The American President Hosts a State Dinner for the Australian Prime Minister in the Rose Garden, 2019

White-tailed Cockatoo Adjustment Villanelle

The prime minister of Australia crawls on hands and knees

to the president of the United States of America,

and the white-tailed black cockatoos weep for lost nesting trees.

A ‘pure titanium’ lump-of-coal-in-the-hand-lackey,

the prime minister is serenaded along with mining billionaire fossickers,

the prime minister of Australia crawls on hands and knees.

With a Gulf war looming into coalitional collateral territory

the prime minister extends his oily tongue — his own red carpet botanica —

and the white-tailed black cockatoos weep for lost nesting trees.

It’s the shop of Australia open for business bankrupting futurity

signed with the tail feather of a cockatoo searching for a hollow,

the prime minister of Australia crawls on hands and knees.

Here in the far away but scramjet-satellite-closeness of another ‘land of the free’,

the black cockatoos circle the valley and try to adjust to the slaughter,

and the white-tailed black cockatoos weep for lost nesting trees.

Balance of trade is balance of flight is the feeding frenzy

where food is wing and a prayer and the faith of an arms trader;

the prime minister of Australia crawls on hands and knees

and the white-tailed black cockatoos weep for lost nesting trees.

            John Kinsella

Sweeney Dreams He's Having a Nightmare of Clearing

In his dream Sweeney sees himself de-feathered and crashed in the grey sand,

unable to pull himself out of sleep, locked into a nightmare of a bulldozer

running across the land like an electric razor, the entire bush falling

to its gigantic all-encompassing blade. Nothing stops it, not even

the largest jarrah and marri trees, nothing just nothing will thwart

its progress, not even boulders setting their shoulders against

the onslaught. Sweeney in his dream tries to stop the nightmare

in its tracks, and calls on those who have become his friends to help him:

Forgive me for my mis-sayings for my well-meant efforts that have failed.

Forgive me for not spreading my wings wide enough to protect you all.

And with that he rises from the sand and squawks so loud the driver

halts his deadly machine, and leaps down and jabs his finger

into Sweeney’s charred breast, like an image out of a painting

yet to be painted, and says, Now listen, buster, this is how I make

my living, and who are you to take food from my table?! And Sweeney,

feeling the sway of his argument and feeling himself fall back

into the nightmare, sees his own beak moving, hears his own words

tumble past the nub of his tongue in more than mimicry of a human voice:

But when it’s all gone, you’ll have no more work anyway and the world

will be dying. And the bulldozer driver replies, You may be right,

but what would you have me do? — this is my job, and I know no other.

And with this Sweeney wakes, from both dream and nightmare and sweating

and feeling for his feathers to find them black and red and white and intact,

and says: I will fly high and watch over them all, I will fly from grey sand

over gravel and ochre loam and granite and brown clay. And in doing so

he flies past Walwalinj which the colonisers call Mount Bakewell,

and watches the fires the farmers have lit to eat their stubble and chaff

from the last harvest running over their firebreaks into the shreds of bush

remaining from past clearings and past burnings-off, and he watches a digger

knocking down four magnificent York gums —  ancient solar systems

of life — to make a paddock even more vacant, more productive

in the short term, but dead to the future, and he cries and cries

but his tears put out neither the fires nor the work zeal of the clearer

doing a job as night falls, and the kangaroo’s head is renamed

the Southern Cross and the ends of the earth play

on the stereos of machinery and cars and houses

and personal devices. Sweeney

in his dream of a nightmare.

            John Kinsella

Bulldozing has begun, but resistance continues

Poems against destruction

Confronting the Bulldozers

I want to make clear that I do not advocate anyone putting themselves in harm's way when confronting bulldozers and other vegetation-clearing equipment.

If I make a personal choice to do so, in any given situation, at any given time, then I do it alone and expect no others to follow my example (in words or deed).

For me, that's a carefully thought out position when all other means have failed. I do not advocate any form of violent resistance.

I do believe I have the right to place myself between natural habitat which is under assault, and the machines being used to facilitate the assault.

