'This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on 'praxis' book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism.' (Publication summary)
'This chapter argues that ecopoetry is too easily absorbed back into the logics of capitalism and colonialism. Aware of the delimiting forces surrounding its own context, the chapter argues to be taken not as an essay but as an action. It argues that for a poem to bring about environmental change, it must be part of connected interventions. The chapter outlines the poetic yarning between John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk Green, a member of the Wajarri, Badimaya, and Nhanagardi people of the Yamaji Nation, as a means of generative protest. It also provides an example of poems written in medias res in the collective resistance to a proposal to build bike trails on Walwalinj, a mountain sacred to the Ballardong Noongar people. This example demonstrates a poem is shaped by the particular situation and how the poem is one part of a network of actions that formed a campaign that was led by Aboriginal elders. The chapter also includes collaborative poetry written during the Roe 8 Highway protests in 2016 and poetry protesting the proposed destruction of the Julimar Forest by mining companies.'
Source: Abstract.
'John Kinsella is a prolific writer from Western Australia. This article takes a topopoetic approach to considering his poetry and poetics by connecting studies of Yi-Fu Tuan’s topophilia and the paradoxical views of Zhuangzi and Thoreau in illustrating some tensions between language and place, connection and disconnection, and placement and displacement in Kinsella’s writings. In particular, I discuss Kinsella’s affective ties to the land and his anti-pastoral stance by parodying the European settlement on Country traditionally owned by Indigenous peoples. His poetry presents a dystopian world that challenges the old European sense of a pastoral society. By making connections between a Chinese sense of the earth and Kinsella’s poetics, I argue that as paradoxical as Kinsella's poetics may be, his writings, imbued with influences from different sources, demonstrate an effort to save the worsening earth.' (Publication abstract)
'Born in 1935 to a family of early and successful Western Australian squattocracy (squatter aristocracy), the celebrated mid-century novelist Randolph Stow’s early life in rural Geraldton exposed him to the political contexts surrounding Australian pastoralism, particularly the dispossession and racist treatment of the Yamatji and Wajarri people of the central Gascoyne region and associated environmental destruction. This article reads two of Stow’s pastoral poems in light of these tensions, following the work of Stow’s Geraldton countryman John Kinsella’s understanding of settler Australian pastoral as inevitably fraught, for instead of a blank arcadia, even in retreat the landscape is always occupied (“Contrary Rhetoric” 136). The most influential voice in contemporary Australia (if not international) criticism of the pastoral, Kinsella argues that environmental violence is inextricable from violence done to the occupants of the land as functions of colonization, and the pastoral as it primarily operates in an Australian context occludes this violence. Kinsella writes that the “hierarchy of land ownership, a concept imported from Europe in particular, has meant that no nostalgia, no return to an Eden, is possible. These Edens are about dispossession and ownership by the few” (“Is There an Australian Pastoral” 348). Yet, is this necessarily other to the pastoral, which traces one of its many origin points to Virgil’s dispossession from his ancestral property at Mantua following the 42BC battle of Phillipi? How might an understanding of the pastoral as social form—complex, communal, and political—better help unpack the work of Stow and others? In this article, I take this question as my central concern, revisiting the poetry of Stow, which has largely rested in a critical lacunae since his death in Harwich, UK, in 2010. I am interested in teasing out how the pastoral is intrinsically linked to citizenship and community, or as William Empson writes, “the problems of one and the many, especially their social aspects” (21). This is the rusted pastoral of the Western Australian Wheatbelt Stow offers us, one that, through the questioning of human communities, is porous, allowing nature, history, and politics to filter through.' (Introduction)
'Life writing is ubiquitous in John Kinsella’s vast oeuvre. Kinsella’s employment of the diversity of modes collected under the rubric of “life writing” is underpinned by a “poetics of dirt.” Such a poetics is visible in the central role that material dirt (as both pollution and terrain) plays in Kinsella’s work, as well as the more general concept of impurity, as seen in Kinsella’s poetic trafficking in ideas concerning transgression, liminality, hybridity, and danger. In Purity and Danger (1966), the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined dirt as “matter out of place.” In the poem “Dirt” (from Kinsella’s 2014 collection Sack), dirt remains understandable as matter out of place, but it also becomes radically mobile, its material and symbolic weight subject to unexpected transformations. The eponymous dirt in Kinsella’s poem is being carted from one place to another by the poet’s near neighbour for “purposes unknown.” This “shitload of dirt,” dumped onto the dirt of the valley’s floor, makes its way into the disturbingly porous bodies – both human and non-human – around it. It is “something you sense in arteries” and “the haze / that lights and encompasses us all.” This poem can be taken as a metonym for Kinsella’s entire literary oeuvre. Employing his “poetics of dirt,” Kinsella attends to the dispossessed dirt of a post/colonial nation; the dirt of contemporary farming practices; the dirt of official and vernacular languages; and the dirt of personal secrets. This