Consuming Rebellions and the Need for Constant Non-violent Protest

       
          by John Kinsella

Here are poems written in 'realtime' in support of James, Sarah and the other protesters who camped out, tree-sat, and were constantly present in resistance to the further destruction (it's not over, people!) of the Beeliar wetlands in Perth (on Bibra Drive in this case), late 2018.

These poems were intended to show that the protesters weren't alone, and that the effort to protect the environment needs to be a universal one; that ALL of our needs and interests intersect in this. As an extension of my notion of 'international regionalism', I am thinking more and more in terms of international responsibility regarding regional intactness, and cultural and identity intactness with respect to the natural environments in which they communalise and identify.

I think we need to be conscious of all language we deploy around this shared act of resistance to the damage being done, and that though the umbrella of 'extinction rebellion' covers many driven and passionate people (and I support the public push to show 'enough is enough' and to make positive change happen), it also fails in its naming. 'Rebellion' suggests a moment (that social-media burst of un-thought-out response that leads to chaotic action without focus, consistency or longevity), suggests an aggressive reaction to aggression that will yield little other than earth people's frustration.

I call this 'the buzz' - and once the buzz diminishes, people wander back to their flatscreens, their new phones, their consumerism. Change will come from non-violent direct action merged with language action merged with cultural and identity and gender-respect merged with thinking carefully about what we do and not letting the buzz create the peaks and troughs that have prevented a collective, concerted and long-term response to the rapacity.

Let's stop consuming as a form of 'equality' when consuming makes for inequality - wealth and privilege need to divest themselves immediately and 'property' be shared in common (and I don't believe in 'property' per se!). Let's stop participating in the consumerism ('western', 'eastern'... or any of its other manifestations within capital... culture is consumed by the consumer-machine of capitalism which purports to offer opportunities of consuming while deleting the basic universal freedoms of food, clean air, natural environment etc) ... the machine grinds to a halt without being fuelled. Let's concentrate on the priorities of social interaction: food, medicine, protecting the rights of the vulnerable, ceasing the exploitation, ending violent conflict, protecting environment and cultural rights attached to place (and spatiality)... and avoid as much unnecessary consumerism as possible.

Here are a few messages I've sent a couple of friends (especially James) in recent days:

*in protests for the environment there can potentially be a game of better-than-thou going on in which personal templates of 'best behaviour' and 'i'm less oppressing than you are' might be put on display, rather than a real deep caring for the natural world (privilege always allows such gambits - people living in the fallout of the  new colonialism of the latest version of the international arms trade get little choice to participate in non-violent resistance to consumerism when they are dying, having their houses destroyed, and their cultures annihilated).

so much activism out of (primarily western) privilege is a performance rather than the grit of protest. it's happening in poetry, too. people display what they feel they must, and don't mean it. a poet should say what they mean as a poet - good, vital... but don't say what they think people want to hear in the arts set... just to fit the moment of angst as the world overheats and dissolves. it doesn't stop the dissolving; it ironically feeds the consumerism. it is a form of consumerism.

too many times shot at, too many times hauled away to the lock-up, too many times been abused to take this pseudo-activism without a vomit feeling. so the performance moves on to what next week? i hope i am wrong, and i know many are long-term committed activists, and some are becoming genuinely aware, but the show must go on and poetry plays its part in that show. poetry actually has purpose to my mind - and not just the purpose of being poetry that the best people will applaud. i don't want applause, i want change - i want the tens of thousands of flooded gums dying around here to stop dying. only one way to achieve that - put our poems where are mouths are.

*i am bothered by 'extinction rebellion' because it reminds me of the buzz behind occupy (i was involved with that in london and cambridge) that dissolved into various forms of 'acceptance' for many. it's the cadre zeitgeist buzz people get and then it gets too hard to just stop the abuse by non-participation (the internet and phones etc have led to more of the destruction than almost anything else over the last twenty years). true non-violent 'rebellion' is (as i have just been writing) not participating in capitalist gain, in refusing to participate in the state machine, in being non-violent, in standing in front of the bulldozers, in believing in EVERY tree and every creature. there is no middle way - there is to my mind :the non-usage of animals, the replanting of damaged areas, and certainly using as few 'resources' as we can (from commuting to travel to how we live in houses etc). we all move, we all use these machines... but even if we lessen our impact it helps more than a raging that vents angst but doesn't actually do anything direct. direct action is standing by that tree, it's choosing to ride your bike rather than drive, it's not buying a new phone or even using one... it's going offline...