I think the most effective approach is to 'talk' or 'sing' to the machines, so to speak — that is, to voice as one the opposition (poetry is effective) so that it is heard by all, confronting the machines, their drivers, and those who wield the power behind them (those so often faceless cowards who send the 'troops' in to do the dirty work).

Below is a poem, written in the context of the Beeliar Wetlands situation, which I believe could be effective 'sung' or spoken 'to' the bulldozers and those behind them, and also to all the 'undecided' or indifferent people who so often unwittingly contribute to the scenario of destruction.

So, please DO NOT ever put yourself at physical risk, but always stand united against this assault against the rights of the environment and, indeed, assault against human rights in so many different ways. We can act in peace and also respect ourselves in doing so.


The Bulldozer Poem

Bulldozers rend flesh. Bulldozers make devils

of good people. Bulldozers are compelled to do

as they are told. Bulldozers grimace when they

tear the earth’s skin — from earth they came.

Bulldozers are made by people who also want new

mobile phones to play games on, and to feed families.

Bulldozers are observers of phenomena — decisions

are taken out of their hands. They are full of perceptions.

They will hear our pleas and struggle against their masters.

Bulldozers slice & dice, bulldozers tenderise, bulldozers

reshape the sandpit, make grrrriiing noises, kids’ motorskills.

Bulldozers slice the snake in half so it chases its own tail,

writing in front of its face. Bulldozers are vigorous

percussionists, sounding the snap and boom of hollows

caving in, feathers of the cockatoos a whisper in the roar.

Bulldozers deny the existence of Aether, though they know

deep down in their pistons, deep in their levers, that all

is spheres and heavens and voices of ancestors worry

at their peace. Bulldozers recognise final causes, and embrace

outcomes that put them out of work. There’s always more

scrub to delete, surely... surely? O continuous tracked tractor,

O S and U blades, each to his orders, his skillset. Communal

as D9 Dozers (whose buckets uplift to asteroids waiting

to be quarried). O bulldozer! your history! O those Holt tractors

working the paddocks, O the first slow tanks crushing

the battlefield. The interconnectedness of Being. Philosopher!

O your Makers — Cummings and Caterpillar — O great Cat

we grew up in their thrall whether we knew it or not — playing

sports where the woodlands grew, where you rode in after

the great trees had been removed. You innovate and flatten.

We must know your worldliness — working with companies

to make a world of endless horizons. It’s a team effort, excoriating

an eco-system. Not even you can tackle an old-growth tall tree alone.

But we know your power, your pedigree, your sheer bloody

mindedness. Sorry, forgive us, we should keep this civil, O dozer!

In you is a cosmology — we have yelled the names of bandicoots

and possums, of kangaroos and echidnas, of honeyeaters

and the day-sleeping tawny frogmouth you kill in its silence.

And now we stand before you, supplicant and yet resistant,

asking you to hear us over your war-cry, over your work

ethic being played for all it’s worth. Hear us, hear me —

don’t laugh at our bathos, take us seriously, forgive

our inarticulateness, our scrabbling for words as you crush

us, the world as we know it, the hands that fed you, that made you.

Listen not to those officials who have taken advantage

of their position, who have turned their offices to hate

the world and smile, kissing the tiny hands of babies

that you can barely hear as your engines roar with power.

But you don’t see the exquisite colour of the world, bulldozer —

green is your irritant. We understand, bulldozer, we do —

it is fear that compels you, rippling through eternity,

          embracing the inorganics of modernity.

                                                              John Kinsella

Land-clearing in Queensland: resist the exploiters

By John Kinsella

It’s not adequate to be aware of environmental horrors; we must act.

There’s a report in today’s Guardian newspaper on land-clearing by farmers and pastoralists in the light of legislation brought in by the last conservative Queensland government. This clearing is so extreme that it should be considered as a crime against humanity (which it is).

These rapacious land manipulators are even violating the destructive laws in place, and going further. And for a land owner and vested interest to claim,

‘Firstly, I state that this country’s greatest environmentalists are our farmers and our graziers’ 

is mockery.

I don’t need to draw analogies; its absurdity speaks for itself. True, you can get some farmers who are more land-care conscious, and, say, crop with a mind to the ecosystem in which they operate. But by and large, anyone engaged in land-clearing in a country already cleared to bare bones has no environmental credentials at all.

