image of person or book cover 5915241536378490679.jpg
Image courtesy of publisher's website.
y separately published work icon Lucida Intervella single work   novel  
  • Author:agent John Kinsella http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/kinsella-john
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Lucida Intervella
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'A lucida intervalla is a Latin phrase describing one of those startling ‘lucid intervals’ experienced by the insane. Lucida Intervalla, as imagined by John Kinsella―the Australian poet and novelist―is an art journalist, artist, and social media sensation whose brilliant presence beguiles every one around her.

'Set in a post-apocalyptic world scarcely distinguishable from our own, Kinsella’s new novel follows her exploits and thoughts about art, political protest, eternity, and the absolute. At once a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas whose prose echoes everything from Søren Kierkegaard to Twitter, Lucida Intervalla may well be Kinsella’s masterpiece.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Nedlands, Inner Perth, Perth, Western Australia,: UWA Publishing , 2018 .
      image of person or book cover 5915241536378490679.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 130p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published November 2018.

      ISBN: 9781760800079
    • McLean, Illinois,
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Dalkey Archive Press ,
      2018 .
      image of person or book cover 4973367497386917997.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 175p.
      Note/s:
      • Published October 26th 2018
      ISBN: 9781628972887

Works about this Work

John Kinsella as Life Writer the Poetics of Dirt David McCooey , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Angelaki , vol. 26 no. 2 2021; (p. 92-103)

'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)

Love and Fame in Spiky Terrain Ed Wright , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 16 March 2019; (p. 24)

— Review of Lucida Intervella John Kinsella , 2018 single work novel

'John Kinsella is best known for poetry that is often characterised as anti-­pastoral: the ecological underpinnings, the rootedness in the wheat belt of Western Australia, the postmodern aesthetic awareness. Rather than the celebration of humanised nature, Kinsella’s poems deal with the exploitation of the land and its consequences as well as the often anti-romantic lives of those on the land. It’s a poetry of silos and heat, trail bikes, drought and death.' (Introduction)

Smudged Francesca Sasnaitis , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 409 2019; (p. 24)

'According to the online resource Climate Action Tracker, Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels and industry continue to rise and are heading for an increase of nine per cent above 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the fifteen to seventeen per cent decrease in emissions required to meet Australia’s Paris Agreement target. What this means for our environment and how the changes will manifest is a matter for speculation.'  (Introduction)

Love and Fame in Spiky Terrain Ed Wright , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 16 March 2019; (p. 24)

— Review of Lucida Intervella John Kinsella , 2018 single work novel

'John Kinsella is best known for poetry that is often characterised as anti-­pastoral: the ecological underpinnings, the rootedness in the wheat belt of Western Australia, the postmodern aesthetic awareness. Rather than the celebration of humanised nature, Kinsella’s poems deal with the exploitation of the land and its consequences as well as the often anti-romantic lives of those on the land. It’s a poetry of silos and heat, trail bikes, drought and death.' (Introduction)

Smudged Francesca Sasnaitis , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 409 2019; (p. 24)

'According to the online resource Climate Action Tracker, Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels and industry continue to rise and are heading for an increase of nine per cent above 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the fifteen to seventeen per cent decrease in emissions required to meet Australia’s Paris Agreement target. What this means for our environment and how the changes will manifest is a matter for speculation.'  (Introduction)

John Kinsella as Life Writer the Poetics of Dirt David McCooey , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Angelaki , vol. 26 no. 2 2021; (p. 92-103)

'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)

Last amended 12 Dec 2019 12:27:58
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X