On Frida Kahlo's 'Wounded Deer' and after Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus 2:10

A couple of poems I wrote for my poetry students. These students are a long way from here, and we are a long way from them — a dynamic of the times. I am always wary of the 'ambient intimacy' of the internet, but I share these in the spirit of community. All poetry is a series of departures as well as arrivals, suggesting movement — flow.  The conversations that develop between 'artworks' are inevitably political and ethical ones, and if we write out of colonial spaces (regretfully, disturbingly, and in grim reality), a series of responsibilities arise that are often in tension with the 'aesthetics' of a piece. I refuse 'aesthetics' as a basis of anything generative, but contend with it every time I write a letter, a word, a line... and every time I use any of the senses available to me. This is an act of dissension whose irony is made even more emphatic through the use of this technology (computer, internet etc) to access 'art' and to comment and respond to it.

See Kahlo's painting here. And here's an anti-ekphrastic act, maybe:

Not On Frida Kahlo’s ‘Wounded Deer’, Not Really?

 

When the bow hunters sported the deer out of the woods near Gambier

I was not thinking of Frida Kahlo’s ‘Wounded Deer’, which I do now.

This is not appropriate in so many ways, but maybe it is in others.

 

When the pick-up truck with the stag in the back secured so the antlers

were safe — wall trophy, obviously — but the hindquarters flopping

and bouncing on the open tail-gate, hooves kicking off the road’s asphalt

 

(and I imagine sparks but it was flecks of staling blood), roared

past me on the road through the village, I was not thinking of Frida

Kahlo’s ‘Wounded Deer’, which I do now. Maybe I should have back then?

 

But now I am thinking it through, in another hemisphere, over fifteen years

later. I am trying to be the deer and the stag but not be Frida Kahlo —

I would never try to do that. Which makes me wonder as I unloose

 

arrows out of my skin — nine times I quiver, nine times I transfer

my essence to a tree, nine times I shape the memory into something visceral —

if I am really seeing the past now? There are no deer here, but there are

 

kangaroos and they suffer similar fates. I cannot see Frida Kahlo’s

head on a kangaroo, I cannot build the symbolism, archetypes and set

of personal references. I won’t mystify. If the sea at the end of a wooded path

 

is forced into the sky, so too are the hills of the valley into a different

but intimately connected sky. Wrong images. I wonder about translations of ‘karma’,

and reach for my feet to see if they are secure on an earth that turns fast —

 

or maybe it’s just turning at the necessary speed. Neither fast nor slow.  Maybe

that speed will stay the same no matter what the miners, industrialists and adventurers

do to it in all our names. It frightens me (and honestly, I don’t frighten easily —

 

well, not in a personal sense, anyway) that I have nothing to do with Frida

Kahlo or her deer-stag or her injury or bare forest or fetish for arrays of nine.

But then, why would I use a word like ‘fetish’? What am I painting here?

 

 

            John Kinsella

Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus: version  after 2:10 — a mimesis

 

How we machine machines

might be at the root of the problem,

a root system of fibre-optics

and nanoparticles, the equilateral

 

disjunctions in application

of field-work. We have made it part

of our avatars not only via imposition

but by unnatural selection:

 

each lyrical strain we tune

into our ‘feelings’, remade as satisfaction

and compliance of mystery.

 

Speech to text slips past the inexpressible.

Expansion of services is not the music

we associate with ‘ecology’ — house of the word.

 

 

            John Kinsella

For Beauty’s Sake: Poetry and Activism (Keynote Address, Perth Poetry Festival 2014)

by John Kinsella

I wish to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this country and the non-ownership of this land.

Poetry is so often less about ‘Art’ and more about ‘activism’ than many like to think. The poem that captures a glimpse of ‘nature’, or human loss, or reconstitutes a family memory through an object found while going through the belongings of a deceased relative, might seem to be little to do with activism but everything to do with art. That is, to do with the art of compacting, containing and adding ‘depth’/layering,/nuance to an idea so it creates conduits into other ways of seeing — creating the poem-object. But for me, rather than the ‘artiness of art’, I am interested in the poem’s potential for resistance, not its compliance with a status quo, not as the production of what will become an objet d’art, a thing intended for wealth accumulation and pleasure. Of course, a piece of art can escape its creator’s (or buyer’s) intentions and become subversive through context.

Poetry works the contradictions, the paradoxes, and brings the incongruous and contiguous into alignment, rendering them into shape, pattern and interpretability. That’s art, and this art is about aesthetics, about a hierarchising of perception into a spectrum of ‘taste’.

I’ve never cared much for taste, and most of us would agree beauty is subjective, which doesn’t have to lead us to say aesthetics can contain such difference, because the issue of ‘beauty’, to me, shouldn’t come up in the first place. Or rather, ‘beauty’ as thing-in-itself. Because if our intent is to oppose beauty to, say, destruction, and use it as a symbol of integrity, liberty, and agency, then it becomes something outside the limitations of taste — in fact, to the arbiters of taste, it might well be ‘tasteless’. Beauty in this case, becomes a political point, an act of defiance in the face of damage, destruction, and disempowerment. Beauty becomes a symbol of resistance and possibly its paradox. That’s a point-of-view issue, or maybe it’s actually an issue of empowerment?

Does the mining company, such as Bauxite Alumina Joint Ventures, wanting to create a massive open-cut mine at Morangup that would reach to Wundowie almost twenty kilometres away, see the destruction of habitat that it will wreak, in terms of destruction of beauty? Of course not. They see their promised ‘rehabilitation’ of land as a kind of beauty; they see the aluminium goods we consume as a kind of beauty; they see wealth-creation as a kind of beauty. No doubt, like Rio Tinto’s collaboration with the Black Swan Theatre Company, they’ll target ‘the arts’ in their desire to extend their largesse, to manufacture beauty that we can all digest as art.