When we read this, we are getting closer to the truth: it’s a business...

‘What we are doing on our properties is taking proactive expensive measurement steps to protect the long-term health of our environment and the viability of our business. We are doing this through the practice of thinning using the current vegetation laws to restore our land back to its original open woodland condition, as much as we are allowed.’

They see the land as theirs to abuse. A tyranny of occupation, a state of war against anything living that doesn’t serve their business model, has been openly declared.

These acts of violence are part of the matrix of terror we silently endure, keeping our heads close to screens and gadgets, engaging with the outside world through Pokémon Go. We are part of an absurdist play of our own writing.

Will we act? Maybe this time — how about it?

Step outside, embrace the earth, resist the exploiters, show that non-violent resistance can bring positive change. (Can poems stop bulldozers?)

Write about it. Tell others. This is no incitement: the evidence is there for you to come to your own conclusions. But take a look, consider, respond.

Great Western Woodlands under threat

By John Kinsella

This is something all of us should be resisting -- it will not only devastate large areas of Western Australia's bushland but threaten the entire biosphere. It must be stopped before it begins. I am going to be there in front of the bulldozers -- poetically and literally -- I hope others will join me.

Concrete, concretion and installation poetry

Concretion and Damage: a Pre-manifesto (though written after)

John Kinsella


Below this article is a short ‘manifesto’ piece on creating ‘concrete’ texts in ‘natural’ environments or environments in which the ‘natural world’ intervenes, ‘intrudes’, or defines the conditions of viewing. This necessitates a lot of scare quotes because of the problem of mediating the ‘natural’ in the context of human seeing, perception and activity. All human activity is contingent on the ‘natural world’, regardless of how much it attempts to distance itself from the materials and variables of its construction. In the case of the images below, it might entail a spider or some other creature walking over a sheet of paper displaying a poem — the poem/sheet placed on the ground (or elsewhere) in the expectation that something will cross its path, literally. The patience is in waiting to capture the photograph.

The series of poem-texts on sheets of A4 was done near Walwalinj in York between 2005 and 2008. The poems were written and printed and no copy kept (digital or otherwise). They were then photographed ‘in situ’ and the paper recycled. These poems exist somewhere between installations and concretions. Over the last nine or so years I have been accumulating poems that exist as expressions in landscape — accepting landscape is a mediated term in itself, and relates to human presence and intervention with varying levels of impact. Whether printed-paper placed among rocks and scrub, or lines written in charcoal on a concrete path between York gums, or words scratched into a firebreak, none of the creations had more than a temporary presence in the environment outside being captured in photographs. The aim is always minimal impact on the ‘natural’. As we located ourselves mentally (as well as physically) at Jam Tree Gully, as we travelled away and returned, a real sense of concretion developed. The words written on the page, often while looking through a window, typed to shape on a manual typewriter, written in journals, seemed to be one part of a locution of place, an articulation of presence and the politics of this. The aim was to plant (literally trees, but also words) and repair, and to record.

Even ‘healing’ brings its costs, and all impacts generate change and loss. I started forming words on the obligatory firebreaks with sticks, scratching short poems in the gravel driveway with its steep gradient (see my earlier articles on the poetics of gradients). Sometimes I photographed these; mostly I didn’t. And in other places, in other countries, I did the same, recording the concretions in poems: describing activities but with no other record. Walking became a concretion for me, and I stepped the lines across roadways and pathways, through fields and paddocks and along fence-lines, up mountains (literally) and across bodies of water. All of these (from various locations around the world) feed into what is formulating as Jam Tree Gully 4 — a conceptualisation of concretion, a ‘demapping’ (see ‘demapping’ article) of presence that shows the costs of even the lightest impact, and contemplations of alternatives and consequences. They are works of ‘place’, displaced in their presentation.

I have always been interested in handwriting and drawing, and since the mid-90s have been writing ‘graphology’ poems. JTG4 is part of that project, and separate. In absence, as the grass is cut by a family member who helped build our house at Jam Tree Gully, I have been drawing word ‘maps’ of the cutting and tree-growth to ‘be there’. They are mental maps, conceptual maps in lieu of. The absentee reconstruction so when we return I can compare the imagined with the reality, and based on something I’ve done year after year, and bear the calluses on my hands to inform the cartography. But these are ‘de-maps’ because even absent-presence comes at a cost, and the polysituated self absorbs so much — a consciousness that giving back, sharing, and restoring even when away has to be built into the texts.

