For Yarloop and its People

Fire Elegy

This is an elegy for a town that has been

brutalised by fire. The town of Yarloop

where I lived thirty years ago and visited

barely six months ago was 'wiped

from the map' two days ago by a brutal
fire-front feeding on the brutal air of a brutalised
climate. The fire still rages out of control.
Is it irony that Yarloop was a milling town —
the tall hardwoods falling to its dizzying blade?
Is it irony that it was a railway town, its workshops
full of skill and pride and waiting out the Depression?
Is it irony a great Aboriginal poet grew up there?
Is it irony the irrigated paddocks burnt
to their veins and the water stopped coming
and the town was left desperate and vulnerable?
All those animals and birds caught by the flames,
spotting so far ahead they made new erosions
to join up with? Traffic diverted. Firefighters
worn and blistered and too overwhelmed
to join the dots. There's no time for metaphysics
or ecology or politics or hope. Just get the job done.
Maybe you have to have grown up there to know
how a greenie and a right-wing nationalist
can forget what the other bloke thinks
and dig in, stand in front of the flames.
It's no ritual of fire and earth and water and air.
There's no time for fucking around. No art. No poetry.
It's brutal. As brutal as poets and poetry.
More towns are threatened. Forests have been
vaporised and ashed. Evacuees retreat
from one town to another to evacuate
again. Two old men in Yarloop were
unable to escape and their remains
have been discovered in the pyre.
I am writing an elegy. Elegies
are brutal with loss. I weep
for the death of a layer of land
I know. I weep for all loss. And now
we wait for snow to come to a German town
where we have just arrived. Ensconcing,
settling, projecting to the burning place
we come from. The heat rays deflected back —
'Like spring here,' says a local. It should be frozen.
We wait for the snow to come to the medieval streets.
The town of Alzheimer's and the botanist
the fuchsia was named for, introduced to Ireland
and woven into hedges and a flower symbol
of West Cork. The flower late. Their bells ringing
fire fire. The burning. The brutal brutal burning.
And not eight days ago we couldn't travel
to Brontë country on the Yorkshire moors
because flooding had broken
the back of infrastructure. We
look for resilience, we long
for resilience, to know we could
and can do it too. It's brutal talking
about the weather. A pastime. An obsession.
This is an elegy. This is what I write
from where I am. I am no less there.
Last year and the year before
we were close to flames.
You never forget.
You want it to stop.
Even seeds opened by fire
know there'll be little to grow
towards, little to celebrate
on opening. And this is more
than human intuition, the river
Neckar running close to here
around an island, our isolation.

            John Kinsella

Poem from residency at Newton Institute for Mathematics in Cambridge

Surreal Möbius Elegy

Surreal numbers locate the real

global curve assigned to the shelf

for forty years to be lifted wholesale

by Einstein for his general theory

of relativity, his lights deflecting

off the rippling band of a mountain

lake, two sides to one story — band-

wagon I want to share with the lost,

with the obsessive of a pure discipline

who were laughed at, their theories

consigned to dark shelves; to locate

paths any error offers, to find a living

Minerva in plain song, the common

tongue — no display of dead wings.

Earlier, before this conversation, I had

been laughing over long-past and slightly

painful memories of a shake-the-foundations

poet, an American in Paris, an American

poet rowdy and disruptive around

ancient buildings he seemed to love —

a boat colliding with all other boats

on the narrow waters, resetting the word —

to be told he might in fact now be dead.

I changed tone and tact and turned one-

hundred-and-eighty degrees to reconnect.

I am shocked to find that he’s been

dead for months. Day turned end-to-end.

A ‘one-sided nonorientable surface’ —

endurance where the easier band

fails. And not having thought of this

poet for some time, the idea of him

had already manifested in yet an earlier

conversation with another party

earlier today. In this six-coloured life

I have painted myself out of focus.

Cold is finally coming, it’s said.

