Poets and Climate Change

Graphology Kaleidoscope 31: ‘poets’ & climate change 

Poets have mined the seasons through core-samples — their own cores,

            of course, and the seasons’ drills, performances

Poets from some places have imposed their models of seasons on other places

            they visit — dragging six seasons into four, four seasons into two

Poets so easily iron out the specificity of rainfall, temperature, duration, into

            metaphor, that great equaliser of creative manifest destiny

Poets monitor the weather because it is as reliable and unreliable as well, metaphor

Poets fixate on extreme weather events and also the predictability of the cyclical

            nature of seasons, though practice increasingly wavers with meltdown

Poets preserve the status quo using the machinery of communication

Poets take the poetry of community and make it their own, catching call & response

            in their nets of self-affirmation

Poets reduce the particularities of tree — the truth of its growth rings, the habitat

            it has sustained, it is — to ‘tree’, the symbolic extension of themselves

Poets watch the rain gauge, caught up in the effect of light through meniscus, and

            fail to note down the declining average — a dry rain-gauge is of limited appeal

Poets broadcast the word, which is their word even when smoke-screened behind

            collaborative gestures, spoken out of community, embedded in rituals,

            any way they can — they believe it is best to be heard

Poets believe they are heard by silence and time, a commodity

Poets blur their denials and are, taken en masse, not deniers (with stunning

            exceptions) but rely on prosody to scaffold their preference

            for playing with words rather than getting outside and protesting

Poets have LOVED the worldwide web and computers — in the end,

            even the deniers (of a certain ilk) come across to word processors

Poets make carbon dioxide, methane, and some glow with their exchanges

            fed by a grid underwritten by the nuclear industry and/or coal

Poets love writing about birds as extensions of the(ir) psyche while noting

            behaviours and habits — generic and in aberration — to say something

            about the human world to say something about birds to say something

            about aspiration to say something about language to say something

            about culture/s to say something about personal subjectivity

            and community to say something about history to say something

            about time to say something about space to say something

            about migratory patterns to say something about locality

            to say something about a vagrant blown off-course a rare

            sighting to say something about feathers to say something

            about hollow bones to say something about pollution (oil

            on the albatross’s wings) to say something about presence

            to say something about loss to say something about trees of life

            to say something about insects to say something about being

            on the hindquarters of mammals to say something about heat

            and shifts in frequency to say something to say something to say

Poets write about (being) human

Poets write about inducing

Poets write about climate

Poets write about change

Poets are wary of over-writing

Poets are wary about being filed into a category

Poets are cautious to keep a wide range of experience on tap

Poets are quick to avoid fads like the dissolution of the biosphere

Poets are there for one protest and not there for another, having filled their quotas

Poets selectively listen to the music of the spheres, especially the sphere that’s

            underwriting their imagery

Poets envision the landscape of their denials as the denial of others — being

            so attuned to the nuances of dirt, and stone, and air, and flesh, and cellulose

Poets are scientists in their own way though they privilege language over data which

            has advantages and disadvantages though they generally cope well with

            contradictions maybe gloating over this a little too much but even

            when writing in air-conditioned rooms know it’s bloody hot outside

            and hotter than the childhoods they reconstruct in lines rhythmic

            with heat waves and mirages and humidity and freak snow events

            making the weird out of the wonderful and cranking language

            into an event — scientists in their own way or maybe scientists per se

Poets are architects designing poems to be read under the new conditions

            accepted as default adjusting to suit their audience’s compliance

            to the changed conditions; architectural elegists celebrating   

            adaptability of and to the human condition — lament lament

Poets write relationships — between themselves and what’s outside

            their ideas of poets and poems and the word (written/spoken),

            so you’d think human-induced (they are often but not exclusively

            human, they are often though not exclusively ‘alive’ — haunting

            and haunted is the shadow of the poet) climate change would be

            the pivotal array of relationship/s they’d write out of, to, too

Poets acquire and reprocess and even neologise words, so here are a few

            for the condition we’ve made figuratively and literally and in thought

            and voice and all shades of a colouring grey — seeraturate, oilboil,

            dessicane — compounds, exploitation of suffixes and prefixes,

            locked into the colonial Latinate, conquest lexicons, culpabilities

Poets will also perish, illuminating their last breath, and ours, all of ours, too.

