Working with Urs Jaeggi 1

       by John

I have worked with Urs Jaeggi on a variety of text(ual)-visual-poetry collaborations since the mid 90s when I first met him in Fremantle, Western Australia, while attending a PEN conference. When I moved to Cambridge with family, I got to see Urs every now and again as I often travelled to Germany. He and I read together in Berlin and Hamburg and created via fax machine a book of poem-visual-textualisations entitled D & G that has since been lost. There were a number of paper versions of D & G circulating around the turn of the century, but none of them seems to have survived. A section of the book was published in Chain magazine in the late 90s, and is included below. As said in the note that follows the pages, the work came out of an intense 'conversation' across and around and under and over and through the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

Since D & G, Urs and I have collaborated on a number of other works via email, with fractions and fragments being published here and there over the years (e.g. in Vlak magazine). Most recently, we have been working on 'drawings and poems', whereby I respond to series of drawings sent as attachments by Urs. This is the reverse of a process we employed in around 2006/7/8 when I sent Urs my Divine Comedy 'distractions' and he 'illustrated' and sent back. Those drawings never found their way into the English-language editions of the work (WW Norton and UQP), but a few did find their way into the selection done by the Italian publisher Raffaelli Editore with translations in Italian by Maria Cristina Biggio in 2013. I have scanned some pages and will include below.

What I have presented here are some snippets from our recent work together, and I intend to add to this over future blog postings. Collaboration has been a vital part of my creative working life, and is really what I am most interested in, and most value. As well as working with Urs for over twenty years, I have also had the good fortune to work creatively with Louis Armand, Pam Brown, Niall Lucy, Dorothy Hewett, Mona Ryder, Karl Wiebke, Thurston Moore, Kwame Dawes, Tracy Ryan, Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Susan Schultz, Frieda Hughes, James Quinton, Wendy Jenkins, Barry Phipps, Paul Kane, Alan Jenkins, John D'Alton, Gordon Kerry, Forrest Gander, and others, and I feel privileged in these interactions.

I begin with a letter and poem written quite a few years ago now in celebration of Urs's 80th birthday, and included in a primarily German-language volume celebrating the brilliance of this Swiss-born sociologist, cultural and social activist, novelist, poet, visual artist, sculptor, and much more. 

                                                                            *

Happy birthday, Urs. I thank you for your friendship and for sharing your work with me over the years. Working with you on various collaborations, including D & G and most recently the Tractortatus texts, has been an ongoing revelation about the possibilities of art and language. You are the embodiment of the Renaissance artist and thinker — all is in your ken — but in a truly contemporary way.

Here is a poem based on a few factors: visiting your apartment in Berlin in the mid-90s; the painting used as the cover image for Salt magazine number 8 (1996); and very distantly, your wonderful poem-text ‘Miles’, published in the same issue of Salt.

I often think of our performances together in Berlin and Hamburg. You are the liberator of the word!

Pause

            for Urs Jaeggi’s 80^th Birthday

In the room the room

you offered the staying

place the rocking-horse

room where night-fright

made no horror and no

shadows just the zoo-light

carried in from wanderings

about the wall machine

down ergo silence of cabinet

of sketches expressing

shudders and stillness

an ergonomics of presence

where comfort allies

with friendship and intensity

with sincerity and circles

wavering circles and souls

stepping down and out

through window and image-bank

in book-frame and covering

voices with plausible trance

or entrance — thankyou

for the cover the glint

and gleaning of salt

and movie-time rescue

like risk like announcement

overtalking to echo

through theatre and audience,

failsafe nor forget-me-not rhizomes

tunnelling streetworks

cloistered or blossoming in window

of multilingual fruitfulness,

no imprisonment in artifice

or maybe freedom in artifice

but not ‘officialese’ (you made

your escape! you sculpted

plastic form office throne

choke of narrative, storyline

fame left on the altar),

degrees of ranks blown

in by Peter the Great

and no notice taken

or left freehold resurrection

poem of provinces — dead

souls — no, no estates

made from transfer or silence:

third persons telling their tales,

folk tales and heritages,

red and blue witches,

sagas   epics   prophecies

I heard Khlebnikov asleep

reciting asleep I was awake

asleep near the rocking-horse

childhood recognition of apocrypha

I was part of we all were you’d think

or you were too and I detailed

the twists and scrunches

of paper that made up

your eternal poem your

challenge to rock the horse

to rock the boat

to rock the monastery

of learning and blight,

chronicle   recital   ode

paint hunger form

catacoustics

of inner-city apartment

as generous as caverns

and sky, ‘(dritte Lektion)’

in the mineshafts of wonder,

investigation, breakthroughs,

sticking-your-neck-out

loyalty of palette is body

of palette is opening colour

outside its spectrum

without the inducements

of colour, refraction, spectra,

prism analogies, dispersion,

diffractions the clamour

for laws we never want,

we pass without pause:

sharing is silence and noise

and the joy of knowing.

Bonding and making,

rooms to fill and empty,

all made in the shades

of living contrapposto.

            with very best wishes,

            from John Kinsella

And some drawings and poems (i.e. Urs Jaeggi's drawings followed by my poem-responses):

 and

Confrontation (after Urs Jaeggi’s IMG-888a4.jpg)

When the boomers

confront each other

on the second tier

below the house,

we described it as a dance. None of us have danced recently,

nor attended a dance, or thought much about dance,

but it’s inherent, isn’t it? We pluck memories

like fur from the coats

of rivals we don’t have, or don’t want. We are not

violent. But the old boomer — scarred, dominant —

hangs on to his mob for another season —

three rivals, almost but not quite

as large, wrestling for supremacy.

All lived to tell tails

they balanced on, ‘boxing’

and tipping opponents

until first and second round losers demurred

to watch from down low

the final tilt, the pas de deux

that defines the sociology

of the present, and what will be

for a time, a cycle.

And from earlier in the latest collaborative cycle:

 

Intentions

I intend to travel beyond the spectrum.
I intend to recast lines and mergings.
I intend to open the doors and windows when it's storming.
I intend to let language escape into geography.
I intend to let geography escape into language.
I intend to wake the sleeping.
I intend to wind the chronometer backwards.
I intend to stir the wind against gravity.
I intend to colour all reproductive parts of the flower.

 

Closing Bell

Paso doble shock to casternet
Psyche's blastdoors, to confront
a mirrorcall, a despicable wall
of Self stretched to profit ideology.

We see into your pas de deux,
your rough riding aubades
to make a myth fit phrenology.
We sense a universal and tranquil pool

beyond your aqueous humour,
beyond the closing bell.

 

Kiss

Repossessions of peace
counts empire-standard,
clauses claws & shadows
philology of body type
facing departures.
Nip the randomness.
Take the chance.
Reading & expression =
stones hauled so far
upright.

Ruins

Struggling over the ruins
as a black rain swirled,
they wiped their eyes
to better see the spirits
rising from spent palaces,
granaries, and tombs.

Greetings from Mexico Received

'Froto mis párpados:
el cielo anda en la tierra'

    Octavia Paz, 'Madrugada Al Raso'

My brother-in-law
travels frequently to Mexico.
He sees the dawn over mountains,
he sees fresh light silhouetting
timeless ghosts in the streets, the trees.
He sees far beyond any wall,
and on The Day of the Dead
he sends us greetings
and we share, too.

 And now some pages from the Italian edition/selection of my Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography... Urs did numerous drawings but only three could be used in this edition — one for each canticle:

And finally, here is the short section from the lost D & G (if anyone out there has a copy of the full manuscript, please let me know!), as published in Chain 5: Different Languages (eds. Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr, Summer 1998). As I mention in the epilogue/afterword, we envisaged it as a kind of radical eclogue, with English, French, German and Latin stretched and fed into the collapsing pastoral (fax) machine:

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So, that's a sampler... more to follow in future posts. Thanks for twenty-one years of sharing, Urs.

More on Parrots

Below are answers I gave to a series of questions sent to me (mid 2015, I answered January, 2016) but never presented or used in any specific way:

*parrots have always been 'central' to what i do for three reasons:

(1) they were always around me at wheatlands farm - i loved them and yet i shot them as a child and that contradiction was one of the driving forces that led me to animal-rights activism and veganism (see a recent animal-rights poem just up at [this blog].
(2) as a child i also trapped them out on the big farm my father managed near mullewa, and then incarcerated them in cages down south. watching their tragedy unfold awakened me to what i was doing. i was saturated in the suffering i had caused.
(3) they have become more than symbol to me, more than 'transitional objects', they are real accompaniments to my life in the wheatbelt and i to theirs. i feel an advocate for their rights, and try to create space for their nesting and lives.

