Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'Paradoxically, loss is the only unconditional possession possible in elegy. A deep understanding of this phenomenon is to be found in long prose forms and lyricism of contemporary Australian writers. Turning the history of literature – from the Medieval to the contemporary – into a body of work more relevant to our ecological plight, in Kinsella’s corpus genres are consequences of textual events operating within an organic totality. This totality deconstructs the reference point for elegy: loss as the condition of thought and experience. Sidestepping while matrixially reconfiguring traditional and experimental forms of writing, Kinsella’s engagement with genre exemplifies not only the undoing of the codes that constitute all possible readings of a text; it is an implicit critique of speech acts that tend to “fix” life into static nouns, reflecting our culture’s ideology of appropriation of nature. Within a critical counterpoint to appropriation (namely, possession), Australian writing can be read as both urging readers to remain alert to pastoral precedents yet avoid projecting genre onto texts. To some extent, elegy has been decolonised in Australian pastoral.' (Publication abstract)

'John Kinsella is an important literary witness to the acknowledgement of native title in Australia, and Indigenous rights more generally. His writings also bear witness to continuing forces of resistance to those rights in Australian society. This paper traces Kinsella’s engagement with the Mabo case, the 1992 legal decision that recognised native title as part of Australian law, and rejected the fiction that Australia was terra nullius at the time of British colonisation. Focusing on “Graphology: Canto 5” and other texts, it argues that Kinsella presents a sustained reflection on the implications and the limits of this decision, in law and in wider cultural understandings and practices, through poetic allusions, paratexts and personal commentary. His writing since the mid-1990s reveals an acute awareness of how imported concepts of property and law are concealed within Western poetic traditions such as pastoral. To counter the effects of this ideology, Kinsella interpolates and appropriates terms from the discourse of property law, juxtaposing them against other ways of understanding and living in the land. In several collections, but especially in Jam Tree Gully, he seeks to develop an ethically reflective account of ownership of land taken from others, critiquing the dominant idea of property and articulating an alternative way of living in the land based on co-existence. The rights of the dispossessed traditional owners are central to a new mode of “writing the land.”' (Publication abstract)

'I have a poem in mind. A 'late' Jam Tree Gully poem. It will be called 'Agora' and I will get to its first lines shortly.

'Why late? I haven't ceased being connected with Jam Tree Gully, nor have I ceased writing it. Maybe because I am thinking about its spaces in different ways now, from afar. I often write from 'afar', and as Tom Bristow has highlighted, I write poetry of 'in situ' and also 'at a distance', but as I have said to him, this is a complex equation with no binaries; they are both elements of the 'cloud' that makes up 'International Regionalism'. And I am not simply co-opting a techno-fetish by saying 'cloud', though I might be ironizing it. In essence, the ecologies I construct around the lens to biosphere collapse, the 'damage done' as I wrote in The New Arcadia (WW Norton, 2005), are silhouetted through the costs of technologizing. I have written 'neo-Luddite' texts in the past, deploring what I see as unnecessary technologies-especially those where 'product' takes precedence over 'necessity'. Under the rubric 'necessity' I would put certain medical advances, the basic technologies of sustaining human life (from the shovel, scissors, through to-maybe- comparatively low-impact modes of transport that don't exploit animals). Advances in computer technology are largely driven by corporate capitalism, and change is interminably linked to sales and profit. All advances, all product developments, cost the biosphere. My aim is constantly to reduce the ironies of consumption-to own less, to 'change' product less, to resists the sales pitch. For me, place is entirely contiguous with how it is or isn't 'sold'.' (Introduction)