Temporariness (2): Photography

            by John Kinsella

I drag and drop my terms from a previous investigation of presence into this ‘new’ one, or into this present one. The multiplicities of polysituatedness, the echoes, murmurs and stains of temporariness. Here for a relatively short time, but not briefly, as I have been before, I am present ‘in company’. My company is more than my own, and as I age, I age with someone else. Tracy and I share much of origins in common. Ancestry, locality, the same television programmes as children, and decades together. We etch-o-sketch each other’s spatial and temporal presences. We overlap. And here, in Tübingen, we overlap in our temporariness. Both of us record our presence and observations of the town and environs in our own way — directly, indirectly — but we are also observed by others alone and together. We do not know what these observations, maybe recordings, mean, but they are there. We are background to the State’s (attempted, at least) observations of all who pass through, and we are in dozens of photographs taken by visitors and residents. The old town is a town that is photographed. The machine is used to capture, but each face or back-of-the-head caught by the machine escapes the function of the machine. Mostly, photographers won’t notice the detail till later. And even then, they might well look around the ‘distractions’, the incidentals in the photos, to see what they want to see. One might be photoshopped out of existence, out of the time marked at the bottom of the image. I have Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade Project on my lap, opened to the section on photography. I am recollecting and tracing because I want to show a poem is not a photograph. Not for me. Is it really for any poet? It might be referred to as such by a critic, as an insult, or maybe as an act of détournement by the poet, or as a commentary on how a photo sees and is seen as opposed to a poem. A sequence of poems: Photographs on... or Snapshots of... Already the title ironises or at least ‘sets up’ the way we frame the poems that follow. All that is seen in the moment. But then, the still photograph in the next frame. Or run together through a slideshow, a different kind of movement, a disrupting film. Benjamin: ‘Symptom, it would seem, of a profound displacement: painting must submit to being measured by the standard of photography: ‘We will be in agreement with public in admiring... the fine artist who... has appeared this year with a painting capable of holding its own, in point of delicacy, with daguerrian prints.’ This assessment of Meissonnier from Auguste Galimard's Examen du Salon de 1849 (Paris, 1850, p. 95, cited in Benjamin, p. 685). This is followed by ‘Photography in verse’ — synonym for description in verse. Edouard Fournier, Chroniques et légendes des rues de Paris (Paris, 1864, pp. 14-15, in Benjamin, p. 685). And, of course, one must reference the referencing of this by saying The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann; Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1999, p. 685). Whose reference system is this? I track my journey and you can follow, too. Scrutiny, gate-keeping, appropriate behaviour. See me as others might see me. See us as others would see us. But let’s go back a few pages, altering the sequence (dipping in?), and read: ‘One of the — often unspoken — objections to photography: that it is impossible for the human countenance to be apprehended by a machine. This the sentiment of Delacroix in particular’ (op. cit. p. 678). Why do I go here? Well, the strands of belonging and unbelonging take me to the photo Tracy is taking — I am there again, NOW — of me on the Neckar Island outside, across the river from the Hölderlin tower. Not outside, really, but almost opposite. At a slight angle, to avoid getting others in the shot — dogs and their walkers, people discussing their problems. We are in the alleyway of plane trees, 

JK photographed by Tracy Ryan; Hölderlin tower behind

the same trees Hölderlin  would have looked onto out across the river, in their youth. The island. I feel most connected to both my aloneness and my sharing of life-space on islands. It was absence of family on Cocos; with family on La Réunion; with family again here, on this small river-island. The ancient trees have been tagged with graffiti. Between the old town keeping an eye on, and the new town eyeing off? Both, really. Crocuses are out. There are no four seasons anymore, not even here, and the prompts to emergence are conflicted.