*i spent many years of my childhood living in mount pleasant by the river, though we spent as much time as possible on wheatlands farm. we then later moved to geraldton. and i spent time, with my brother, up north with my father on access visits and holidays, and also on the farm near mullewa he managed. i have lived in fremantle and south perth (twice), i have also lived in northbridge and for a time in the globe hotel (gone now) in perth. i wrote a series of city-dwelling poems which were published as a chapbook by vallum. they are entitled 'inner city poems'. more of my suburban poems - always about space - are to be found in the book i did with robert drewe entitled sand (fremantle press). the wheatbelt has been the main focus and living place of my 'australian' life, but i have (long ago) spent periods in the city. i lived on the streets for a considerable time when i was alcoholic/addicted for those many years. twenty years sober now. i associate the city with lostness, confusion and confinement re space because of the cycle of self-abuse.

*i think birds are a spatial release for suburbs - they are hope and transcendence. when i wandered the dark lonely places of suburban enclosure (consider john clare and enclosure), i literally communed with birds by way of sharing. i sought to protect them and they gave back. 'introduced species' of birds make their place where native birds have been destroyed, and they in turn enrich the ecology and allow for other birds to co-exist. people who shoot pigeons and rainbow lorikeets etc in the suburbs are an outrage - in the context of 'invasive species'. what a cheek! aviary escapees, native species (especially the wonderful carnaby's) and other species that have gained traction, should be protected and nurtured. for themselves, primarily, but also because they offer understanding of the world at large, realign and free the spatial constraints of the city, and show that there is more to the world than 'owning' animals and owning space. suburbs are about control - birds break down that control in non-violent liberating ways, they can share, why don't we?

a poetics of bird-spatiality in the city.