*the kids coming out against the damages against climate/environment was a positive action. peace marches (as tracy says) that are silent, are powerful. such collective actions work, even if in the moment then gone. but 'rebellions' and 'occupies' that become hype about who is connecting with whom, bother me as shared events of buzz rather than long-term commitment. not to say they can't be, but the 'beeliar group' potential is there - once the hype shifts as cadre groups fall out, it fails. rebellion is not what's needed, non-participation in the corporate military state that is doing this (and people go along with it) is what's needed. the moment people get a buzz out of an action, the action becomes secondary. there's no buzz - only commitment. that good feeling you get - of being alive... is because it's outside the buzz, it's because you're connecting with what you're trying to protect. that matters. city-driven protests too often become about the entertainment zone and social sets of the city - not the dirt and the air and the water and the birds and life itself. same with any concentrations of people over other forms of nature. yes, social media has enhanced empowerment in marginalised groups, but the abuse of rights of self and community has also happened repeatedly on a cast scale. voices of the self should never be lost in the mass voicing of the many — small communities speaking with small communities and so on, rather than the loss of rights of self by 'faceless' (that is face behind the avatar) attacks when every person's situation is different within and without community.

*so often these things are propelled by older people feeding on younger people (social-media companies might be the face of the young, but they grow older the more established they become... and take on values of conservatism) - on young energy that isn't necessarily (though it may be, of course) focussed - rather than the reality of the event itself. extinction is being caused by ALL of us - including the participants in the 'rebellion'. they could truly rebel by changing themselves to start with (some will, many won't, not really). sorry, but i've seen too much of this movement shallow stuff that sparks then fades as lives change etc. the coming-together has an energy, then it morphs. hope i'm wrong! i truly do. to stop consuming outside what is necessary to live would be a good start!

*that is, start addressing the problems with capitalism and the state and never give ground, with peace as your best friend. no peace and there'll be no peace. 'rebellion' intimates violence even if unintended and that's why we have the problems in the first place. they use it as a 'hashtag' (potentially the end of liberty in too many ways for too many) because it buzzes and attracts young people who want to have the buzz and think they're also being ethical. there's a category error in it all. beeliar writ large. and one needs to come in and out of these well-meaning but often unseeing gatherings and keep a steady line. they will fade as fast as the world is fading. as committed life activists, our function is to be steady, coherent, consistent, and persistent. you are all these things - use this commitment to help others stay committed and to not just tune into the buzz then tune out.


Anyway... here are some of the poems sent through to the tent (of James) and the camp as it grew and to Sarah in the tree:

The Review of Fremantle Press New Poets We Have to Have

by John Kinsella; posted by Tracy

I was disappointed to see the latest Westerly poetry round-up summarise the 2010 Fremantle Press collection of three ‘new’ poets with the general label ‘competent’. After lamenting the lack of ‘variety’ in the Fremantle list in recent years, the review leaves us with the simple assessment that the three-in-one collection was surely done for reasons of cost.

Now, in an age of declining poetry book sales (which is, true, matched by an exponential rise in web interest and performance interest in poetry), the presentation of three full-length collections, in an attractive and intelligently edited and introduced single volume, is a gain rather than a loss.

Let me express my connection to this volume before I begin — allowing that most collections published in Australia have at most one or two degrees of separation from a reviewer. The volume was edited by Tracy Ryan, my partner. One of the poets collected, J. P. Quinton, has assisted me in various tasks, and another, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, I adjudged (anonymously) the winner of a poetry competition some years ago. I have only briefly met the third participant, Emma Rooksby.

Dismissing each of these collections as ‘competent’ reduces the possibility of newness, innovation and breadth of publishing vision, far more than binding them within one cover in what will be an ongoing series (the 2011 volume has just been published, including two poets, and next year’s volume is a collection of performance-driven poets).

Westerly has a long history of supporting Western Australian writing, rightly placing it in a broader ‘Australian’ and regional context. The latest issue includes a wide selection of Australian poetry, with Western Australians coming off particularly well. What’s more, after questioning why Fremantle has tended to publish ‘established’ poets over recent years, the poetry round-up spends all the ‘Western Australian’ time concentrating on examples of those very poets. If it’s difficult to open a gambit with new poets and there’s no discourse to slot them into, let me provide a series of possibilities which will be just as much about how not to ‘slot’ them in, as how to ‘read’ them.

The first New Poets volume was part of a process that saw the submission of many manuscripts by journal-published poets looking for the publication of their first full-length collection. The process not only fostered the three poets included in this volume, but also resulted in a master class, in which a number of other poets presented and discussed their work in a supportive context.

The fact that Rooksby, Mitchell, and Quinton are dramatically different practitioners is a double plus in terms of their being collected together. It signifies diversity and cross-talk; it is about associations and clarifications of how we might read poetic cultural subtexts by creating context.

In her collection Time Will Tell, Emma Rooksby is what I would call an ‘internalising’ poet. The title’s colloquial familiarity captures much of the subtle tension between public and private that emanates from her poems. Pithy, compacted language, with a strong sense of ‘turn’ of phrase and idea, works image and rhetoric with equal skill and determination.