Tracy takes all the photos of our presences beyond Jam Tree Gully. She carries the camera. She embraced digital photography very early on not in praise of technology — she shares my doubts, objections and often refusals — but because this way she could get around the issue of animal products in the manufacture of film and developing of photographs. I think of this as she snaps my photo. As a child, I did all I could to avoid being photographed. There are quite a few childhood photographs of me, but fewer than there would have been. Seeing myself disturbed me as much as hearing myself on cassettes. Early cassette-players. All these devices to show we’ve been, to carry our timbres to others, to say we have trodden here as well, maybe (slightly) before. The markers of presence. The painting marks the presence of the painter more than the subject. Does the photo mark the presence of the photographer in the same way? Our temporariness here has stretched to breaking-point; we risk becoming familiar. That familiarity of the outsider who stays and stays and sees what is uncomfortable even when not looking. It’s easy to see the overt badness: the hatred of refugees by some, the violent moments on a back street, the racist graffiti, the brutal presence of the past under the utopias of early modern architecture. It’s also easy to see the good (I don’t use scare quotes): people living as people, welcoming refugees, the anti-racism, and a strong environmental consciousness. As I would arrange good and bad. As I would picture the qualities of each. But the liminal comes into focus over time, and one realises the Green emphasis is also mixed with capitalism, that the head of the Greens in the state is proud of his Mercedes and wants the state to be used as a dumping-ground for radioactive waste. The blurring. The state party system adapts to the emphasis of place, and beneath all the good and bad is a commercial drive, a desire for goods. Telephones, cameras, computers. They might be used to undermine the capitalist enterprise, but they reinforce it more than they undermine. The violent ones, those from the circles of Dante’s Inferno, worship goods to remake the world in the image they ascribe to some other force but which is really a reflection of self-desire and often self-hatred. I think this while being photographed opposite (almost) ‘Hölderlin’s tower’ (it wasn’t his tower, it was the carpenter Zimmer’s and his family’s) and thinking of the industry that has grown around his supposed madness, his fall, his ‘lesser’ late poems which I think burst out of their formulaics to be masterpieces of subterfuge, mocking the very fame he had obsessed over when young. He was not insane. His tower glows. An edifice. Graffiti approaches along the walkway. It will be tagged.  

This end to Benjamin’s Photography section does something for me and maybe this text as well: ‘Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel can perhaps be considered a “critique of the snapshot”, insofar as in this piece the two aspects of shock — its technological function in the mechanism and its sterilizing function in the experience — both come into play.’ (Benjamin, p. 692) This notation to brutality (the consequences of a Sunday stroll?), to Cocteau’s critique of the bourgeoisie reinvented in the gallery of the book, or the accumulation of notes towards the book, does not accord with the moment of being photographed in front of Hölderlin’s tower. (There was no violence; however, behind the façade of any pleasant moment within the State is the knowledge that the pleasantness comes at a cost to the world somewhere else.) But it does accord with the ecology of presence around it, and of which we make ourselves part.  There is no beauty in ‘history’. The dialectic rejects it. I do not ‘watch the birdie’ when Tracy ‘snaps’ me. I am there, and she is in front of me, and I look at her obscured by the machine. But I see past the machine to Tracy. I know she is there, and that she will look at the picture later. I know it is part of a narrative she is making where a narrative is, but is also diffused and lost. That narrative isn’t fixed, and its purpose will change over time. I am happy to be part of it: a recording, of course, but also an act of temporariness against the hauntings of temporariness. Not to say we have been, but to say we are. Not to own presence, but acknowledge it. Tracy’s brother Sean, who died when he was eighteen, was a photographer and was going to study to be a ‘professional photographer’. I am told that as a child he liked the tricks of the camera, all it could do in terms of changing our perceptions of what actually was and is. The person standing on the palm of a hand, the warping of perspective. But there is no change to reality, just a play on the way we see. He was interested in temporariness, he died young, but marked his places in so many ways. Not damaging, but imprinting over so many other previous imprints, and in the imprint of presence continuous. In Tracy’s ‘snaps’ are her brother’s imprints. In a world where negatives are a fading memory, his negative develops the island without damaging the trees, a negative made positive in a place so far from where he lived and died. The ‘other side of the world’ (a place he never left), but here all the awareness of the indelible nature of ‘history’ and its images would have pressed on him also.

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

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.