essay argues that Kinsella’s “poetics of dirt” cannot be disambiguated from his activist poetics, and the profoundly auto/biographical nature of his writing. Attending to postcolonial theory and life-writing studies, this essay analyses how Kinsella thematises dirt as central to both life writing (in prose and poetry) and a life of writing. In doing so, it considers dirt as something not simply “out of place,” but – in a postcolonial, post-sacred, and late-capitalist world – endlessly mobile, unstable, and transformative, moving between material and discursive realities in newly complex ways. By attending to dirt (both as matter and as pollutant) within the context of his various auto/biographical projects, Kinsella conspicuously draws attention to the relationship between the human and the material, profoundly questioning – in a way akin to a “new materialist” perspective – the consequences of a human-centred ontology. At its most radical, the “poetics of dirt” found in Kinsella’s life writing posits a world in which human subjectivity is not the only agental force in the material world.' (Publication abstract)
'This article focuses on the question of John Kinsella’s invisibility in World Literature from the perspective of his International Regionalism (IR). First, it compares the similarity and difference between Kinsella and Joseph S. Nye’s international regionalism, and pinpoints the development of Kinsella’s IR from Disclosed Poetics, Activist Poetics, Spatial Relations to Polysituatedness. Second, it concentrates on analyzing the background of Kinsella’s IR through three kinds of ideologies: veganism, anarchism, and pacifism, in order to mark the unique identity problem of Kinsella – identity dilemma in-between pre- and post-nation as Australia. Third, it clarifies the reason why Kinsella is invisible in the World Literature canon as Emily Apter mentions in “On Translation in a Global Market,” in line with the question why Kinsella was mainly in the footnotes of Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney’s Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature. In conclusion, on the one hand, Kinsella’s IR about the World and Literature does not fit in the Center, or the Periphery, nor the Semi-Center & Periphery; on the other hand, Kinsella’s IR might more aptly be termed International Community-ism, because Kinsella’s World is built up by very small communities.' (Publication abstract)
'In his book The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh examines why the human imagination—especially in literary fiction—has so often failed to come to terms with what he considers the greatest crisis of our times: climate change. He calls this a failure of our collective imagination—a “great derangement”—born out of an assumption that the earth is a separate and inanimate thing on which we live, rather than a living entity of which we are a part. In a partial answer to this problem, John Kinsella’s new multigenre book, Polysituatedness, presents a view of global citizenship in prose and poetry that serves as a treatise for how humans can engage with the planet. In doing so, he suggests possibilities for fueling our imagination about the climate crisis. It is, therefore, fitting to consider these two recent books together. They share an urgency that literature, which has often been at the vanguard of addressing the challenges of our times, must do more to bring this critical issue to the center of the humanities and to human consciousness.' (Introduction)
'John Kinsella remains Australia’s most militant, morally cognizant naysayer, and his oeuvre is an archive of precepts running counter to master narratives of place. This essay re-reads Benjamin’s notion of the artist as cultural producer against the grain of Esposito’s etymological excavations of “community,” and frames Kinsella’s steady output of co-authored books as not only a mode of nomadic munificence but no less than a kind of formative guerrilla poetics. Pairing with poets, rock stars, others to extend his anti-capitalist project, Kinsella’s co-authored works perform a suite of interventions, gifting readers a means by which we too might fathom the generative effects of banding together in a munus speaking its own laws (and lore) to reconfigure notions of co-empowerment, equity, and indeed comradeship. Each of Kinsella’s co-authored books constitutes an intentional community of two and, as if dwelling in compositional possibilities, each text remains steadfastly optimistic. Refusing to be locked into despair by regressively instrumentalist political non-visionaries, from within an Antipodean milieu Kinsella and his many co-authors materialize gestures demonstrating how we might struggle for control of who gets to produce ideas, by which decentralized means, and to which generative ends.' (Publication abstract)
'This article focuses on the question of John Kinsella’s invisibility in World Literature from the perspective of his International Regionalism (IR). First, it compares the similarity and difference between Kinsella and Joseph S. Nye’s international regionalism, and pinpoints the development of Kinsella’s IR from Disclosed Poetics, Activist Poetics, Spatial Relations to Polysituatedness. Second, it concentrates on analyzing the background of Kinsella’s IR through three kinds of ideologies: veganism, anarchism, and pacifism, in order to mark the unique identity problem of Kinsella – identity dilemma in-between pre- and post-nation as Australia. Third, it clarifies the reason why Kinsella is invisible in the World Literature canon as Emily Apter mentions in “On Translation in a Global Market,” in line with the question why Kinsella was mainly in the footnotes of Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney’s Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature. In conclusion, on the one hand, Kinsella’s IR about the World and Literature does not fit in the Center, or the Periphery, nor the Semi-Center & Periphery; on the other hand, Kinsella’s IR might more aptly be termed International Community-ism, because Kinsella’s World is built up by very small communities.' (Publication abstract)