            Don’t hand it to them on a plate, stop feeding the loose change

            to the meter. Give language a cooling-off period. Unmake

            linguistic economics. Don’t sing a song of sixpence. See

            the bird without capturing it. Don’t play while determiners

            and pronouns burn together.

  

            John Kinsella

Having listened to David McCooey's new album, The Double

On David McCooey's new album, The Double — a poem-response.


having listened

to the echo taking us back into its trust,
tremolo and sustain working the lines
of rooftops, the 'chimneys doing
their slow work', and taut
with continuance, the lava lamp
losing its grip on suburban manners,
left stranded in the restitutions
and deliverances of voice, I watch
an ambient sky with Western gerygones
taking in the east-west transit,
sparking across hindsight
and prospect, held as I am
in the hold of repressed longing
which lights up in a way
we can study slowly,
not the flash they
need turn away
(from) in the Guam horror
scenario. I will send
it out as resistance,
by proxy, hearing
everything drawn in
without the need
for a massive release
of energy — to hold
is to keep the song going
long, long after. Hold.


     John Kinsella


The album can be found here.

Against the Nuclear Weapon Programmes of All Nations

A call for total nuclear disarmament across the world and an end to ALL nuclear weapons programmes. Discuss, don't destroy. Converse, don't attack. Peace, not conflict.

Graphology Kaleidoscope 27: nuclear peace poem

Things I can just see from here not drawn

into descriptions earlier, or rather

descriptions as they are remade

in the reality of now —

circuits of a windmill

drawing up through deep hill

of rock, a stand of wandoos

singed during burn-offs

now framed by a green lie of pasture.

From his golf club at Bedminster, New Jersey,

green of a sort, Trump says to North Korea:

‘...they will be met with fire, fury

and frankly power

the likes of which this world

has never seen before’ — a nightmare

of lineation, too close to all hands,

as Kim Jong-un’s juche

tracks its course to the doors

of history, of unresolved

policy. The ‘hermit kingdom’

pondering issues of re-entry.

Such ‘thousands-fold revenge’,

such ‘preventative wars’,

such rearrangement of atoms

and molecules. We are drawn

into the wars of the soul —

final proofs due soon.

Rarely, seabirds make passage

to inland waterways

quickly saline, still fresh in living memory —

we see silver gulls in Northam on the river,

we see them overflying farm dams.

We can’t lose sight of the personal in any of this —

concerning all of us.

Technology of peace at our fingertips —

wild flowers still managing to erupt,

prepare their blooms.

Newest World maps, projections — ICBMs

capable of reaching here and here and here —

wave motion practicum — the case itself —

as they have for decades now,

locked and loaded.

A machinery shed, a figure, a swirl of low cloud.

All drawn in here now, as I see us,

I see the above-ground silos

prepared for grain receival, though

the crops a long way from harvest.

True, I’ve seen this before,

but now I am in this context.

I write to the bureau of meteorology

to point out that rainfall figures

for three rural towns

are missing. How will we

know the yearly averages

if days go missing?

It’s all in the details,

it’s all in the details.

I hear back — a missing day

means no annual figures

will be tendered.

I see the grey skies the swirling leaves and branches,

the run rolling down the slopes of Jam Tree Gully.

In these drought lands

there’s been so much rain

to step out is to invite

instability — the ground

that will be blown away

in summer, will shift

dramatically underfoot,

I am sure. They are sure of winter.

Fire, fury, power, thousands-fold.

Paperwork. Cultural-linguistic

windshear. Our settlements.

Miniaturisation of.

Bomb in a warhead

mounted on top.

Steady & ready.

Trajectory.

Inclination.

Parrots

unable to find

nesting hollows.

I receive lists

of illegal clearing

going on

of overclearing

going on

of clearing

to begin

again.

‘International waters’

the biggest test site.

Skeletons in suspension —

I, too, converse with them.

A detente from interior

to coast. And then out,

where the lifeboat

rocks headstrong

and dangerously

in the swell.

All drawn

into the picture

of now.

The production of tablets

will ease our passing.

Legislation of death

centres, pummel

our sanctity, our refrains.

Disarming as sanctions

deathtag hypocrisies — the nuclear weapons industries

                                           doing very well, thank you!

Things I can just see from here not drawn

into descriptions earlier, or rather

descriptions as they are remade

in the reality of now —

circuits of a windmill

drawing up through deep hill

of rock, a stand of wandoos

singed during burn-offs

now framed by a green lie of pasture.

