Tracy Ryan's and John Kinsella's Launch Speeches for Westerly Issue 63:2

Last November (2018), Tracy and I launched issue 63:2 of Westerly magazine in the Shakespeare Garden at the University of Western Australia. Here are our speeches — Tracy's first, then mine (John's)...

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It’s a pleasure to be here this evening to launch Westerly 63:2, with its dynamic emphasis on community, both local and international. I want to acknowledge that this launch is being held on Aboriginal land – on Whadjuk Noongar land – and to express my respect for the strength and contributions of Noongar people, not only here on Whadjuk land, but also acknowledging Ballardong Noongar people, from among whom some powerful writers have contributed to this new issue of Westerly. As it happens, John, Tim & I live on Ballardong country.

It’s a privilege to learn from their poems in the Northam Noongar Poetry Project, and to be invited on the figurative walk the poems conduct. They emerge from the “Strong spirit,/ strong mind” referenced in Julie Wynne’s poem, “Rise Up and Be Strong”, which reminds us too of the centrality of voice and listening. It’s a credit to Westerly that its poetry pages make this connection with women from Ballardong country, beyond the journal’s base in Perth but not so very far away.

Just as bookshops, libraries and writers’ groups are important cultural loci or nodes within communities, literary journals at their best are not cut off from, but reflect (as well as influence) what is happening in those communities. With this issue, that sense of reflection is seen not only in the offering from the Northam Noongar Poetry Project, but in, for instance, the publication of David Malouf’s address from the recent Short Story Festival.

This sort of openness to events and developments in the immediate region is more than just a snapshot or a “what’s on”; it’s a live connection to the actual, and enables us to read disparate elements or features in a coherent context – so, for instance, we move back and forward between memorable short stories with the atmosphere of Malouf’s overview in the back of our mind.

When we read a story like Jane Downing’s “Caution Submerged Steps”, or Troy Dagg’s “The Pool”, we recall Malouf’s pinpointing of “engagement and empathy” as integral to the short story’s operations. The short stories in this issue all hover around questions of our relationship not only to place but to the people in it; our responsibilities whether faced or shirked or both.

In some of the poetry, these same concerns and linkages are encapsulated, for instance in Amy Lin’s “The Architecture of Grief”, where place and (absent) person merge; likewise, though differently, in Roland Leach’s poem, “Wreckage”. These points of crossover are of course not accidental; they represent skilled organisation on the part of all the editors concerned, and send ripples through the issue that have an effect bigger than the sum of its parts.

Similarly, despite respect for specific differences within Aboriginal people’s experiences, the issue allows us to read Cindy Solonec’s non-fiction about her forebears and family from the Kimberley in the light of what Ambelin Kwaymullina and Julie Dowling have to say about stories, and to reflect on the commonalities of family separation and its legacies also mentioned in the Northam Noongar Poetry Project, as in Janet Kickett’s “Story of My Life”. Westerly’s editors begin the issue with an emphasis on locatedness on Noongar country and “the complexities” that involves; it is heartening to read material that does not shy away from such complexities but embraces and investigates them. Congratulations to all who have contributed to and worked on this issue for its openness in this regard.

     Tracy Ryan

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And mine (John's), which followed Tracy's on the night:

The polyphony of voices brought together in this issue of Westerly do not have their own localities, their own emphasis, threatened or dis-respected through the constructed community that is literary journal publication. In the polyambient nature of location, a consciousness that we speak out of our own experiences of place is set against the consciousness that we read other experiences and intensities of place through that same set of personal experiences. In these intersectionalities of ethical-place-concerns and shared and differentiated experience, we are surely reaching towards a more just co-ordinating of respect and belonging. Editors Catherine Noske and Josephine Taylor note in their introduction:

... our engagement with Indigenous authors in this issue has pointed more pressingly to our locatedness on Whadjuk Noongar boodja, Westerly’s presence on Country, and the complexities of past and future that involves. This cannot be underestimated in the unending process of understanding self. It is only appropriate, then, that this issue questions and considers the coming into self that writing has always offered. (p. 9)

In this acknowledgement is writ the unresolved fact of dispossession and privileging of a colonial authorising that’s intensifying rather than diluting. In Elfie Shiosaki’s interview with Julie Dowling, ‘Sovereignty, Self‐ Determination and Speaking Our Freedoms’, we hear Julie Dowling say of her mob, ‘What they’re doing is mapping dispossession in terms of things and how we get treated by local mob.’ That’s unmapping colonialism with its own tools and an undoing of its destructive technologies, its technologies that will yield only desolation.