john kinsella

The Wild Colonial Boy

The wild colonial boy is a loner

The wild colonial boy has guilt over his plunder

The wild colonial boy plunders his guilt

The wild colonial boy doesn’t know

            what to do with the plunder

The wild colonial boy offloads the plunder

            at the trash and treasure

The wild colonial boy can’t tune into the Eureka Stockade

The wild colonial boy tries to fly in and fly out but is caught out,

            amphetamines in his urine

The wild colonial boy shares a cell with a Noongar bloke

            who shares law and knowledge from country

The wild colonial boy rather be inside than out

            because the chains and slavery of the languages

            of occupation leave him confused and angry,  

            but inside is murder and he knows it

The wild colonial boy doesn't know what to do

            with his skill set — he thinks of going bush

The wild colonial boy watches the numbats

            near the huts in the visitors’ part of Dryandra Forest

The wild colonial boy listens to the crested pigeon flying, to the bush stone-

            curlew stalking, the western gerygone singing along with the

            elegant parrot in the canopy and the golden whistler

            and even the nest-hunting shining bronze-cuckoo

The wild colonial boy couldn’t be said to be distracted as the cops

            close in around him, but listening to the cross-talk

            of community, the close-knit interferences of belonging,      

            the distress of songs broken up by songs of repair and reparation

The wild colonial boy is taken and cuffed and has the shit

            kicked out of him — now he is tattooed with a constellation

            that shines over no part of the earth but is permanent

The wild colonial boy watches a young Noongar bloke being beaten

            to death in the lock-up

The wild colonial boy has been extradited as witness

            to be laughed at by the judge, to be warned to say nothing more

            if he ever wants to wander the plains again

The wild colonial boy promises himself he will shout the truth

            at every footy match, in front of every television,

            to the writers of reports who will go home to love and calm

The wild colonial boy wanders the port streets on his release,

            not understanding he’s in a decolonising world,

            the shops bristling with worldly goods, with opportunities,

            and all good things coming to those standing and waiting

The wild colonial boy stops in front of a travel agency window

            and sees a jet will take him anywhere in the world

            and that he can unlearn the codes of his failings —

            he can become he can become he can become

The wild colonial boy has worn dresses and wandered naked

            and has never been stuck on the codes of the pub

            and wonders if his time has come, but the urbane laugh

            at him — his phonelessness — head-in-hands on the kerb

The wild colonial boy looks out for his mate the actor

            but knows in his heart that his friend is gone,

            a friend who had been eaten by Australia,

            a friend whose name he won’t use in a song

            out of respect for the dead

The wild colonial boy looks out from near the walls

            of the Roundhouse and finds solace

            in the sea, the dolphins, the gulls

The wild colonial boy hears the many conversations

            and all languages make sense to him

            though he claims none — he is homeless

            and stateless and his family can't reach him

The wild colonial boy can't ‘call Australia home’, though he has never

            really left its shores; but he has travelled outside its jurisdictions,

            and he has travelled far beyond its metaphors

            John Kinsella

Wheatbelt Stubble Burns and Fencing Are Just Other Methods of Clearing Native Vegetation

 
   by John

This poem is in response to the atrocity of stubble-burning going on at the moment in wheatbelt Western Australia. We have spent two months under smoke from pointless and damaging burns. In the extreme dry (no rain!) the stubble has easily lent itself to complete burnouts of surrounding bushland. And so many old-growth trees left in paddocks are now burnt to ash. A disgrace! And there's a binge of fencing going on, with fencers (and landowners) removing as much vegetation as they think they can get away with.

Graphology Endgame 74: burn testament burn-off

(i)

The burn-off racket. The windrows flame out.

The oops, it got away from us — fire having its way.

Blokes in hi-vis jackets light the stubble & evaporate.

Highlights to flame against, smoke dousing bees

where manna-wattles blossom now on edges,

so eruptive to nakedness, the raw combustion.

Don’t separate off napalm in the farming-out

of warfare — contrast victor and conquered. Don’t

lose track of parodic elements, those satellite furphies

to barely catch out the wanton, the collateral exposé.

Firebreaks ignored when razing the fence-line.

Lexical endgame in ‘out of control’; afraid there’s no

conservation cropping going on here, just burning

regimes to mock retention. Stubble binds. Stubble burns.

A week later, we’re back on the same road to witness

the entire bush-residue burnt out — the hop, skip and a jump

from paddock to enclave. Ash complements emptiness.

Summer’s fire-plan is autumn’s clearance sale in action.

Where we’d admired tall York gums in the centre of a paddock,

along the spine of the eroded Dyott Range, we see emptiness.

Fire climbed into branches and wiped out eras of nests.

Ash and charcoal ploughed into the loam — warped fertility.

We see power-poles in paddocks protected from the burning —

thus the selective nature of ‘accidents’. Growth as mechanism.

We have lived in a humidicrib of smoke for two months. Singed

and coated lungs. Landowners burning out the heart of here

as vengeance against the dry, against the ecosphere

for telling them what’s what. No rain means more flame.

In this age of destruction, we are expected to keep

our mouths shut and cop what’s ‘good’ for us?

(ii)

In this long dry, flames reach higher and it’s a gamble

grabbed with both hands: the fire-starters thirsty

for every extra bag of grain or hay-bale they can eke out.

Shot-term visionaries of the aggro-cultivated balance sheet.

And where flames don’t wipe out the remaining trees,

bring in the fencers! — excise every last tree along roadsides,

extended domains of felling. These tricks of demolition — scrolling,

rolling up. Work that into lines of rhyming iambic pentameter —

a colonial metre; or better still, make comment

and enjoy the indifference of movies or game-stations

in open forms. Poetry accommodates what is as long

as it sparkles in display — pseudo-ritualistic burning-off

being the way of it, the sun a red goitre in the encarboned sky.

And Stephen Hawking, O prophet of humanity, instructs us

that ‘resources’ will be used up (too fast, too fast) within a hundred years,

not a thousand, and we’d better hop to it and get out there

colonising space (I thought that’s what had been happening

all along). Hawking might like to visit the Western Australian

wheatbelt to see humans cutting off their noses to spite

all other faces, to see the eco-system of a tree

go up in smoke at the one time of year

we might hope to avoid bushfires — this

is the psychology and skills we’ll take out there

from here, the green eye on green planets to make bare.

The smoke of lit fires across the planet blankets

the future. It hasn’t rained and the farmers

can’t crop so they burn (working hard — leaving

the burning unattended) — to expand, to make ready,

to add the quintessence of their agriculture

to cracking the world’s pastoral-ismo enigma code.