            John Kinsella

Filomena Coppola's Earthly Tales at Gallery 152, York, Launched by John Kinsella

This is an exhibition of the tactile — you’ll want to touch, but you can’t, and that tension will generate insight upon insight in a cascading run of sensations. For these works are about sensations, as much as they are about displacement, disconnection, but also invitation and entry points.

There are three series of work here; each of the threads is in conversation, in this superb open space where light and bareness coalesce. The natural elements are displaced, as the Murray Cod you will see drawn on ancient petrified redgum sanded and polished to a sheen, and the orchids you see in their aching leaves and stalks and blossoms are a long way from home. Yet such separations create empathy, for the fish is trying not only to find its way home, to understand its own issues of belonging, but also to tell us something about our own conditions of belonging and isolation. In a sense, the threads interweaving in this distant space are about empathy and hope.

And as a silhouette of the ‘Fish Out of Water — Murray Cod’ series there is an earlier work, and some understanding of the drives of this work is useful in approaching ‘Murray Cod.’ Filomena Coppola has said:

Fish out of Water – Murray Cod is a development from an intervention project that began at summer solstice, 2013 and continued through summer solstice 2014. I have been painting a lone sardine on a river pebble – the sardine is a reference to the waters near Sardegna and the Port of Napoli – the port where my parents began their journey to Australia. I then released a pebble at each of the eight sabbats. These represent the earth changes of the summer and winter solstice, the equinoxes and the four cross quarters of Lammas, Samhain, Imbolc and Beltane. Often associated with pagan festivals, I am acknowledging this history as well as connecting with the earth changes throughout the year; the seasons, light and my own connection to place.

If you’re interested in the dynamics of this fascinating project, there’s a downloadable pdf available via Filomena’s website. And though these sardines are in evidence in the framed works here (which constitute one of the three main narratives in the exhibition), crossing Australia on their long, almost timeless journey, carrying stories across the world’s oceans and acting as shamans and healers on behalf of the earth itself, while also functioning as cultural intermediary and creating a hybrid presence and new stories as they progress, the real focus of the ‘Fish Out of Water’ installations here is the ‘Murray Cod’ of which the artist notes:

This work Fish out of Water – Murray Cod is a continuation of this project. Working with petrified red gum, which is between 5000-9000 years old and sourced from the Murray River, I made nine organic forms – grinding and sanding the wood into forms that are beautiful to hold. The petrified red gum carries within it stories of the Murray River, this continent, its cultural history, and the floods, droughts, fires that have affected this landscape. I feel that each organic form vibrates with the history that it carries. On each, I have painted a Murray Cod – a fish out of water – a comment on this changing continent, its climate, culture and demographic. I then travelled the length of the Murray River and selected nine locations beginning at Cudgewa Creek and ending where the river runs to the ocean at Goolwa’

[Artist’s statement — website].

And we can see that journey here, and we can connect with its cyclical movement, and share the journeys. This vital predatory fish of the Murray-Darling system — one that nurtures and protects its eggs — is under threat in its own home. It is looking for a way back to its stories, its narrative of being. And, in addition to this, we can all question our own understandings of cultural presence and relativism, and the responsibility we all have to respect the different stories of belonging, and the different stories of journeying. I appreciate and admire the respect shown to Indigenous knowledge and presence, and the power of that belonging.

The other thread of this exhibition, the ‘Wallflower’ series, is in part about sexuality and female subjectivity, and this doesn’t necessarily mean it requires the male, though the male may be there, hovering around the edges. It’s about identity more than sexuality, and as sensual it is, it’s for the ‘female’ to decide, to make choices.

In many ways, these flowers are speaking to women, though not exclusively — these are not to be left sitting on the sidelines neglected, waiting to be asked to dance, they are far too active in their apparent quietude for that. These are suggestions of female bodies — but there’s the furred implication of male presence as well, but maybe that’s not essential here. What’s challenging in all this is that these ‘parts’ are closer than many would like to think — they fur together, they grow together, they are part of the living organism, of the essence of life itself.

There’s nothing prurient in this — it’s threatening, sure, but life is about risk and we need to understand our discomforts as much as our pleasures. So, enticing and disturbing, maybe, at once?