Which brings to mind someone else's recent project of connecting with place in Wales where a poem was painted onto rock faces in the Snowdonia National Park, intended to be temporary, to be washed away by the rains, but ended up being baked by a warmer than expected September and proving indelible. There are a number of issues here. One is the desire to mark place beyond the moment, which is problematical. But even more so is to miss the fact that climate change will necessarily alter conditions of interaction and presentation. So many of these things are ill-thought-out — a nice notion, but no depth in understanding of causality. So much ‘eco-art’, intended to be of a place and meld with it, merge with it, do no damage, leaves a permanent mark. I recall river installations made from ‘local materials’ that damaged microenvironments then floated down into the sea to join the suspended wastes that are changing the biosphere. The artist’s desire to leave a mark is understandable, but ephemerality has its worth in such contexts. Speaking words that won’t be heard, scratching words in sand that will blow over in a day... there are millennia of such acts. They are more durable than felled trees and carved rock (damaged or ‘used’ in the name of art and knowledge) in so many ways. They enter language and ritual, they inform our movements and day-to-day activities in ways we are rarely aware of.

But I am talking about a form of the concrete. A dissolvable, non-toxic concrete. That’s thinking about materials used and where they are from, what will happen to them afterwards, the ink used, the electricity used, the manufacturing implications — everything. In a global-capitalist world that is consuming itself, that glorifies the soldier in war but not the janitor who cleans up the body wastes of Ebola victims, we need to recognise the art of the moment, the poetry that is survival without damage. We don’t need to write out words in places revered for their natural beauty, but we can speak them there and even hold up a sheet of paper with those words, backdropped by the sublime or whatever you want to call it. The marks must be temporary because any more than that and the place will be changed irrevocably. And that it was altered in such ways in the past doesn’t mean we need to continue doing so. All borders are artifices. How we connect to a place is informed by so many variables. We don’t need to mark our connection by undoing the stone of it, itself.

The creation of a text in a natural environment, a concretion, brings into question how close you are/were to the event. I suggest that those performing an act of damage probably have it subliminally or overtly ‘written into’ their poetic language. And in their practice overall. These things are highlighted or hidden depending on how conveniently we can distance ourselves from the impacts we make, the damage we do. In poems of place we inevitably implant ‘locators’ — ‘co-ordinates’/spatial reference-points (tree, rock, mountains) that relate to the terrain of the place out of which the language comes. Without those topographical reference-points, sense of place is lost. Or is it? One could create simulacra in a poem on the page that seemingly have nothing to do with the place they refer to...?

This applies to one of the tenets of polysituatedness (see earlier article) and its larger set, international regionalism. The influx of many other geographical and topographic knowledges doesn’t undermine the fact that any place will have long-associated presence/experience and (spiritual) connectedness that has generated a specific language of that place, that loses something (or something is changed) in its being translocated or invested with new presence. The globalisation of economies (that is, imposing a mode of trade and finance centred on major economic power clusters but consuming and smothering smaller and less robust communities in the process) is vanguard military-capitalist self-empowerment, which is about ensuring that all the conduits feed the wealth of the few. Constructing a shop that sells mobile phones in place of a stand of trees, one might very well lessen communication rather than extend or ‘create’ it. It’s not about egalitarianism or caring, but about wealth-accumulation and control. To go into an impoverished space and create texts in the physical materials of that place (human-made or ‘natural’), without a personal connectedness with that place, is clearly exploitative on many levels; but it might be generative if, say, it brings awareness of issues that leads to self-empowerment. That would be a thread of polysituatedness that is conscious and self-critiquing. Does the end justify the means? That depends...

