Celebrating John Kinsella's Collected Poems (UWAP) at City of Perth Library last night

By Tracy

In addition to John himself, participating readers & brilliant poets were: Alan Fyfe, Caitlin Maling, Cass Lynch, Emily Sun, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Siobhan Hodge & Tim Kinsella — with introductory talks by Tony Hughes d'Aeth and Lakshmi Kanchi.

Not everyone who took part is shown here — some of my images didn't come up as I'd hoped! Some were taken by me, others by Wendy Kinsella.

Thanks to UWA Publishing, City of Perth Library, WA Poets... and many others.

John Kinsella

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

John with Will Yeoman

Part of the audience

Mar Bucknell with John Kinsella, Rohit Kanchi

Tony Hughes d'Aeth

Lakshmi Kanchi & audience

Cass Lynch & audience

Emily Sun speaks

Tim Kinsella reads

John Kinsella speaks

Tim Kinsella reading

Scott-Patrick Mitchell speaks

Emily Sun

Caitlin Maling

Lakshmi Kanchi

Tim Kinsella

Tracy Ryan

Peter Wheeler in foreground, Mar Bucknell & Rohit Kanchi behind

John Kinsella, Lakshmi Kanchi, Steve Mickler

Lakshmi Kanchi & John Kinsella

Tony Hughes d'Aeth

On Scott-Patrick Mitchell's Poetry Collection Clean

 Launch Speech for Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s Clean

 

            by John Kinsella

 

I first met Scott-Patrick during a workshop I was giving in 2006. Well, that’s true and not true. I had read their work as part of the pre-entry submissions and had been astounded at the freshness and verve of the work — that its language seemed so alive and yet had something haunting about it as well. But I had encountered their work prior to this as part of the ‘world-building’ Interactive Geographies project for Poetryetc listserv back in the late 90s. As that project was made of so many voices, I hadn’t separated any one voice off in particular. Texts were offered and absorbed into a kind of polyvalent rhizome and the whole work pulsated with many lives, many places.

 

At a tangent to this, one of the many interesting and even exciting things that came with a first reading of Scott-Patrick’s book Clean was to encounter who they’d been in the sharing of their voice with the many, and to see it reworked into the language of the city it geographised. In Clean (Upswell, 2022), Scott-Patrick’s ‘interactive geography’ moment becomes part of a personal synthesis, part of the thesis/anti-thesis sub-structure of this remarkable work of addiction and recovery. Boorloo/Perth in the context of an ongoing journey that came close to consuming and even destroying the poet.

 

So, in a vicarious kind of way, I realised that I had in fact ‘known’ them for much longer than I’d been fully aware, and apropos of this, that I needed to question what it is that suggests we might know someone in the first place. We can never know anyone completely, and Scott-Patrick’s poems also show us that we spend our lives trying to know ourselves.

 

These reflections came from a first encounter with Clean and intensified as I reread the three sections of a book that gathers into a life. The many levels of affect the poet engages us through are compelling, troubling, addictive and in the end, liberating — personally, and also collectively as people implicated both in the very place of writing, the city it is being launched in, and in our embodiment of the poems as readers. We, the readers and hearers of this remarkable collection, are constantly asking ourselves what we should and shouldn’t do, where we might and might not appear, and where we should or shouldn’t fuse our own experiences through what is mapped and unmapped. This is an act of immersing ourselves in a life, and in a city — an act that carries responsibilities.

 

I want to say something about the nature of addiction which, I feel, my twenty-seven years of sobriety, of being ‘clean’, have suggested to me — that an addict never stops being an addict, and that if we are able to channel our addictions into generative and healing actions, that mark(er) of our lives can improve rather than destroy them. Further, it means we can hopefully bring joy and support to other people’s lives rather than damage or even destroy them, too.

 

In the poem ‘Reworking slurs I was called from when I was using’,  Scott-Patrick makes use of expressions of contempt meted out by non-addicts towards addicts which I could strongly identify with — they flip them linguistically of course, and there’s a harsh reflection to be cast back on the social condition delivering them, but ultimately the responsibility comes back to the addict, and the poet — “DO US ALL A FAVOUR AND (graft saplings/to rock face/at the edges/of the compass)’. This is a tough equation that doesn’t map onto any other personal-social dynamic. It’s also a brilliant fusing of rhetoric in the form of insult, and figurative slippage into a layered perception of being, of quiddity.

