John Kinsella

Beginning in the year 300 BC and ending with a theatre company in a small Western Australian town as they prepare for a show, The Fountain of Youth is another riotous and rollicking novel from John Kinsella, and the third volume of his ongoing ‘Lucida’ cycle. In the small wheat-belt towns of Western Australia, the locals are either benign or malicious, indifferent or intrusive. Among their ranks are vegan activists, paramilitary sects, doomsday preppers, thespians, playwrights, and of course, the odd extraterrestrial. These unlikely neighbors intersect at the straining joints of religion, faith, secularism, technology, and the pressure is beginning to build. The Fountain of Youth is a rare and remarkable book in which guerrilla environmentalists, hidden identities, mythological origins, and theoretical physics unfold in gorgeous, surreal waves of language.

Have a talk with a ghost or a duck or contest the destroyers of the land, listen to the roos and slow worms, marvel and question and rage and love the language with John Kinsella’s Aporia.Aporia is a collection searching for logic where logic is hard to find or maybe can't be found. From the death of the poet's father, to considering the complex, troubled, and often distressing relationship between humans and non-human life, and through a sense of ghosts being materially present even when we doubt their existence, we undertake a journey in which reality and creative conception are in tension. This tension is embodied in the figure of the poet Hölderlin, and also through moments in Ovid's Metamorphosis, ongoing obsessions for Kinsella which he constantly circles back to, reconsiders, and departs from. Whether conversing with ghosts or the living, with animals or plants, these are poems concerned with transformative relationships with and within the “natural world.” Kangaroos, echidnas, ducks, owls, deer, slow worms, and many other creatures from around the world inhabit these pages, finding their own way through to autonomy and self-declaration as the poet argues with himself over the dynamics of life and death.

Contestatory and Creative Poetics for a Time of Climate Catastrophe: Volume 1: Per Se is an extended narrative meditation upon the meaning of per se, which generally denotes the thing-in-itself, for its own sake – but that, upon closer examination, transpires to be a high tensile composite of the ‘thing’ (se) and a relationship (per) that always links it to something else – and indeed, in relations of internal complexity, to itself. Per se, in the book’s multiple parsings of the term, is a moniker for the infinite relationality of the world and the relationality of each thing in itself. Per se also denotes the endless fractal embedding of bundles of relationality at the successive levels of thing-ness from the infinitesimally minute nano-scale to the unimaginably distant outer reaches of the sideral. Per se becomes an exploration of the way commodities, cut loose from their context of production and floating on sea of oscillating (exchange) values, never cease to morph back into artefacts defined by the socially intensive use-values their fellow actants discover in them. The book thus focalises a politicised effort to revision the rampant multiscalar individualism, solipsism and apartheid-like segregation of our age. Instead, it searches for possibilities or community in every aspect of the world we have learnt to see through a relentlessly atomising and hypostatising filter. The volume claims that every act of perception is political, reestablishing obfuscated connections, thereby seeking to repair the shredded fabric of the ecosphere below the threshold of myopic common-sense. Yet it also celebrates the myriad acts of citizen defiance, visible and invisible, that constitute activist agendas around the world, sending signals – both practical and exemplary, symbolic and literary – that shore up communities of resistance everywhere. The book does not hesitate to interrogate the fractal responsiveness to its own nature, meditating repeatedly on the political character of writing, and more significantly, of the teaching of writing. Central to its concerns are various avatars of trees, from the pirogue that hangs above a bar in Lille, and one that is crafted as part of an Italian artist’s global collaboration on the periphery of this volume’s emergence, via the jacarandas of post-apartheid South Africa, to a wood-chipped pine forest that has become a memorial library in Oslo – to name only a few of the topics taken up by the book’s many silvan micro-fictions. Looming over all these concerns are two contemporary silvan catastrophes: the megablazes that destroyed forests in Amazonia, Australia, California, Siberia and the Mediterranean during the period when the book was being written and the deforestation that has allowed zoogenic diseases to jump from once secluded animal species to the humans that would never have been their neighbours if naturally occurring forest-barriers had been left intact.

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.

This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’: it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.

Illuminated by the spirit of ecological activism and decolonisation, The Darkest Pastoral engages deeply with nature, climate catastrophe and grief and the interconnectedness between humans and the natural world. John Kinsella’s poetry stretches and often breaks the lyric in an attempt to create new modes of intervention and action. Though focused around his homeplace in the Western Australian wheatbelt, much of his poetry converses with other places around the world, especially those he has lived in for extended periods of time, including central Ohio, Cambridge, West Cork and southern Germany. Often writing in an anti-pastoral mode, Kinsella experiments with the histories of poetry, art and music, to create a poetry that will respect ecologies and bring positive changes in destructive human behaviours. His poetry, both experimental and pastoral, about the natural world is centrally preoccupied with birds and plants and often features the landscape of Western Australia. Kinsella’s artistic response to ecological catastrophe is in dynamic conversation with the work of many artists and writers—Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Jacques Derrida, amongst others. With acuity and empathy, this collection is a poetic attempt to reckon with a world in transition. “These are great ecological poems, whose wide sweep becomes increasingly astonishing as the years go by. At this writing, John Kinsella is a mere sixty. Who knows what is yet to come?”—from the foreword by Marjorie Perloff

The sixth collection of this profound dialogue between two major poets from opposite sides of the world takes on the subject most of us try to avoid. Provoked by such things as near fatal accidents, family intimacies at points of crisis, the threat of rising temperatures and forest fires in Western Australia, poems confront the reality of physical rot, the fact that history is essentially the record of countless generations of the dead, but also celebrate the arts of mortality: the elegy, artistic ambition and the creation of a self to live by.