The external world is often presented in vivid sketches, but always folds in on the private or even intimate moment. Often there is the sense of a private conversation going on between the ‘voice’ of the poet and one with which s/he is intimate. But it would be wrong to think that these poems are simply making private communiqués public. Rooksby is concerned with how much private knowledge becomes something else when it is painted within the public frame of shared experience and awareness.

Hers is not a poetry of the material, though she is concise and precise in her empirical observations; neither it is a poetry of metaphysical aspiration. Rather, it’s a poetry of grounding, pinioning those hermeneutic fragments and moments that compile a life. The poem becomes a record of uncertainty locked within the apparent certainties of language (but that changes too). Memory is unreliable, but that doesn’t stop us constantly trying to validate and confirm memory in thought, in speech. This is structuralist poetry, in which subjectivity is a nagging doubt.

Try, but the quality of memory
decays. Somehow each incident
that’s set aside for treasuring
gets furred with motes of dust

In short, sharp, seven-line poems such as ‘Early afternoon’, ‘Winter’, and ‘Guardians’, interspersed through the collection, we are given imagistic glimpses and moments, interludes in the repetition of days. Rooksby’s uneasy relationship with closure in form, and her persona’s relationship with those towards whom it directs its voice, are epitomised by the closing line or lines of these pieces: ‘Surfacing, you see the long path back, in fading light’ (Early Afternoon). Rooksby’s skill is in taking the quotidian and showing its necessity to a greater, almost spiritual vision. She doesn’t demean or diminish the ‘ordinary’; the reader feels privileged to be part of the ‘quiet’ accumulation of detail and observation built across poems. The process is not passive; it’s a wrestling with how and why we privilege one perception over another.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s {where n equals} a determinacy of poetry is a collection in which (or maybe through which) poems are part of a broader display. If Rooksby delights in bringing the details of life into focus, Mitchell delights in graffiti-ing the streets of the psyche’s inner city (I use ‘psyche’ in its analytical sense, not as a vague sense of something). This is not so much in his specific references to inner-city spaces or markers (though they are there), but in his creating a street-map of language-play and public displays of private art. Mitchell’s elliptical and paratactic plays on line and expression are as much about the ‘domestic’ moment, the private encounter with language and occasion, as Rooksby’s poetry. His work ranges from love poems with a self-ironising edge (consider his love poems and poems of desire in the light of Rooksby’s opening poem, ‘Drink’ and the aesthetics of de-romanticism: this can manifest in so many ways!) through to a struggle with the validity of the symbolic versus the representational, in poetry and artistic expression in general.

Mitchell’s syntax and grammar are about beginnings rather than ends. By no means the first poet to place his punctuation at the beginning of a line rather than at the end, he’s nonetheless one of the most able practitioners of this approach. This invites a line to begin rather than end, and asks for an inverted reading, as well as encouraging us to read against meaning that has so often already been expressed or investigated ironically. Which is not to say Mitchell takes himself less than seriously — or expects the reader to take it less than seriously — but that he is fully aware that creating poetry is a self-conscious act of display and performance the moment it is spoken or is committed to the page.

Mitchell’s constant linguistic play on subjectivity advances beyond mere questions of the lyrical self or unified self, and questions the subjectivity of the recipient subject. He takes a ‘confessional’ mode and reinstates the very doubts expressed by confessional poets themselves (e.g. Robert Lowell). Take the poem ‘dew’ — a play with a Victorian romantic cliché, a self-reflexive love poem, and the medieval traditions of aubade:

.it is morning &
you twitch at each
kiss from these lips
placed ethereal on
ridge & slope of
body i dote

The ‘landscape’ solidity of ‘ridge & slope’ in the context of the body not only maps flesh on place but also links sensibility to surroundings and occasion. The you is as implicated as the ‘i’, but is also separated off as an idea, a notion, an extension of the ‘i’. The ‘you’ only exists because of the display of the poem. This reaches a deadly self-irony that still operates in the realm of need and desire in the seemingly off-putting (though not), ‘alopecian dreams’:

I dreamt last night
I had hair
; long
ocean-dipped
, arse tickling

The play of classical literary tropes with the slightly ‘off’ familiar is at the core of Mitchell’s poetics. Its best expression is actually found in a poem of more overt ‘beauty’, the wonderful ‘heliograph’ which reminds me of Callimachus’s (ca. 305BC.-ca. 240BC) ‘Hymn to Apollo’. Mitchell’s great skill resides in his poems’ openings — like Rooksby, his frustration is with the need for poems to end at all (which is not a bad thing!). ‘heliography’ opens with:

ball me up in a ball of light so I can write
how our sight foresaw this new beginning

The Steinian repetitions, the gentle sound-play, the nursery-rhyme explosion into what amounts to ontological clarity, launch us into a tour de force of ode-making fused with the ironies of ordinariness. Performance in the light of the sun matters to Mitchell.

