Two Poets Paint: John Kinsella & Glen Phillips art exhibition at Sandalwood Yards Gallery, York

 By Tracy

Saturday 24th September saw the opening by Will Yeoman of an exhibition that will run for 2 weeks (till 8th October) containing works by John Kinsella & Glen Phillips, as part of the York Festival. This exhibition is located on Ballardong Noongar Boodja.

Glen's works feature wheatbelt landscapes; John's are interpretations of scenes from Dante's Divine Comedy.

Entry to the exhibition is free, and the artists' works are for sale.

Sat 24 Sep – Sat 8 Oct (Wed – Sun, 10am-4pm)

Sandalwood Yards Gallery, 179 Avon Terrace, York

You can watch & hear John reading a poem from his Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography at the launch here. 

Some photos from the gallery:

Glen Phillips & Rita Tognini in front of some of Glen's works

John Kinsella & Tracy Ryan with some of John's works

Random Access Clarifications

By John

One hundred and sixty years ago today (i.e. on May 23, 1849), Thoreau, according to Raymond R. Borst’s essential The Thoreau Log: A Documentary Life of Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862, ‘Surveys land in Lincoln near Sandy Pond Road which he wishes Emerson to buy because of its beauty (Moss, 7).’ Although he probably means ‘surveys’ in a more general sense, the subtext is still of division and possession. This issue of surveying has always bothered me, and I tried to critique it in my poem ‘Figures in A Paddock’ back in the late ’90s. I bring it up now because of the matter of removing fences and opening boundaries for the movement of wildlife (and, for that matter, people — but the caveat on that is if they’re moving through to interact with place without damaging: that’s where questions of preservation become complex: caveats make for contradictions).

Yesterday, BHP announced the first uranium mine in Western Australia. This is the beginning of another end. I want to declare loud and clear, that not only will I protest this in my poems, but I will be seated where they are going to mine, speaking my poems as they cart me off. Land and rights, and permissions and access, are matters not only of consensus (of which there can be none), but of the long-term rights of all traditional peoples/custodians. Because the corporate state has constructed a set of conditions by which people have to rely on its largesse for basic human requirements, the need to profit from such mining activities becomes normative and seemingly necessary. If the land wasn’t under pressure in that way, and community choices could be made without the imposition of a ‘you will do this or lose’ (at best) scenario, the state/corporate conditions/equation would be less likely to succeed in its tyranny.

Let’s not for a moment believe mining companies and their government apologists are operating for the wellbeing of communities (local or otherwise). The entire dynamic of money, employment, security, rights, and wellbeing is a ploy to control: create the necessity in order to offer ways of fulfilling it.

As for ‘progress’, when we have another benchmark for this in whichever field — tomorrow, next year, a decade from now — few would envisage turning back the clock to today. It’s circular logic, that will be deployed against the Neo-luddites whenever the opportunity arises.

At this moment I am watching a female western spinebill doing somersaults outside the window. Its curved beak is an entirely adequate and all-encompassing technology. The irony of typing on this laptop as I prepare to go offline and off-computer: well, it’s a log-book of a planned and permanent movement to find better ‘technologies’ (by which I mean less sophisticated and less reliant on industry: in other words, ‘simple living’ alternatives). They are ‘pre’, they are outside the notion of ‘progress’, and their usage is part of a desire to ‘de-technologise’, but yes, essentially they are technologies in themselves. Yet that’s semantic, because what I am clearly trying to do is step away from material ‘progress’ and to say one reaches a point materially that is more than adequate; that in fact the damage done far outweighs the ‘human application’ regarding the ecological. A manual typewriter rather than a computer (a technology that doesn’t need to ‘develop’ to achieve the same end results), a pen or pencil more often than not. Paper made from non-tree sources. And so on...

The ‘planning’: I make a living from writing, and have become computer-reliant in meeting my deadlines/obligations/expectations of how text is presented. I need to change the culture of production and how my publishers and others are willing to accept material from me. It can be done, but it has to be carefully planned and discussed. October is my deadline-aim in terms of ‘home’ stuff, with my university communications following at some point when I’ve been able to lobby effectively for some changes regarding my communication with students and so on. That can be realised, I am sure.

Actually, it’s more than this: I believe that we have to rethink social notions of what is adequate and what pleasure and leisure are. But this is not ‘primitivist’ thinking: it’s poetic thinking. Poems, to my mind, are about repair, analysis, fruition, and not destruction. And ‘destructive’ poems consciously deployed bring attention, in the cases I respect, to the failure of acts of repair. I write a lot about death and destruction, but I hope this allows a reader to refocus on their role (and the poet’s role and the poem’s role) in making such things allowable.