Once a fêted literary figure, the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, but now derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet Harold Lime turns his back on material modernity, withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England. But human connections will prove difficult to sever completely, and he is drawn out of himself by a fox hunt saboteur (“the sab woman”), with whom he forms a poignant, uneasy relationship and who acts as his mutual confessor. In the isolation of his basement, Harold Lime obsessively listens to Mahler, whose nine symphonies, unfinished tenth, and Earth Songs, each corresponding to a separate chapter of this innovative poetic novel, will reawaken the sensitivities he has tried to erase, taking him back to his Australian childhood and youth, fostering a growing awareness of intertwined body and soul, of commitment and connectedness, of the ecology of rootedness and unrootedness in an unjust world.

This Pivot book provides a wide-ranging and diverse commentary on issues of legibility (and illegibility) around poetry, antifascist pacifist activism, environmentalism and the language of protest. A timely meditation from poet John Kinsella, the book focuses on participation in protest, demonstration and intervention on behalf of human rights activism, and writing and acting peacefully but persistently against tyranny. The book also examines how we make records and what we do with them, how we might use poetry to act or enact and/or to discuss such necessities and events. A book about community, human and animal rights and the way poetry can be used as a peaceful and decisive means of intervention in moment of public social and environmental crisis. Ultimately, it is a poetics against fascism with a focus on the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains.

Departing from Virgil's Eclogues, The Pastoraclasm is an urgent environmental address to humans, nature and vegetable gardens.

This Pivot book provides a wide-ranging and diverse commentary on issues of legibility (and illegibility) around poetry, antifascist pacifist activism, environmentalism and the language of protest. A timely meditation from poet John Kinsella, the book focuses on participation in protest, demonstration and intervention on behalf of human rights activism, and writing and acting peacefully but persistently against tyranny. The book also examines how we make records and what we do with them, how we might use poetry to act or enact and/or to discuss such necessities and events. A book about community, human and animal rights and the way poetry can be used as a peaceful and decisive means of intervention in moment of public social and environmental crisis. Ultimately, it is a poetics against fascism with a focus on the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains.

This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’: it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.

The Graphology Poems are a 'life-long' poetry cycle of semiotics begun over a quarter of a century ago. This multiplicious and diverging cycle and sub-cycles of poems uses handwriting, textuality, orthography, and considerations of prosody, to consider issues of human rights, justice, ethics, politics, environment, animal rights, questions around the purpose of art, music, writing and creativity, forms of activism and the nature of knowledge. This is the second, expanded edition of Graphology Poems 1995-2015, and includes all the poems in the original Five Islands Press three-volume edition, plus some of the uncollected Graphology poems of the same period, a reproduction of the holograph Runes notebook, and a lengthy updated foreword by the author, an introduction by Nicholas Birns and 'outroduction' and interview with the author by Jonathan Dunk, edited into a single volume by Gareth Jenkins.

'The Weave is the second book collaboration between Thurston Moore and John Kinsella - 'dubbed a work in progress by the two poets, the book guides readers through a world in decay, crafting an invigo rating language of spontaneity and survival out of the destruction. Moore and Kinsella aren't just observing - they implicate us all in the harms of global capitalism and environmental disaster, charting a back and forth between the individual and the crowd.' - Rosie Long Decter'These poems start in Dolphy's key + end with a quarryman's dream. In between secrets are stored. See how many you can find.' - Clark Coolidge

In this forceful call to action, acclaimed poet John Kinsella explores deeply felt and ever more insistent ecological concerns in his signature lyrical and experimental activist poetry. Here Kinsella turns his restless, unblinking gaze to a world where art, music, and philosophy--the highest creations of the human imagination and empathy--suddenly find themselves in a time and place that not only deny their importance, but can seem to have no use for them at all. In answer, Insomnia offers poems of self-accusation and angry protest, meditations on the nature of loss and trauma, and full-throated celebrations of the natural world.Kinsella attempts to find a still point from which we might reconfigure our perspective and examine the paradoxes of our contemporary experience. Ranging sleeplessly from Jam Tree Gully, Western Australia, to the coast of West Cork, Ireland, and haunted by historical and literary figures from Dante to Emily Bront , Insomnia may be Kinsella's most varied, concentrated, and powerful collection to date.

Using this poetic form (of five 3-line stanzas and a final quatrain) throughout to great effect, John Kinsella's latest collection is a work of ecological and political passion. The birds and animals of Western Australia, its landscape of vibrant colours and panoply of sounds are described in vivid detail, so much so that the reader almost feels part of this antipodean environment. And it is the ecological destruction of the environment and the politics behind it that are the target of the poet's rage and frustration. This is indeed a powerful and necessary work from a powerful and necessary poet who believes that poetry is one the most effective activist modes of expression and resistance we have.

John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with - and often directly through - his creative and critical work, Kinsella is also a prominent activist. In this important collection of essays the vegan anarchist pacifist poet claims that poetry can act as a vital form of resistance to a variety of social and ethical ills, in particular ecological damage and abuse. Kinsella builds on his earlier notion of 'linguistic disobedience' evolving out of civil disobedience, and critiques the figurative qualities of his poems in a context of resistance. The book includes explorations of anarchism, veganism, pacifism, and ecological poetics. For Kinsella all poetry is political and can be a call to action.