 

Society’s bigotry is never acceptable, and normative ways of controlling difference are always damaging, always, to my mind, wrong. Witness Scott-Patrick’s superb ‘This Is Not a Manifesto’ in which they begin: ‘Because I am still manifesting. At the age of/ 42, my gender identity is more fluid than ever’ Inside, I am aqueous...’, which many of us in different ways will either identify with or understand. The ultimate beauty and generosity of this poem is exemplified by these words near the end: ‘Until then, weep at the bravery of/ those who are younger, so much more certain/ of how to speak uncertain’.

 

I’d like to riff off the issue of ‘beauty’ in Scott-Patrick’s work. Beauty is lost in the grimmest and sludgiest moments of the early section of the book, ‘Dirty’, and this lack of beauty creates a ghostly residue, a haunting that grows with sobriety. The haunting is complex — it is both the loss of self that comes with addiction, but it’s also the loss of the world addiction brings. It’s the grimness of scraping up stuff to feed addiction and it’s the anti-performance of getting through the day and the night and the day. Being clean is remembering what it was like not being clean. But beauty is always somewhere to be found, and as the book ‘journeys’, the nature of this potential beauty shifts focus.

 

Inhabiting a city empirically and also inhabiting it conceptually as Scott-Patrick does, doesn’t conceptually (and maybe even physically) mean the same city. The city seen through the heightened, expectant or dulled senses of the addict is very different from the city seen while ‘clean’, and, even more so, through the stages of getting clean. It’s hard to shake the residues of the addict city, and they have to be reinvented, rewritten as a part of seeing it fresh.

 

It took me years to return to inner-city ‘Perth’/Boorloo... I could not walk past certain hotels, nightclubs and doors that went up to Northbridge rooms without feeling ill. Scott-Patrick has remained in the city, and has rewritten their relationship to it, adding to their world and all our worlds. Consider the poem in ‘Dirty’, ‘This Town’, that goes: ‘Funny how this drug is anything but chill. A storm rolls into curtains, threatening to arrive. It never does. At least, not in the sky.’’ The travel through to ‘Ghost City’ of the ‘Clean’ section near the end of the book: ‘Bird song fills the void/ where once fumes coiled: each squall and call/ amplified off these walls.’ Bird song is beauty.

 

Now, the irony remains, as does the ‘street-smart’ locution that is steeply immersed in figurative perception, but there’s a shift in register. The ghost city is the city of addiction, and it haunts, but it is something distinctly different. It is better than the fumes of the pipe, even if the city throws up other pollutions. And the growing urge across the collection towards environmental positions takes up this haunting: an addict pollutes their own body, and society pollutes the planet. What is the difference? We can hopefully cure our addictions; we can hopefully cure pollution.

 

It’s a simple equation on one level, and the most profoundly difficult on another. Oh, it’s not coincidental that I have quoted from prose poems — these are magnificent and tonally inventive examples of the form, and tell stories as well as create intense lyrical and anti-lyrical contestations as ‘poems’. Scott-Patrick has always been a unique wielder and breaker of the line in poetry, and compacts a mythology and satire into a love poem, into a poem of connecting and disconnecting with others, in profound love poems, but their prose poems complement those dynamically lineated poems, and work as a major counterpoint in this book. The middle section’s ‘The Sleep Deprivation Diaries’ sequence shows the prose line at work (day by day) with electric poetic sensibility, and the erasures and breakdowns of lines contest sentences which only healthy sleep can bring — which the addict never really attains, and the recovering addict struggles after.

 

This book is full of confronting images and situations, and also full of hope. It has to be. There’s an essential dialogue that goes on with the mother, that has its inevitable pain and grief, especially come out of loving an addict, and the earth’s pain is elided with her own because of her generosity of spirit. It’s an interaction of sublimated wit — linguistically generative, compassionate, sharing, knowing, respectful, sensitive, tolerant and sometimes difficult. It’s one of the book’s complex beauties.

 

As is the increasing presence and engagement with the natural world, even if it’s as harried rural foxes or crows picking a living in city streets. Flowers appear and have quiddity. In the end, the book has a positive ectoplasm in the haunting that the poet carries with them through the many-layered city.