I had an interesting exchange with a fellow poet (and one I admire) the other day, about the blurring of lines between activism and poetry. He felt they were separate acts and used Judith Wright as an example. I maintained that Wright was an activist in her poetry as much as in her general life, especially towards the later years of her poetry writing (clearly in her prose, she was). This poet-friend was talking over his reactions to my Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography, which I consider my main work of poetry, a work that is in the realm of the ‘parafigurative’, where activism and poetry go hand-in-hand. Not to be didactic, but to be suggestive, and prompt ‘action’. My fellow poet felt that one should choose either a life of activism or a life of poetry. My reply was:

"mum was a poet and i’ve been writing it since i was six. for me it was a poet becoming an activist and making the two talk with each other. i have a book on ‘activism and the poet’ out with liverpool uni press next year. i’d like to think my poems do something other than ‘tell’ - i try to create many levels of approach in every poem i write, and for every poem to be reinvented with every reader and every reading. i am writing a new intro for j. wright’s selected at the moment and think she was an activist-poet in whose work (later work especially) these elements were in synch and didn’t counter each other. poetry has a long history of activism. on our blog (mutually said) i use a coinage i came up with re metaphor and activism — the ‘parafigurative’. this is what i am trying to do — articulate a poetry of action but also ambiguity."

My poet-friend also went on to discuss the structure of my Divine Comedy, and as this is relevant to the reading of the poem in terms of local and regional activism, I’ll include my reply:

"i think there are four narrative threads in the book:

1. the template of dante
2. the movement around the block approached from different angles (per the different canticles)
3. a topology and taxonomy of place that builds and ‘collapses’ to rebuild which is intertwined with a literal history of the place – including the building of a portrait of a surrounding community (yes, williams is the right parallel in this sense, and even more so olson’s maximus re location and illustration by example and observation and snippets of history etc).
4. the interactions of the ‘characters’ involved re their epiphanies and ‘elegies’"

Now, it’s back to my Thoreau book. Have just completed two new poems. Am now in the process of developing a ‘narrative’ framework for the book as a whole. It’s a matter of reconciling surveyed areas of poems and the points of access that surround them. I guess this will make sense (I hope) when the book appears. At the moment, I am considering ‘random access’ versus a set of semantic points of entry.

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

John Kinsella -- poems to accompany Niall Lucy's essay in Derrida Today

John Kinsella -- Five Derrida Poems

Fourth Essay on Linguistic Disobedience

“A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the laws of its composition and the rules of its game.”
Derrida

“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any society which I have not joined.”


Taking the fifth, he avoided the traffic. The organism
wasn’t feeling comfortable, though the sun bright and everything blue.
In the canyons, prayers are trapped halfway; cooling,
eventually dropping — churned up by pedestrians and cars. Advocacy
redecorates, brings in old fireplaces, pronounces
death-again sentences on leather chairs.
I have no clubs and no belonging, though the marks — amatory, elegiac, territorial,
arbitrary — left by beak of ladder-backed woodpecker, or the claws
of the twenty-eight parrot, on the bark of differing geographies,
erase none of my loyalties. This is not romanticism.
Continuation of lines of branches and twigs in the leafless woods
takes us back, imploded to fractals, hesitant at the solid point
of interruption: soundless. In the rock-garden
skinks move out of the tepid, a willy-willy
weaves garlands out of the crop: gamenya,
tall and high on protein. This house is stranded in that field,
the roof is giving way and red brick crumbling.
There’s a well nearby fed by a spring. Salt-rings
mark decline. Birds here are shunned
and strings of fragments come undone.
What’s of me here? he asks, memory
faster than time, the whole lot imploding.
His Auntie will not visit the farmhouse she raised
children in; her new place is decorated with photos
of the old place, a curatorial space. Recently he went out
to take a look, preparing a report then abandoning it to a carmine sunset —
insects thick on the windscreen. The twenty-eights tracked the car
as always, white cockatoos abandoned mallee trees.
At the cross-roads a shearer or young driver
cut sick: figure-eights and ‘doughnuts’ engraved deep.
On the sign at the corner of Mackey and Cold Harbour Roads,
a fox was impaled — its tail bristled like headgear.
Bounty hunters call it ‘poling’, or ‘shishkebabing’.
It’s what you do with ‘foreign muck’. A sharp taste
in their food brings it on. The Needlings burnt without
touching the paddocks — it doesn’t happen like this anywhere else,
as far as we know. Sheep spread out evenly,
as if placed to make something happen.
Belonging to this is not desirable.
Unbelonging, I make conversation
with like-minded people. A wedge-tailed eagle is seen
on a fence-post and none of the party wants to shoot it. I select
this society. The guns will overwhelm you! a sceptic declares, safe
in the anonymity of the world wide web. We will absorb
consequences. Sun burns even in winter here,
skin mutating. Its despotic face is passionate and unrelenting,
making language form. A spoonbill sifts units of water,
silt-heavy and charged with mosquito larvae,
in the gulch, creek, ravine, stream, gulley…
solubility, intactness… not a technical piece in a legal sense,
an ‘impressionistic’ account as a means of redress,
just ice concurrent with heat.