In Ambelin Kwaymullina’s brilliant article ‘Literature, Resistance, and First Nations Futures: storytelling from an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint in the twenty‐first century and beyond’, she says of being a futurist storyteller: ‘But Indigenous Futurist storytellers do not only address the profound injustices of settler-colonialism. We also look to futures shaped by Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing.’ And goes on to cite Lou Cornum:

Indigenous futurism seeks to challenge notions of what constitutes advanced technology and consequently advanced civilizations [...] Extractive and exploitative endeavors are just one mark of the settler death drive, which indigenous futurism seeks to overcome by imagining different ways of relating to notions of progress and civilization. Advanced technologies are not finely tuned mechanisms of endless destruction. Advanced technologies should foster and improve human relationships with the non-human world. (np)

Further, thinking over the lines from the introduction to the issue quoted above, and the work of Nicholas Jose, whose novel, The Red Thread: A Love Story, is considered and carefully contextualised by scholar Wang Guanglin in the issue, I am reminded of Jose’s article on Randolph Stow’s Visitants in an issue of Transnational Literature from 2011, in which he also spoke of ‘locatedness’. He wrote: ‘For Cawdor [...] His desire is to step outside his own locatedness, and he prides himself on his capacity to do so. It proves damaging all round.’ (Nicholas Jose. Visitants: Randolph Stow’s End Time Novel Transnational Literature Vol. 3 no. 2, May 2011.  http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html)

The relevant bit is, ‘It proves damaging all round’. When we subsume another’s locatedness, even if we are attempting to make connection that is protective and generative, we necessarily occlude, damage, and create false stories of presence. Stories of the self if disconnected from their cause and effect are damaging stories.

Aboriginal stories of location are part of stories that belong to their lines of heritage, and are theirs to tell. Julie Dowling includes this note after her interview: ‘The stories contained within this interview may not be reproduced without the story-owner’s permission.’ It is worth thinking about the issue of ownership here outside and inside the capitalist rubric colonisation imposes on it.

Ownership here is a resistance to theft, to having value added by colonial mechanisms in order to strip away connection to self and presence of its originators — this is what is being resisted in the Aboriginal work in this issue. When the Northam Yorgas offer their remarkable poetry, whose coming into being was facilitated through the participation of wonderfully engaged workshop people, it is offered not as something to take from, but something shared. It is shared (or not) by choice, and the conditions of its sharing are to be respected (as they have been by the workshops’ facilitators).

In showing editorial sensitivity to offering a zone of respect for creative and scholarly work of location, the editors are ‘curating’ but also resisting the curatorial urge to collate and to compartmentalise — their gatherings are to offer to liberate, not isolate, to respect, not constrain.

In his scintillating article, ‘Writer as Translator: on translation and postmodern appropriation in Nicholas Jose’s The Red Thread: A Love Story’, Wang Guanglin writes: ‘In a logocentric Western philosophy, which prioritises word over image, alphabet over ideogram, all human efforts are very much conditioned by either-or choices, which do not allow translation to experience other kinds of transformations.’ The colonialisms of translation are literally deconstructed (Derrida is an active shade in this text), and we might agree with Old Weng, as paraphrased by Wang Guanglin, ‘incompleteness is a way to continue people’s lives.’ (p. 64) Which is not to say we are not looking for resolution and completeness regarding injustice, regarding land and cultural theft, but that inside resolution, which we hope is achievable, the self’s journey is never finite or limited.

It is perhaps pertinent to consider: Beibei Chen’s article on Ouyang Yu’s novel The English Class, where he notes of the character Jing:

‘Jing is aware of his incompleteness, which causes a crisis of subjectivity at a key point in the text:

I hate myself so much for being unwhole, for being a traitor to everything I once held dear, for being unable to resist the temptation to fall into delightful peaces [sic], for the delirium that I have courted. (372) 

[Beibei Chen (p.183)]

What all readers have to be vigilant for is the process of how we access and utilise the stories shared with us, especially Indigenous stories and the theft they are told against. Ambelin Kwaymullina notes:  ‘The need for non-Indigenous writers to step away from (rather than into) the story spaces of Indigenous peoples is an issue that has been raised many times over’, and ‘But the privileging of the voices of cultural outsiders over cultural insiders remains a live issue across the Australian literary landscape.’ (Ambelin Kwaymullina, Westerly, p.148)