A Book That Would Have Been: On Scott-Patrick Mitchell's Unpublished Manuscript Vade Mecum

Introduction to SPM’s Vade Mecum

            by John Kinsella

We have: eros, psyche, ‘the mountain, the valley, the river, the tree’. We have self, we have process and other selves, we have nature. We have language, loss, and intense desire to heal. ‘Desire’ is a word in the dictionary we’ve missed really coming to grips with. It’s so much more expansive than definition allows — SPM expands our understanding, the possibilities. So much of this is shadowed in this text we perform in our own ways, spaces.

Moisture, stars, The Lord’s Prayer rewired and defused, a guide to ways of expressing love and the right to speak it. Healing, the medicinal, reassurance, affirmation in the face of a tense world and its ironies, bodily alchemy, the human as the cat’s familiar, the beauty of abjection, fluidity, and the friendly face of (nonetheless) sharp satire. SPM delights in recontextualising language, taking a nineteenth-century cliché as an erotic and semantic ploy — ‘dew’ is the pun par excellence, sincere and disarming.

‘a salem love poem’ interplays convention and filmic representations of ‘American’ self-originating stories that base themselves on the anxiety of displacing the native American belongings with new world ghostings, of witches escaped from the old world to destabilise the colonial presence. In such slippages are SPM’s voicings — his bricolage of presence, made up of all he watches and experiences, those semiotic feedings of a wired-in life that is cybernetic, and feeling the angst and pain of love’s pleasures and failings. Burnt offerings, swords to ploughshares, witches as victimised, the colonial imposition — at stake, the self-given in a risky world of no clear meanings, where text is the pattern we make for ourselves to state innocence and culpability woven together. How can a love poem declare itself in the contradictions?

SPM is not going to play ball with a dick pic. He might not send it to the mother of the offender (fair move after warnings have been issued and little choice is left!), but he’s going to tackle any imposition with what it deserves. He is conscious of boundaries, and he is going to differentiate between the rights of text to go where it will, and the rights of the self to declare what is appropriate or not. What goes, and what doesn’t, is in flux, but ‘no’ means no, as it always should. There’s a highly attuned sensibility when personal and political rights are contesting for space in a consuming, capitalised world. The right of presence, to share without constraint, doesn’t mean the right to objectify and to take away from intactness. Desire and imposition are not yoked in sexual discourse:

words like stretch & choke

spill freely from this bloke

as he objectifies me into the

object i will never be

Love and desire, lust and consummation, are not about imposition. Again and again, these are poems of rights, poems of language’s possibility to extend outside the status quo, to particularise and universalise at once, over and over, but to know respect and intactness of self and community. Complex conversations that need to be had through puns, play, and concise expression. This is a poetry that knows — that is unrestrained in the references it feeds on and feeds out, will revalue ‘tired terms’, and invigorate the unexpected as well — a vibrant even playing-field of wit. We are we, and us is I, and yet unappreciated as a self the pursuer wants us to perform, to role-play for them, but forgetting we too have roles and subjectivity. Now, there’s a generous willingness to play along, as desire says so, and love definitely insists, but not at the loss of self-respect or rights to be loved as well. It’s not simple, ever, but it can be rendered in the beautiful, in the gesture of the love poem. A dawn moment, an aubade that is love of the world as well. Again, mutual and proliferating respect.

Such a desire for living, to be alive, and to share that. In the containment of the poem is the proliferating largesse, the welcoming on the journey — intimate companionship. Polysemous love and desire out of a invigorating view of body and spirit, in which the trans is the normative and a worldview grows and expands as inclusive is what is and what has been hidden by the repressive control mechanisms of states, and their tooled-up iron maidens of gender, sexuality identity control. This is a book of liberty and freedom with awareness running in-sync with a desire of just outcomes.

Elegy — the loss of a sister anchors us to the narrative of life as performance, as crisis, as vulnerability. What is left after loss? It’s powerful because it isn’t easy, none of it.