They are also outside sexuality, as they are outside the plant, the botanical. They are vegetable becoming animal and vice versa; they are the interweaving of all life into the moment of observation and experience. And the desire to touch. First thing I did when approaching the remarkable ‘Wallflower — Meow, make me purr’, was reach out to touch, then remind myself, No, that’s not permitted, not part of the rules of encounter. Step back, respect the intactness of the image before you, and all it represents.

Not only did I want to stroke the fur as one might a partner’s hair, or an animal’s fur, but to stroke it against the grain, the wrong way. Because there’s something disturbing going on in these drawings, something that makes the pastels hyper-real beyond illustration, and something almost carnivorous. Not as dentata, or as invasiveness, but as a dangerous kind of welcome.

Talking with Filomena, she mentioned the animal belly seam in the fur, and I agreed, I had encountered that in the work as well — something liminal, a line that is vulnerable and yet assertive. The irony of the docile image of the wallpaper background, the polite and muted domestic, is that within the walls of rooms the secrets are held, the risks taken in love and life, and shared encounters made. There is something threatening and rebellious in all this; with its undertones of the anarchist designer William Morris, one is also reminded of where the decorative meets craft.

And also something investigative, as we find with the sardine swimming through the neat, small frames of botany, zoology, and rainfall data on the Australian map in the three confrontations with data and subjectivity — what facts we have, what we know, and yet the ‘touch’, the qualities of life itself are often missed. As the sardine ‘swims’ on the dry dead eucalypt leaves in these montages, it lifts details into the sensorium, into the realm of environmental investigation, consequence, and we hope, healing.

But we are ahead of ourselves here, because we need to find the Murray Cod trying to re-enter the river, a river that has suffered horrendously from environmental degradation, that is a barometer for the consequences of colonialism. Yet it’s also a river of ongoing beauty and strength, and that’s to be embraced; the presence of people has been part of its being for tens of thousands of years, and the new migrants to Australia of the last two hundred or so years, or, indeed, of the last decades, can be part of its repair and its spirit if they listen, learn and sense.

I see the ‘Fish Out of Water’ Series as very much about healing, about return, about belonging. The merging of textures in the ‘pebbles’ — the wooden stones, if you like — carrying the fish as they ‘bed down’ in different locations on or near the river, or by the sea shore, absorb the qualities of those locations, and return to their homes with the knowledge of their experiences. This is an ongoing conversation, in which learning is essential — Filomena Coppola has gifted us a role in this narrative, and that is to find the fish, to witness, to return them to their homes, and in doing so share in this illumination.

For me, touch — the tactile — is a vital component of understanding. I was lucky enough to have the artist hand me one of the stones — the Barmah stone — to hold, to nurture in my palm. It’s a disconcerting and reassuring experience at once — a sense of breaking a taboo, of being where you shouldn’t, and yet entirely ‘natural’. Now, viewers can’t touch these objects, but they will want to, and that’s the point. On their wooden platforms with photos of sites where the fish out of water will try to find its way back, they tempt us to pick them up and put them in place. I asked a couple of people which fish they connected with, and three said the image of the reeds, as the fish was soon going to work its way through the reeds back into water. Another said, ‘All of them’ — a collective experience of return and belonging.

In all of this, the hybrid, the identity made up of many experiences and backgrounds and even origins, is part of the understanding, part of the beauty and the trauma. No easy solutions are offered in this, and neither, I think, can art do that. Art is about ambiguity as much as resolution.

Mentally, away from the space of the exhibition, my mind keeps returning the installation of/from/out of Bonegilla, and its relatively recent history as a migrant camp of many Nissen huts, and the transitions from one life into another. All lives are part of presence, and the fish returning to water is a complex journey, and involves many stories; these are fixed and unfixed, and have a massive breadth.

So, respect and welcome and difficulty and reconciliation and hope and desire and questioning and conservation and learning. And touch. Filomena Coppola said to me as we were looking at the image of the fish on its ‘pebble’ near rock-pools that will probably dry out, leaving it more stranded than ever in an alienating landscape, but we hope, we hope against the odds, that she intends, ‘Layers of different cultures in landscapes...’, and this is surely the case.

So, I declare this beautifully uncomfortable exhibition open — it is seductive and disturbing in so many different ways, and it is generative, and searches for a healing and a healthy future. And may you embrace its talismanic seeing-stones — touching them with your mind’s eye, but not your fingers!

          John Kinsella