'Life writing is ubiquitous in John Kinsella’s vast oeuvre. Kinsella’s employment of the diversity of modes collected under the rubric of “life writing” is underpinned by a “poetics of dirt.” Such a poetics is visible in the central role that material dirt (as both pollution and terrain) plays in Kinsella’s work, as well as the more general concept of impurity, as seen in Kinsella’s poetic trafficking in ideas concerning transgression, liminality, hybridity, and danger. In Purity and Danger (1966), the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined dirt as “matter out of place.” In the poem “Dirt” (from Kinsella’s 2014 collection Sack), dirt remains understandable as matter out of place, but it also becomes radically mobile, its material and symbolic weight subject to unexpected transformations. The eponymous dirt in Kinsella’s poem is being carted from one place to another by the poet’s near neighbour for “purposes unknown.” This “shitload of dirt,” dumped onto the dirt of the valley’s floor, makes its way into the disturbingly porous bodies – both human and non-human – around it. It is “something you sense in arteries” and “the haze / that lights and encompasses us all.” This poem can be taken as a metonym for Kinsella’s entire literary oeuvre. Employing his “poetics of dirt,” Kinsella attends to the dispossessed dirt of a post/colonial nation; the dirt of contemporary farming practices; the dirt of official and vernacular languages; and the dirt of personal secrets. This essay argues that Kinsella’s “poetics of dirt” cannot be disambiguated from his activist poetics, and the profoundly auto/biographical nature of his writing. Attending to postcolonial theory and life-writing studies, this essay analyses how Kinsella thematises dirt as central to both life writing (in prose and poetry) and a life of writing. In doing so, it considers dirt as something not simply “out of place,” but – in a postcolonial, post-sacred, and late-capitalist world – endlessly mobile, unstable, and transformative, moving between material and discursive realities in newly complex ways. By attending to dirt (both as matter and as pollutant) within the context of his various auto/biographical projects, Kinsella conspicuously draws attention to the relationship between the human and the material, profoundly questioning – in a way akin to a “new materialist” perspective – the consequences of a human-centred ontology. At its most radical, the “poetics of dirt” found in Kinsella’s life writing posits a world in which human subjectivity is not the only agental force in the material world.' (Publication abstract)
'Born in 1935 to a family of early and successful Western Australian squattocracy (squatter aristocracy), the celebrated mid-century novelist Randolph Stow’s early life in rural Geraldton exposed him to the political contexts surrounding Australian pastoralism, particularly the dispossession and racist treatment of the Yamatji and Wajarri people of the central Gascoyne region and associated environmental destruction. This article reads two of Stow’s pastoral poems in light of these tensions, following the work of Stow’s Geraldton countryman John Kinsella’s understanding of settler Australian pastoral as inevitably fraught, for instead of a blank arcadia, even in retreat the landscape is always occupied (“Contrary Rhetoric” 136). The most influential voice in contemporary Australia (if not international) criticism of the pastoral, Kinsella argues that environmental violence is inextricable from violence done to the occupants of the land as functions of colonization, and the pastoral as it primarily operates in an Australian context occludes this violence. Kinsella writes that the “hierarchy of land ownership, a concept imported from Europe in particular, has meant that no nostalgia, no return to an Eden, is possible. These Edens are about dispossession and ownership by the few” (“Is There an Australian Pastoral” 348). Yet, is this necessarily other to the pastoral, which traces one of its many origin points to Virgil’s dispossession from his ancestral property at Mantua following the 42BC battle of Phillipi? How might an understanding of the pastoral as social form—complex, communal, and political—better help unpack the work of Stow and others? In this article, I take this question as my central concern, revisiting the poetry of Stow, which has largely rested in a critical lacunae since his death in Harwich, UK, in 2010. I am interested in teasing out how the pastoral is intrinsically linked to citizenship and community, or as William Empson writes, “the problems of one and the many, especially their social aspects” (21). This is the rusted pastoral of the Western Australian Wheatbelt Stow offers us, one that, through the questioning of human communities, is porous, allowing nature, history, and politics to filter through.' (Introduction)
'John Kinsella is a prolific writer from Western Australia. This article takes a topopoetic approach to considering his poetry and poetics by connecting studies of Yi-Fu Tuan’s topophilia and the paradoxical views of Zhuangzi and Thoreau in illustrating some tensions between language and place, connection and disconnection, and placement and displacement in Kinsella’s writings. In particular, I discuss Kinsella’s affective ties to the land and his anti-pastoral stance by parodying the European settlement on Country traditionally owned by Indigenous peoples. His poetry presents a dystopian world that challenges the old European sense of a pastoral society. By making connections between a Chinese sense of the earth and Kinsella’s poetics, I argue that as paradoxical as Kinsella's poetics may be, his writings, imbued with influences from different sources, demonstrate an effort to save the worsening earth.' (Publication abstract)