And poetry? Poetry is occasionally offered funding directly and indirectly by such companies. It’s easy to get caught out, so we need to be wary and understand where the money’s coming from; often, it’s hidden. Business mostly wishes to take beauty and turn it into a form of capitalist activism, they wish to take art — all your arts — and make them subservient to this notion of beauty. It’s called advertising... or propaganda!

But if we accept that the integrity of land, that country itself is intrinsically beautiful, then in the name of beauty we might claim all evocations of natural beauty in poetry as an activist moment, as a resistance to the mining industry version. So poets describing a kangaroo paw, poets evoking a sunset (with or without pollution coloration), poets noticing a birdcall and implanting it in their own aubade, their own dawn love-poem, become activist in a way that resists the consuming of country enacted by these corporate miners.

So activism in poetry is often implicit, unless you celebrate goods, fetishise your possessions for the sake of them being your possessions. No amount of irony can save the poem that’s built around the actual ordering and acquisition of material goods for the literal sake of ownership.

But the activism I am interested in tonight is possibly more direct. It’s a matter of working lyrical and rhetorical registers, of bringing the figurative and didactic into conversation. The activist poem can traverse the spatiality from ‘celebratory nature poem’ all the way to the damning rant, the poem that simply says, in essence, that ‘All mining companies are fucked! They serve their own purposes. The rock they crush was a home to animals and plants. The rock they crush was a story...’ and so on. A poem doesn’t need to be stuck in the consistency of diction, in registers of display, in the packaging that more accords with Rio Tinto’s glossy arts policy. And if it does deploy ‘regular diction’, ‘predictable’ metrics, and a pat rhyming scheme, let its subject matter challenge the very conventions from which such approaches to poetry arise. Or let it connect with them, with the aural roots, the aids to memory that fomented the patterning of words into lyrics, into combinations of lines that become memorable.

Either way, let the poem protest against the constraints that industry, the military, religion, and government would impose on poets, poetry and community. Poems speak for themselves however hard they might rant, and maybe that’s what the governments and corporate cultures fear the most: their unpredictability, their capacity to make non-violent radical change.

It took the American poet Muriel Rukeyser in 1938 to help articulate in ‘The Book of the Dead’ the horror of the deaths of hundreds of labourers from silicosis after they were forced to mine silica without masks when excavating the hydroelectric Hawks Nest Tunnel at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia from 1927 to the late 30s. That’s poetry as direct, unremitting activism. Is there beauty in the poetry? — maybe of a sort touched upon above, but certainly not that packaged by Union Carbide, the company at the centre of the disaster, or any other prodigal of global corporate capitalism. The beauty of product, the beauty of modernity hawked by such companies is at variance with life, habitat, and health of the biosphere. Rukeyser wrote, investigated, reported:

[see her poem...]

I’d like to finish with a few lines from a poem entitled ‘Mining Company’s Hymn’ from the 1977 collection Jagardoo by Nyungar poet and playwright Jack Davis, whose poetry I am lucky enough to be editing into a collected volume at the moment:

The government is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
They let me search in the Aboriginal reserves
which leads me to many riches
for taxation’s sake.
Though I wallow in the valley of wealth I will fear no weevil
because my money is safe in the bank
vaults of the land,
and my Government will always comfort me.

Forest Sculpture Walk Seems Anti-Forest to Me, Sorry...

By John

Just saw a short on SBS featuring the Northcliffe ‘Understory’ forest project. I was the initially successful applicant for the position of poet-writing-the-forest and pulled out due to my distress at the mistreatment of the forest involved. Bulldozing a chunk to make an arts centre, hacking a path through dieback sections of the forest. I went down for a meeting with the Northcliffe organisers and though some considered my concerns, they rejected my requests for dieback treatment areas and so on.

While in the town collating material for my poems to feature in the forest, I interviewed some more radical members of the community and heard of their concerns regarding the forest being used for an arts exercise with the forest coming second and the ‘artsy’ stuff coming first. Various ecological concerns were voiced, and I realised that to contribute to the forest project would be to violate everything I believe in. Rare parrots would be disturbed, banksia dieback (banksia is a sentinel species for dieback) would spread in the making of the path (or boardwalk as it turned out to be), and the intactness of this small piece of forest would be disturbed — carved up by the walk and the movement of people.

The best kind of sculpture in the forest environment/ecology is surely ‘created’/’evolved’ without human intervention and is chanced upon (if ‘discovered’ at all) and left alone: not constructed and revisited treating the forest as if it’s a ‘creation’ for humans to use as an art gallery (basically acts of mimesis, anyway). This is the triumph of aesthetics over nature, and the ecology that is appended to make for good consciences is a lie. The primary local argument for this was that it was better than logging it — this is true, but it should be added that the piece of forest concerned was a gift to the town and basically outside logging jurisdiction. To leave it intact and to keep invasive ‘artsy’ hands off it would seem altogether the right thing to do.

Anyway, my withdrawal meant other writers filled the space and provided poems anyway. There are many who would disagree with my post here, pointing out that at least some kind of preservation and understanding of the forest is being expressed. Maybe, but I feel that when the ‘arts’ are served first, the forest will always come second. I don’t doubt at all the good intent of the participants, but I do doubt the efficacy of the endeavour with regard to the ultimate health of the forest and the creatures that inhabit it. It’s a question all arts practitioners have to ask themselves: I guess many would see my view as both self-defeating and unrealistic.