Encircled by surreals, I feel close,

so close, too close. And I saw

a bloodied bird’s wing on a path.

And I looked for words instead

            of numbers.


           John Kinsella

Penillion Against Bombing

This percussion’s

Desolation —

By one remove

The killing trove.

In claw & tooth,

Jackal, deer, North-

ern bald ibis —

Total eclipse —

Apocalypse

That you will strip

To bare bare bones —

Beast and human,

No virtual

Play, visual

On your smart phone —

Curtailed lifespan.

What’s endangered?

Truth embodied —

Temminck’s horned lark,

Flamingo’s spark?

Life’s decoding

An imploding —

Plotless story,

Praise the glory?

They block the sun

With their mission —

They send dark birds

And deadly words —

To make ruins,

Desolation —

What’s not destroyed

Will be destroyed.

This death sentence

Kills innocence

Which also dwells

Amidst the kills.

Collateral.

Funereal.

A prayer is prayer

Anywhere. Here

Or there a blitz

Makes resistance.

What’s not destroyed

Will be destroyed.

            John Kinsella

How Many I-s in the Hotel of Xi Chuan?

     by John Kinsella

A few days ago I had the privilege of hearing the Chinese poet from Beijing, Xi Chuan, reading from his work and discussing it, along with his English-language translator Lucas Klein. What grabbed me even before the reading began was Xi Chuan’s statement that his poetry was not of a single ‘I’, but rather a cluster of I-s. I don’t think any poet is a single I, and I have often over the years argued against denoting a unified self. Ouyang Yu and I had read earlier in the day, and I feel certain both of us would resist any sense of an intact ‘I’ in what we do, aside from our use of ‘voice’, in who and what we are as poets.

What Xi Chuan outlined as his reason for stating this, his need for such a declaration, struck me as deeply relevant and vital. He discussed having a ‘hotel in [his] head’ which is inhabited or co-inhabited by a number of other voices which are not his own. This is not so much a conceptual statement of artistic practice as one of deep necessity. In that hotel, or maybe boarding house, are those who have been lost or extinguished, those whose voices were taken from them, who were forced into silence. His own voice has to accommodate the silenced — provide spaces for them to speak, and to write out of him.

It was clearly painful for Xi Chuan to discuss this, and what began as a kind of ironising (of all notions of innovation, of himself, of us all) quickly became a deeply-felt ‘confession’ of obligation and respect, of necessity. It was witness carried to the extent of giving away one’s sense of unified self (should even the idea exist) to a polyvalent (my interpolation) self. Not many selves, but many other selves.

His poetry is group portraiture and choir singing; it is the quintet; it is the private meeting in the public house of poetry. The complexities of an intertwining public and private become devastating as images and glimpses are sewn together from Xi Chuan’s own experience, what he knew of those who had been his friends or colleagues, what he imagines of them now, and what they ‘stand for’. Symbol streams through Xi Chuan’s poetry, which both reconstitutes the damaged and withers what flourishes out of toxicity. Wit through understatement and unexpected juxtaposition, allusions to beauty and hope, play against each other in what one might understand as a ‘dance’ of voices cross-speaking in the hotel of self. A lyrical-self is counterpointed with the other selves speaking in many voices in themselves: urban, rural, landscape, built-scape, intellectual, quotidian, and the contradictions that make up any viewpoint, any political, ethical or social stance. The poem ‘Notes on a Mosquito’ (to which I will return) is case in point.