The colloquial gets a full workover if not makeover in J. P. Quinton’s Little River. I feel confident in saying there’s nothing quite like Quinton’s voice (including his own voice!) in Western Australian poetry, and possibly Australian poetry as a whole. If you can imagine aspects of John Forbes and Nigel Roberts coalescing with Les Murray and maybe John Tranter, you might get some way toward unravelling its studied intricacies. In terms of environmental sensitivities, you could be rewarded by looking to John Anderson and maybe even Charles Buckmaster. Which is not to say Quinton’s ‘voice’ is the result of absorbing his models, but rather that he always writes meta-textually and always with an ironic awareness of how ‘voice’ can only ever be derivative and comparative. He says it as he hears it, and as he ‘speaks’ to his mates, the bloke in the street, in the bush, on the road.

This is Quinton’s genius; this most ‘voiced’ poet really writes outside poetic voice. He writes and speaks in his poem as he sees and experiences it. It’s what we used to call, in my ‘out-of-it days’, a ‘no-bullshit voice’. You believe it, whether it’s true or not. It counts as witness. When I said ‘studied intricacies’, I meant that Quinton’s ‘talk’ in the poems is both casual and immediate, and highly studied. He is a master of open-form poetry that gives the impression of having been written in stricter forms. In his work there is a kind of formal and tonal mimesis which are not replicable. At its most blunt, you might even think Charles Bukowski or Banjo Paterson; at its most sharpened and deadly you might think John Donne.

Little River is a book of range and variation. From engagements with localised popular culture in which tropes work hand-in-hand with the blunt reality of their application (or where ideas and theories of their nature derive from), through to environmental poems, poems in which the relationship between the ‘self’ and the transcendentalised ‘natural’ world is pondered and troubled over (the Swan River in Perth is a vital focal-point for Quinton), through to elegies that overwhelm with their bluntness and clarity, their almost brutal confrontation with loss of an older brother.

To give a sense of how a Quinton poem fuses casual language usage with formal (seemingly almost accidental) constraint, the ‘throw-away’ observation with sharp, cutting insight, and a simultaneous respect and trashing of ‘art’, we might consider the devastatingly ironic ‘Art for Life’s Sake’. Quinton can be gauche, brutal, frank and razor-sharp in the same line. Once again, as characteristic of Rooksby and Mitchell, Quinton is a deft poet of beginnings:

Your brain-damaged neighbour checks the mail ten times a day
for a bill he knows is due next week. Here, the sky is forgotten.

But Quinton is a poet of endings as well, maybe because loss and death are never far behind an observation, a thought, a recording. The last three lines of ‘Art for Life’s Sake’ say it all, and more. And it’s the more that comes out of confronting loss every time you wake that does it:

Having kids means spending all your time trying not to hand down
the malignant shit your parents gave you. At least with art you’ve only got
yourself to blame and perhaps Mr Imagination will stick around.

One gets the sense there is no other way to write it. Take these lines from the elegiac ‘All the Albums We Listened to Together’:

Is it you
Your deadness
Or me
My unforgiveness.

Air-drumming along
In your kombi
With its over-adjusted headlight

The first stanza quote shows inversion and play on primary and all-encompassing ‘values’: death and forgiveness. The person addressed is dead. Forgiveness has not been forthcoming. And yet the absoluteness of the dead is questioned in the irony of the ‘ness’, and the failure of forgiveness is countered by the guilt of the ‘un’. Suffix and prefix become the values, rather than the concrete reference. In the second stanza it’s the ‘over-adjusted headlight’. The light works, but doesn’t work right. This contains condemnation and understanding without saying so: nothing is precise, there is no exact measurement of death and its causes, and of how we deal with loss.

Quinton is a landscape architect, and his poems are landscapes. The persona is out in nature to remake and qualify himself, to give purpose. But the intellect behind this subjectivity can’t give way to ‘feeling’. Feeling is brutal. Reality is all-consuming. The poem ‘The Lookout’ shows closure up for what it is, and architecture of place, emotions and ideas, cancels itself out. We survey place from our privileged position of life. We begin:

Ice melts, green belts.
Alpine cold, frozen eucalypts
mountains near and far off.

and thirteen lines later we close off with:

Not so long ago
siphoning the world
my brother broke down and gassed himself —

a total, fucking, gas.

Endgame. Quinton will be one of the most significant poets of his generation.

So, one asks how three such vital poets can be merely described as ‘competent’. These are groundbreaking poets in a groundbreaking collection. Tracy saw it when she selected their work, I saw it while she was doing so. It has to be said. These poets have to be heard.


[Fremantle Poets 1: New Poets. Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell; J. P. Quinton; Edited by Tracy Ryan. Published by Fremantle Press, Fremantle, 2010]