways the psychology of its aggressions is understandable, if contradictory — but being understandable does not make it right). It’s the idea and reality of the state itself that engenders the brutality of a modern Israel, and any other state for that matter. Australia, the United States of America, Russia (and its so-called ‘federation’), the United Kingdom, China, France... right down to the smallest island nation-state, are part of the same picture.
Human brutality is not isolated to ethnicity, creed, or belief, but to the abrogation of self and community empowerment to the centralised militaristic ‘protection’ of the state. Every soldier is made a murderer by the actions of the state. Every soldier who participates is responsible, whatever they do or don’t do. It is a collective guilt and a collective injustice. Participants — voters, party officials, those who pretend it’s not their concern but continue to benefit from the state’s military actions — are equally culpable.
Non-violent resistance is the only way — and as poets, every poem we write should be a form of resistance, an act of linguistic disobedience. States murder more than they protect. And they protect to perpetuate their own existences. Disarm Israel. Disarm all states. Disarm all individuals. Weapons are a violation of all people’s rights. Until people who are not in the killing zones understand and resist the state, the killing will continue. For most, it’s a moment of indignation with the news headlines; then they move on with their lives. Killing knows no providence.
To make it clear — on a micro level, both Jewish and Palestinian peoples (and any other peoples for that matter) can co-exist (and have the right to co-exist) more justly without the machine of the state (Israeli, Palestinian, or any other form of state), and without the tools of conflict. The abolition of all states is the only avenue to justice, liberty, and fraternity. Ultimately the existence of any state means the oppression of those whom it perceives as threatening it, or acting against its interests, and, indeed, its own citizens.
The machine of the state is essentially militaristic. The state of Israel is a fully military colonial machine. The destruction of the Palestinian people is its core aim — to create space for itself, to assuage its own guilt at its mistreatment of those who do not ‘enjoy’ the privileges that come with participating in its statehood (and who resist its expansion/consolidation), and to ensure its own survival.
All states defend their own existences, and the existence of Israel has its obvious historical reason for being (and in some ways the psychology of its aggressions is understandable, if contradictory — but being understandable does not make it right). It’s the idea and reality of the state itself that engenders the brutality of a modern Israel, and any other state for that matter. Australia, the United States of America, Russia (and its so-called ‘federation’), the United Kingdom, China, France... right down to the smallest island nation-state, are part of the same picture.
Human brutality is not isolated to ethnicity, creed, or belief, but to the abrogation of self and community empowerment to the centralised militaristic ‘protection’ of the state. Every soldier is made a murderer by the actions of the state. Every soldier who participates is responsible, whatever they do or don’t do. It is a collective guilt and a collective injustice. Participants — voters, party officials, those who pretend it’s not their concern but continue to benefit from the state’s military actions — are equally culpable.
Non-violent resistance is the only way — and as poets, every poem we write should be a form of resistance, an act of linguistic disobedience. States murder more than they protect. And they protect to perpetuate their own existences. Disarm Israel. Disarm all states. Disarm all individuals. Weapons are a violation of all people’s rights. Until people who are not in the killing zones understand and resist the state, the killing will continue. For most, it’s a moment of indignation with the news headlines; then they move on with their lives. Killing knows no providence.
To make it clear — on a micro level, both Jewish and Palestinian peoples (and any other peoples for that matter) can co-exist (and have the right to co-exist) more justly without the machine of the state (Israeli, Palestinian, or any other form of state), and without the tools of conflict. The abolition of all states is the only avenue to justice, liberty, and fraternity. Ultimately the existence of any state means the oppression of those whom it perceives as threatening it, or acting against its interests, and, indeed, its own citizens.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Skinks or goannas?
By John
A few years ago, after the publication of my book The New Arcadia, I wrote an article entitled “By Any Other Name” (it originally appeared in the Australian Poets’ Union journal and somewhere else I don’t recall as well). This article considered the poetic dynamics of local namings for plants and animals. I am fascinated by how one species of, say, a tree, can be given alternative names within a region, how throughout one’s life a “misnaming” from childhood can stick and become a reality.
In my book Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography (also here), this is particularly true when it comes to the name for Tiliqua rugosa. Most commonly named the “bobtail”, this skink is found throughout Australia and is known in the suburbs as much as the country. Around where we live in the wheatbelt, it goes by a variety of names: yourin (the Nyungar name), bobtail, bobtail goanna, bobtail lizard, blue-tongue lizard, blue-tongue goanna, and shingleback.
I have heard all these names used many times. I read that they are also known as “sleepy lizard” in the region, but I have not heard that name used by locals. Our family usually call them “bobbies”, “bobtails”, “blue-tongues”, or “blue-tongue goannas”. Of course, Tiliqua rugosa (and I only use the Latin name as a “constant” for convenience, not as a recognition that it is a standard that cuts across, say, the constant of the Nyungar name, “yourin”), is not a goanna but a skink. So already in a number of the namings there is a taxonomical error. From a poetic point of view, in terms of what they say about locality and issues of belonging, I find such misnomers generative and deconstructive of hierarchies of classification. The reptile scientifically called “Tiliqua rugosa” is what it is to those who live with it for an endless variety of reasons. The naming grants agency (as it should) and distinguishes an individual relationship.
In the book Reptiles and Frogs of the Perth Region (though we are further out than that, there’s still a lot of crossover, which makes this a useful book for identification purposes — it’s interesting to think about such processes of standardised identification and putting a scientific name to your own, personalised or familiarised “common” name), we read: “The large number of different common names around the country indicates the familiarity Australians have with the species.” Thus a “misnaming” sticks: it becomes (here, right now), the “blue-tongued goanna” — a misnaming, in truth.