This issue is an enactment of principles — the curatorial becomes the collation and exchange within the skilful organising, the juxtaposition of pieces so we read in questioning ways. The self is given its own space to grow within its own community/ies and left intact — in fact, the entire issue challenges invasiveness. The remarkable prose poem project ‘curated’ by poetry editor Cassandra Atherton confirms how a medium, a ‘genre’, is never the same in different hands, and that a mode is always an undoing. ‘Divination: Linen and Dolphins: From Soft Oracle Machine, a collaboration with Chris McCabe’, by Vahni Capildeo, is a wonderful breaking out of the containment field of formality to bring new departures and proliferating conversations. And finally, I have to speak for the Fay Zwicky of 1995 and her eternal presence as part of Perth poetry, and the university — her spirit is with us, laugh at this comment as she would.

     John Kinsella

The Review of Fremantle Press New Poets We Have to Have

by John Kinsella; posted by Tracy

I was disappointed to see the latest Westerly poetry round-up summarise the 2010 Fremantle Press collection of three ‘new’ poets with the general label ‘competent’. After lamenting the lack of ‘variety’ in the Fremantle list in recent years, the review leaves us with the simple assessment that the three-in-one collection was surely done for reasons of cost.

Now, in an age of declining poetry book sales (which is, true, matched by an exponential rise in web interest and performance interest in poetry), the presentation of three full-length collections, in an attractive and intelligently edited and introduced single volume, is a gain rather than a loss.

Let me express my connection to this volume before I begin — allowing that most collections published in Australia have at most one or two degrees of separation from a reviewer. The volume was edited by Tracy Ryan, my partner. One of the poets collected, J. P. Quinton, has assisted me in various tasks, and another, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, I adjudged (anonymously) the winner of a poetry competition some years ago. I have only briefly met the third participant, Emma Rooksby.

Dismissing each of these collections as ‘competent’ reduces the possibility of newness, innovation and breadth of publishing vision, far more than binding them within one cover in what will be an ongoing series (the 2011 volume has just been published, including two poets, and next year’s volume is a collection of performance-driven poets).

Westerly has a long history of supporting Western Australian writing, rightly placing it in a broader ‘Australian’ and regional context. The latest issue includes a wide selection of Australian poetry, with Western Australians coming off particularly well. What’s more, after questioning why Fremantle has tended to publish ‘established’ poets over recent years, the poetry round-up spends all the ‘Western Australian’ time concentrating on examples of those very poets. If it’s difficult to open a gambit with new poets and there’s no discourse to slot them into, let me provide a series of possibilities which will be just as much about how not to ‘slot’ them in, as how to ‘read’ them.

The first New Poets volume was part of a process that saw the submission of many manuscripts by journal-published poets looking for the publication of their first full-length collection. The process not only fostered the three poets included in this volume, but also resulted in a master class, in which a number of other poets presented and discussed their work in a supportive context.

The fact that Rooksby, Mitchell, and Quinton are dramatically different practitioners is a double plus in terms of their being collected together. It signifies diversity and cross-talk; it is about associations and clarifications of how we might read poetic cultural subtexts by creating context.

In her collection Time Will Tell, Emma Rooksby is what I would call an ‘internalising’ poet. The title’s colloquial familiarity captures much of the subtle tension between public and private that emanates from her poems. Pithy, compacted language, with a strong sense of ‘turn’ of phrase and idea, works image and rhetoric with equal skill and determination.

The external world is often presented in vivid sketches, but always folds in on the private or even intimate moment. Often there is the sense of a private conversation going on between the ‘voice’ of the poet and one with which s/he is intimate. But it would be wrong to think that these poems are simply making private communiqués public. Rooksby is concerned with how much private knowledge becomes something else when it is painted within the public frame of shared experience and awareness.

Hers is not a poetry of the material, though she is concise and precise in her empirical observations; neither it is a poetry of metaphysical aspiration. Rather, it’s a poetry of grounding, pinioning those hermeneutic fragments and moments that compile a life. The poem becomes a record of uncertainty locked within the apparent certainties of language (but that changes too). Memory is unreliable, but that doesn’t stop us constantly trying to validate and confirm memory in thought, in speech. This is structuralist poetry, in which subjectivity is a nagging doubt.