[From Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems, WW Norton, 2003]


Scratchings

That's the best place to look — today,
this morning, at this time of year:
it's bright and hot around there.
Two absences — the echidna

and meaning. Proof is here,
as told. Durable trees that hold
their leaves: hooves
breaking ground like Sensurround

and axe-blows ringing settlement.
Scratchings, markings that work
when working's almost done:
scant evidence of termites,

though phonic libraries resound.
In listening, close to ground.
Plosive catch and guttural plough.
Mother tongues and history.

You can't refer, an English critic
says: Saussure apocryphal and sporting
with locals — shooting signs
in road holes. Shout down,

public audit, echidna in parenthesis —
keeping low within perimeters
country town not promoted
within its written prejudices.


Heidegger and Poetry (Istrice 2)

for Niall Lucy

The logic
of the damaged
animal
outside the zoo —
a rarity —
ethical
as Greece,
gathering
of crows in twin dead trees
near the glue works: chain
lettering, so many;
so many of them.


So, opposition
in the open,
on the roadside
slightly out of view:
so low so slow
in abstaining
tall trees — just white gums
and red gums — people
passing knowing
only colour
generally —
you know, verticals,
the higher ups
the stretches
over the lower dead.


How do you timeframe fire
burning down
to prevent fire
in summer:

unfinished,
like heart
of lines:
behind
crow clusters
picking remnants:
vocabulary,
concordances,
lexicons,
third party
insurance?


I take the rollover,
quilled ball of tale,
give ground.


What do we give
on the up and up?
It’s the Southern Highway
I drive home. Honest,
that’s the route
of the errant.
Accidents
waiting to happen,
even where lanes
double — briefly
duplicate.


Echidna Elegy: IMM Jacques Derrida


Gross diagnosis is signed by the roadside;
or what a roadside might be if they wreck the trees,
take up access, if in scanning we take our spoken
presence; those diggings acclaimed and celebrated
prove to be rabbit testings, and not the echidna
we’d hoped for; does it make a difference?

I sense an echidna nearby and take pleasure
in this desire I might have as photograph
taken in shadow — a risk, an actual distance,
a narration wished out of hiding, though it’s too bright
for an echidna, blazoned affirmative to roll as cylinder,
coil in the tree-base hollow, bristle out of the cinders.

In everything the word echidna is echidna
where population is depleting, where a short
burst of termite activity — intense — brings
the liveness of monsters to propensity; where
are the anomalies? Where the historicity
of domestication and trauma? After the show

you sat with us and translated echidnas —
no language you’d have yourself recognise,
no language you’d have as event: the claw
clasped over our hands is the hand that digs,
its marks a transmission of shocked awakening,
diverting us from trails of proper meaning.


Canto of Abandoned Hope (Derrida and Dante, Inferno 3)

This is back-engineering. I have passed through the gate
and been through the bowels of the earth, passed out
into lambency. Today I took the children to Gwambygine,

to the bird lookout over one of the few permanent pools
left to the river. We stood quiet and then in the splay
of a dead tree a pair of Splendid Fairy Wrens

appeared, the bright male a gift out of death,
all tropes shed and risen over the riparian foliage.
Though its colour was muted and mutable,

the twitching of its tail diced bathos, calling
the female to the tine of the fork opposite. Intense.
Though vulnerable and breaking down,

swamp she-oak, paperbark, and even needle trees,
meliorated the floodfringe, bone-white with salt. The kids
were quiet but ecstatic, and said that though a sad window,

a precipice into a shadow place, the lookout becomes
a warning sign that passers-by just don’t get: it’s better
going there than avoiding the damaged remnants.

The light wasn’t strong though it was hot, an overcast
valley that compelled you to breathe slightly short, the end result
a semi-neutrality that was deceptive. We read on a metal sign:

possums might feed at night, hiding at day in a paperbark hollows
along the river, but foxes have probably caught them out,
on nights where dark translates the lambent less and less.


[From The Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography, WW Norton, 2008]