Poems implanted into the natural world are always about intrusion. They alter the co-ordinates of the ‘poetry’/poetics that pre-exist their intrusion. And there’s always a poetry (‘constructed’ and utilised in various forms and manifestations by people, animals, birds, plants...). To leave your mark is to occlude other marks, equally and maybe more necessary (codes to survival and understanding). If we start from that knowledge, then we can lessen the negative impact and increase the generative (awareness, different ways of seeing, respect). Also, we need to stop thinking of ‘poetry’, or rather the gestural substance of poetry, as a purely human activity. What we might call a ‘found’ poem or ‘artwork’ in nature (from a flower through to a burnt stump in the shape of something we think we recognise), is also nature in-itself.

Listening to a rare bird recently, I was conscious of taking its song for my purposes. It is its song. It’s not an installation. It’s not my poem (though I will make it mine, then altruistically share with other humans), but it might well be the bird’s poem. It’s not a concretion. But it might be something akin, something similar. It’s not all utility, I am sure. When placing a poem in the natural world, we could think of it as collaboration... with nature? But what is the ‘other’ getting out of it, rather than yourself and your audience (people)?

Literal concrete... was already there -- added charcoal

Literal concrete again... charcoal washed off after a week

Paper was recycled afterwards

Stick-writing on firebreak at JTG

Weighted down in high wind

Christmas spider came along of its own accord, after I placed the poem between 2 trees!

Another Graphology in a different form

One of many gravel concretions that change shape over days

Demapping — Jam Tree Gully 4 Concretions Manifesto 1


Jam Tree Gully 4 is a visual accretion of concrete poetry/visual poetry material, sound files and other materials from the last decade of creating artworks 'in situ' — that is, at the place of conception and awareness. In essence, Jam Tree Gully 4 can only come into being in a public space — I see this 'book' as a curated art space rather than the conventional printed page (though a catalogue would work well to accompany the installed materials).

The map poems are part of a 'concrete' line of work that I have been investigating for many years. They include poems written and printed (and then deleted from the electronic 'record' - these large-font printed poems only exist in this form), poems photographed 'in terrain'/in-situ (including rocks, clay, even ants 'randomly' walking across them) at my mother's place below Walwalinj (Mount Bakewell) in York, Western Australia; literal maps of Australia with text inserted, and poems created from text that 'map' a place - i.e. the words working as figurative and representative acts - standing for, and spatially in relation to, the place itself. I have also included images of texts scraped into the dirt and word poems ('graphology') made from sticks laid out on a firebreak at our place (Jam Tree Gully in the Western Australian wheatbelt). I have worked on concretions in the southwest of the Republic of Ireland which will become an extension of the Jam Tree Gully scenario — an ironic 'annexe' to the place of 'home'.

I am particularly interested in materiality of 'presentation' — the 'etho'/'ethical'-politics of deploying waste materials; of using, say, charcoal taken from a bushfire that went through the zone years before, of writing on concrete scribbled out on rough ground as a track when the rains (eventually!) come, the yellow sand brought in from elsewhere to break up soil for a vegetable garden or laying a driveway. Equally important is a respect for the intactness of rocks and eucalypts, the passing insects and animals — these are 'caught' in photographs and in textual imaging, but left unhindered in their place of origin.

This all fits into a politics of what I term 'demapping' colonised spaces and looking to different ways of configuring space outside of survey (indigenous Australians have numerous traditional and post-traditional methods — verbal and visual). When I say 'etho-political' I am playing on ethical, ethos, ecological and so on. In creating 'spatial poems' in which I 'map' our place at Jam Tree Gully, I enact ‘return’ as well as retrieval: this is stolen land which cannot be ‘owned’, and by acknowledging that the colonising language is overlay, I also acknowledge other languages exist/pre-exist as well, and are indeed primary. I do not use strings of indigenous words in order not to appropriate. The act of concretion is a recognition of the totemic, of the indigenous, and of the fact that I cannot lay claim to the material, spiritual, or conceptual co-ordinates of this space. But I can witness, observe, and ‘present’ (not ‘represent’).

So the 'mapping' poems become a process (even 'methodology') of/for breaking away from the constraints of mapping for control, occupation, dispossession and other power-ploys. The map defies its own purpose, its own subservience to 'usage'.

Jam Tree Gully 4 is curated space. A curator 'spatialises' it within the conceptual (and real) gallery. In essence, it is an exhibition of the creation of ‘the book’ in curatorial space.