The feeders, the fed, the feeding: eat what’s served up

on our plates. Not every farmer, of course — no one size

fits all, but people stand and suffocate bewildered,

not knowing what to do. Firies who fight summer fires

light late-autumn fires and have a barbecue afterwards.

Just one scenario, but it’s all in play at the moment.

And those few colonisers out there, who will wreak

development on other worlds, will think back to what

they’ve left, the billions dying, and say, all those plumes

of smoke, those destroyed trees, those genetically

modified crops replacing evolution. For our sakes.

We carry the genes of Stephen Hawking

in phials around our necks: ancestry,

the burning that brought false fertility

hard to pick out on this bloody

and smoky event horizon we cease under.

(iii)

We are not alone. A letter to the Toodyay paper

pointing out that such burning-off is illegal.

And another in the York paper. Rain doesn’t

come, so the burning continues. Into the ash,

the GM canola implants. Air-seeders,

dust plumes. Last year there were families

in the crops — bumper green — to leitmotif

the media. Happy families as the earth contracts.

(iv)

The colours of a polluted sunset are simply awe-inspiring.

I won’t fill in the wild and muted and angry colour chart —

that’s just a little indulgent, isn’t it? Giving you something

sensuous to get a grip on, dig your teeth into. That’d be

making art out of the horror — finding beauty in the

last gasp. But I’ve seen many land-owners standing

on the edge of their spreads (it’s the year of America)

admiring their handiwork, the kickbacks of nature.

(v)

The eagle flying mid-range between the burning

and the hills, waiting for the dash of rodents

and even reptiles who are this way and that

with the late heat, the dry, but shorter days.

The eagle flying mid-range between the burning

and the hills, watches its eyrie flamed-out of the tall tree

that has survived the bushfire seasons to be ashed

so the tractor can get a clear run on profit’s ingress.

(vi)

In Ireland it’s blasphemy to question God’s

ironies of fire and water — the conflagration

that has turned even bones to ash. It’s all

goodness on the statute books, and local

spirits know what’s good for them

as the earth is made bare; even

that place of the Saint Finbarr —

Gougane Barra — watching the mountains

in flames, the vegetation rising as cinders

to make false haloes over the lake.

Gorse fires without restraint.

Consequences. Subtexts. Blasphemies.

(vii)

Harvest of flame.

Time and a place.

Now a consequence

for nature that has

nowhere else to go.

Harvest of flame,

the world’s punishment

for suggesting ‘restraint’.

All that precedent

lost to the industrial

grotesque — the natural,

the ritualistic, all dragged

into the coffers; the products

we ‘need to have’, force-

fed, choking on abundance,

harvest of flame.

(viii)

Sick moon? What is

the magpie mimicking?

And the mistletoebird?

The trees knocked over by the digger

and burnt — we saw it happening.

No gathering to stop it.

Nothing. No case

to answer. Sick moon?

You rise large and diminish.

Consortiums and governments

are aiming to mine you soon. Soon.

Burnt off constantly by the sun.

Tawny frogmouths

suffocated by smoke.

On the moon, too — see them fly past,

and fall. Less gravity, but enough

to bring down, to hold the dead.

Evening star — fire-starter?

Tawny frogmouth — smoke ghost.

The gods are alive and walking

and flying and swimming and crawling

and existing on the earth — today,

and for the last couple of months,

Gods here have been burnt out

under the camouflage of burning-off,

of adding trace elements to a soon-to-be

heavily fertilised soil, to remove

the inconvenient chaff piles

and trees, of replacing

fences with new fences

and clearing vegetation

as process. These live gods

made dead. Multiplying

but finite blasphemies.

Evening star — fire-starter?

Nocturnal day-walkers.

Bruised clouds.

(ix)

You dare compare your acts

with the use of fire by Aboriginal people

as a means of being one with their country?

You dare compare your acts

with the use of fire by Aboriginal people

as you burn country you stole from them?

You dare compare your acts

with the use of fire by Aboriginal people

when you divide and conquer, leave nothing alive?

(x)

Smoulder. Rouse. Conflagrate.

It’s easy to balance the equation.

Emulsified testament suspension.

Conflagrate. Rouse. Smoulder.

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            John Kinsella