From the angle of ‘polysituatedness’ as construct, Xi Chuan’s multiple accommodated selves, selves that aren’t split off from himself but have entered and contribute to his self, Xi Chuan’s poetry becomes about the place of setting, the place he himself occupies, yet also all the places the other ‘lost’ poets and friends fill or would have filled. His place is their place too — this is a polysituatedness of loss, of a tragic reconstitution as statement of persistence and survival. And this loss is concrete and irreconcilable. We read in Lucas Klein’s introduction to Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (New York: NDP, 2012): ‘The high-lyricism of Xi Chuan’s earliest poetry would not last. Because of the government’s suppression of the democracy and worker’s right movement in Tiananmen Square, in which Xi Chuan participated, 1989 was a hard year for China’s young intellectuals; it was an even harder year for Xi Chuan, as on March 26, Hai Zi committed suicide (he was twenty-five), and on May 31 their mutual friend and fellow Beijing University poet Luo Yihe died from a cerebral hemorrhage (age twenty-eight), days before PLA tanks rolled in on the demonstration of June 4.’

The eliding of deeply-felt personal loss with loss on a large, private-public scale wounds and opens the self. Either germs enter the wounds and cause gangrene and loss of mental limbs, or what those lost were enters and inhabits and builds in the host-self. I got the sense of Xi Chuan as a host-self poet.

In the prose poem ‘Notes on the Mosquito’ the play between life and death, killing the mosquito and becoming the mosquito and what it represents (to the killer), are woven together into a dystopic ‘welcoming’ mat of language and ‘this is who and what we make ourselves’. The stunning and vivid images that so took me during the reading, with their anaphoric departures and rhetorical threads (images as beads on a necklace came to mind at the time), are played with an irony drawing on an international awareness that irony works in different ways in different cultural spaces and places.

Xi Chuan, who talks of Yang Lian in his afterword, is like Yang Lian in his polymath elucidation of ‘classical’ Chinese in a cross-language cross-cultural and interhistorical contextualising. The mosquito as symbol of not only the ‘ordinary’ person, the ‘everyman’, the selves neglected by the acclaiming public, by the big public movements of history – is also, well, a mosquito. Thing-in-itself. Different. And difference and sameness are at the core of the ontology of this ‘meditation’ in irony both lachrymose and lambent. To quote from Lucas Klein’s translation (his translations of Xi Chuan’s poems are superb poems in their own right), we go from brutality to existential musing. From:

In the crevices of history, mosquitoes are everywhere. They have witnessed and even participated in beheadings, human quarterings by cart-horse, busted embankments on the Yellow River, and the peddling of sons and daughters, yet not once do the twenty-five books of the dynastic histories mention the mosquito.

to, six stanzas later: ‘So what human form does the mosquito take after it dies? Someone buzzing and flitting in front of me, he must have been a mosquito in a previous life.’

Xi Chuan is a master at tackling the ordinary lyrical observation and manifesting it through historical-cultural specifications of place. He takes an idea, or maybe a word itself, and lets it grow. Razor-sharp observation mixes with casual conversation, and while remaining understated, vast structures can build from fragments. Sensuality and decay, youth and ageing, comfort and pain, vie with each other in building the ‘shape of the poem’ itself. I think of Pound’s vase being cracked open to leave the shape of the poem that had been poured into it. The shape is conceptual, and often amorphous and beautifully contradictory. ‘Drizzle’ manifests:

it’s not fur—it’s mold—mold on stones    mold on bread

it’s drizzle

it’s drizzle that makes    clothes grow moldy   the spirit grow moldy—

      this is the decay drive

and later in ‘Drizzle’:

eighty days of drizzle—not too long

eighty days of drizzle enveloping 120, 000 square miles of land and

      sea—not too broad

Place is in the poem, place/s are in us. Cycles that become moebius strips in which we question where we stand and who we are. There are many departures of self in the selves of Xi Chuan, and maybe, also, his translator and readers. As it is unpublished (but a video exists here), I cannot include a sample here of the poem ‘Bloom’, the tour de force with which Xi Chuan and Lucas Klein finished the reading, but maybe I can cite the final two lines in the English translation as the poem built and built and snowballed through the rhythms of being, wherein the many I-s in the hotel of Xi Chuan’s self bloomed in their variety, disturbance, strangeness contradictions and beauty:

just bloom like a fool

just bloom casually and carelessly come for all your marvelousness bloom