Celebrity is local, not mass, poetry is the breath, as Yoko says to SPM in the twittersphere, but even more than the unspeakable, it’s the unbreathable which in pain but a desire for what’s best and loving and durable is the poem’s compactness and levers of pleasure and intense sadness working herein. We are loved by SPM in this, and we need to love him back. We can, you know. And in such respectful and varied and varying ways. So many degrees of encounter and so many words we still need to conjure, just to make do. The wet of death, the wet of love, the saline solution that conducts the currents across states of being. We share in our differences; we make the larger thought patterns in speaking, in breathing others’ breath.

Our chant communication, our ‘post-verbal’ poetry is also a delving into the choate, the inchoate, the pre-speech. Not post-structuralist only, but a conversation across the linguistic tree, its branchings. And so what do we give and receive outside prosody, outside the organisation of a poem? The mouth moves, and the eyes see inwards — there are no physical or psychic ‘impairments’. All differences are gains. The lexical is just one path. Other paths, so many others, are vibrant within these containment fields of language that let go, let go, let us in. Share. Osmotic. Where Kurt Schwitters saw his vowels go outwards and echo, a resonance that might have to come, that has happened, is doing. Beyond. Deep pragmatics of needing a poetics of inclusive beyond. These are our poems, too. In the teaching and receiving, receiving and teaching, the mentoring and being mentored, in the open collaboration. In the cipher, the shaman, the medium. We are here, too.

And in the fake-news world, the Lincoln residues. But this is non-violence, only the violence refracted through the performative act of power. The tyranny that wills its violence. The theatre is not real, though Lincoln fell. The metaphor for violence is horrifying enough. Peace. Pacifist language must step in, calm the choir, the hecklers, the hawkers of hate speech. But the terrible possibility of violence is there — violence making violence. And that’s terrifying.

But the poem enacting is costly and difficult, and people don’t always get it, even close people. Yet people need poems for them, and poems must be written for them — it’s compulsion, need, and much more... ineffable:

being a poet is like being an addict

because your sister will send you

text messages that read you fucking

junkie poet cunt, why don’t you go

& get a real job & she doesn’t know

that you do indeed have one: your

job being to open the souls of every

person you meet to the mightiness

of the unknown, a thing you can

achieve if you have that singular

right perfect poem

Being an unromantic romantic can be devastating, and shares qualities of and with addiction/s.

Orthography is survival in a violent world, not only a mirror. Loan poem, learning to read, rehabilitation of definitions, the list and its echoes.

This book is to the memory, to the body, to the being of sister. Sister lost cannot be rebuilt but the breath is present and moving and still there. Elegy is conceptual sprung rhythm. We have, in ‘the white lilly’, the matter-of-factness of it, the loss... the need to write the poem, to write the poem for them, those who have lost life, for life itself. The poem resonating for her — recuperative in some ways, in ways:

when you lose a sister

to cancer, you sometimes

wish you could remove a rib

rebuild her into being, but ya

bloodwork don’t match, even

though, when you use that

face app, to find out what

you would look like as a

woman, her face pouts back

There is disturbance out of loss — desire becomes distressing and its path to redemption is troubled, self-punishing. The sense of self collapsing is thwarted by redefining the self in the world outside the body, the flesh, the psyche. An anxiety over death is a search for reason, a need for ‘elegance’, as if form has some way of holding back loss, emptiness. A process of rebuilding, of manoeuvring out of the way of the ‘fuck off we’re full’ horror of right-wing bigots.

There is nature, and it is outside the self, though to merge with it is redemption, too. Yes, yes... Lake Monger, the moorhens, the swans, what the line actually takes us to. Cough of an ibis, secular resurrection of suburban — the ‘bird poem’ as encounter with so many threads of enculturation, and of bird itself. Yes, nature is rising in the breath as it was always there and always will be, and we need to stand against the exploiters and protect the spaces where the bulldozers go. Yes, you and I and we and he sang to the bulldozers — we were there, all of us. I know the mantra, so do you, and so does SPM. Concern is part of it, being active and out there and speaking our breath is essential. Self is nature, too. We owe it. We owe culture. We need to listen and touch and see and sense and make poems as we can, any way we can. And wet is water and it has a structure and ecology, and makes. This is city speaking. This is city more than buildings. This is city community people nature and buildings. This is Perth, this poem book. This making. This respect. Listen. Breathe.

*Note: Due to the closing down of the original publisher, the work in the manuscript discussed above will eventually appear in a different form/arrangement with another publisher. 

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]