So when I come to write a poem, the process of naming becomes all-important. It changes the geography of the poem’s language itself. What’s more, there is also another species of the genus Tiliqua — the Western bluetongue (Tiliqua occipitalis) a different lizard entirely (it is somewhat similar to look at, though without the thick scales and with a more tapered tail). Both the bobtail and the Western bluetongue have a distinct blue tongue they project with mouth agape when threatened. When I write a poem, I take this knowledge to the process of naming.
Also, a lot of my poetry is “in-situ” poetry, with notes for poems taken within the space they describe, and a specific observation or occurrence behind their writing. I am there, in the poem, with the action. “Look, there is a blue-tongued goanna” may be technically wrong, and I know it, but that’s what was said at the time, so it sticks, and the poem evolves out of the process of engagement and naming.
As an activist, I see my poems as forms of affirmation and resistance at once. I always take the side of animals and plants. What I resist is this kind of thing, noted in the previously mentioned reptile guide, and witnessed by myself numerous times over my life — leaving me angry and determined to resist people’s violences in all ways possible:
“During the warmer months many bobtails fall victim to vehicles on roads; unfortunately some motorists intentionally hit these placid animals”.
And one might add to this list snakes, rabbits, foxes, and numerous others — I regularly see drivers swerve to the other side of the road in order to hit creatures.
And speaking of reptiles, we saw a Western granite worm lizard a few days ago and I wrote the following poem (a 64 plus 4 poem!):
Western Granite Worm Lizard
Springs out of the fossorial
so tightly wound about the loop
of scale and flesh, its shovel nose
— foot of compass — lifts, distracts;
squeaking high above slenderness,
vocal cord that knots in dashes,
mesmerised in its magic box,
a binary of ones and noughts:
eyes are lidless.
John Kinsella
A few years ago, after the publication of my book The New Arcadia, I wrote an article entitled “By Any Other Name” (it originally appeared in the Australian Poets’ Union journal and somewhere else I don’t recall as well). This article considered the poetic dynamics of local namings for plants and animals. I am fascinated by how one species of, say, a tree, can be given alternative names within a region, how throughout one’s life a “misnaming” from childhood can stick and become a reality.
In my book Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography (also here), this is particularly true when it comes to the name for Tiliqua rugosa. Most commonly named the “bobtail”, this skink is found throughout Australia and is known in the suburbs as much as the country. Around where we live in the wheatbelt, it goes by a variety of names: yourin (the Nyungar name), bobtail, bobtail goanna, bobtail lizard, blue-tongue lizard, blue-tongue goanna, and shingleback.
I have heard all these names used many times. I read that they are also known as “sleepy lizard” in the region, but I have not heard that name used by locals. Our family usually call them “bobbies”, “bobtails”, “blue-tongues”, or “blue-tongue goannas”. Of course, Tiliqua rugosa (and I only use the Latin name as a “constant” for convenience, not as a recognition that it is a standard that cuts across, say, the constant of the Nyungar name, “yourin”), is not a goanna but a skink. So already in a number of the namings there is a taxonomical error. From a poetic point of view, in terms of what they say about locality and issues of belonging, I find such misnomers generative and deconstructive of hierarchies of classification. The reptile scientifically called “Tiliqua rugosa” is what it is to those who live with it for an endless variety of reasons. The naming grants agency (as it should) and distinguishes an individual relationship.
In the book Reptiles and Frogs of the Perth Region (though we are further out than that, there’s still a lot of crossover, which makes this a useful book for identification purposes — it’s interesting to think about such processes of standardised identification and putting a scientific name to your own, personalised or familiarised “common” name), we read: “The large number of different common names around the country indicates the familiarity Australians have with the species.” Thus a “misnaming” sticks: it becomes (here, right now), the “blue-tongued goanna” — a misnaming, in truth.
So when I come to write a poem, the process of naming becomes all-important. It changes the geography of the poem’s language itself. What’s more, there is also another species of the genus Tiliqua — the Western bluetongue (Tiliqua occipitalis) a different lizard entirely (it is somewhat similar to look at, though without the thick scales and with a more tapered tail). Both the bobtail and the Western bluetongue have a distinct blue tongue they project with mouth agape when threatened. When I write a poem, I take this knowledge to the process of naming.
Also, a lot of my poetry is “in-situ” poetry, with notes for poems taken within the space they describe, and a specific observation or occurrence behind their writing. I am there, in the poem, with the action. “Look, there is a blue-tongued goanna” may be technically wrong, and I know it, but that’s what was said at the time, so it sticks, and the poem evolves out of the process of engagement and naming.
As an activist, I see my poems as forms of affirmation and resistance at once. I always take the side of animals and plants. What I resist is this kind of thing, noted in the previously mentioned reptile guide, and witnessed by myself numerous times over my life — leaving me angry and determined to resist people’s violences in all ways possible:
“During the warmer months many bobtails fall victim to vehicles on roads; unfortunately some motorists intentionally hit these placid animals”.
And one might add to this list snakes, rabbits, foxes, and numerous others — I regularly see drivers swerve to the other side of the road in order to hit creatures.
And speaking of reptiles, we saw a Western granite worm lizard a few days ago and I wrote the following poem (a 64 plus 4 poem!):
Western Granite Worm Lizard
Springs out of the fossorial
so tightly wound about the loop
of scale and flesh, its shovel nose
— foot of compass — lifts, distracts;
squeaking high above slenderness,
vocal cord that knots in dashes,
mesmerised in its magic box,
a binary of ones and noughts:
eyes are lidless.
John Kinsella
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