Try, but the quality of memory
decays. Somehow each incident
that’s set aside for treasuring
gets furred with motes of dust

In short, sharp, seven-line poems such as ‘Early afternoon’, ‘Winter’, and ‘Guardians’, interspersed through the collection, we are given imagistic glimpses and moments, interludes in the repetition of days. Rooksby’s uneasy relationship with closure in form, and her persona’s relationship with those towards whom it directs its voice, are epitomised by the closing line or lines of these pieces: ‘Surfacing, you see the long path back, in fading light’ (Early Afternoon). Rooksby’s skill is in taking the quotidian and showing its necessity to a greater, almost spiritual vision. She doesn’t demean or diminish the ‘ordinary’; the reader feels privileged to be part of the ‘quiet’ accumulation of detail and observation built across poems. The process is not passive; it’s a wrestling with how and why we privilege one perception over another.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s {where n equals} a determinacy of poetry is a collection in which (or maybe through which) poems are part of a broader display. If Rooksby delights in bringing the details of life into focus, Mitchell delights in graffiti-ing the streets of the psyche’s inner city (I use ‘psyche’ in its analytical sense, not as a vague sense of something). This is not so much in his specific references to inner-city spaces or markers (though they are there), but in his creating a street-map of language-play and public displays of private art. Mitchell’s elliptical and paratactic plays on line and expression are as much about the ‘domestic’ moment, the private encounter with language and occasion, as Rooksby’s poetry. His work ranges from love poems with a self-ironising edge (consider his love poems and poems of desire in the light of Rooksby’s opening poem, ‘Drink’ and the aesthetics of de-romanticism: this can manifest in so many ways!) through to a struggle with the validity of the symbolic versus the representational, in poetry and artistic expression in general.

Mitchell’s syntax and grammar are about beginnings rather than ends. By no means the first poet to place his punctuation at the beginning of a line rather than at the end, he’s nonetheless one of the most able practitioners of this approach. This invites a line to begin rather than end, and asks for an inverted reading, as well as encouraging us to read against meaning that has so often already been expressed or investigated ironically. Which is not to say Mitchell takes himself less than seriously — or expects the reader to take it less than seriously — but that he is fully aware that creating poetry is a self-conscious act of display and performance the moment it is spoken or is committed to the page.

Mitchell’s constant linguistic play on subjectivity advances beyond mere questions of the lyrical self or unified self, and questions the subjectivity of the recipient subject. He takes a ‘confessional’ mode and reinstates the very doubts expressed by confessional poets themselves (e.g. Robert Lowell). Take the poem ‘dew’ — a play with a Victorian romantic cliché, a self-reflexive love poem, and the medieval traditions of aubade:

.it is morning &
you twitch at each
kiss from these lips
placed ethereal on
ridge & slope of
body i dote

The ‘landscape’ solidity of ‘ridge & slope’ in the context of the body not only maps flesh on place but also links sensibility to surroundings and occasion. The you is as implicated as the ‘i’, but is also separated off as an idea, a notion, an extension of the ‘i’. The ‘you’ only exists because of the display of the poem. This reaches a deadly self-irony that still operates in the realm of need and desire in the seemingly off-putting (though not), ‘alopecian dreams’:

I dreamt last night
I had hair
; long
ocean-dipped
, arse tickling

The play of classical literary tropes with the slightly ‘off’ familiar is at the core of Mitchell’s poetics. Its best expression is actually found in a poem of more overt ‘beauty’, the wonderful ‘heliograph’ which reminds me of Callimachus’s (ca. 305BC.-ca. 240BC) ‘Hymn to Apollo’. Mitchell’s great skill resides in his poems’ openings — like Rooksby, his frustration is with the need for poems to end at all (which is not a bad thing!). ‘heliography’ opens with:

ball me up in a ball of light so I can write
how our sight foresaw this new beginning

The Steinian repetitions, the gentle sound-play, the nursery-rhyme explosion into what amounts to ontological clarity, launch us into a tour de force of ode-making fused with the ironies of ordinariness. Performance in the light of the sun matters to Mitchell.

The colloquial gets a full workover if not makeover in J. P. Quinton’s Little River. I feel confident in saying there’s nothing quite like Quinton’s voice (including his own voice!) in Western Australian poetry, and possibly Australian poetry as a whole. If you can imagine aspects of John Forbes and Nigel Roberts coalescing with Les Murray and maybe John Tranter, you might get some way toward unravelling its studied intricacies. In terms of environmental sensitivities, you could be rewarded by looking to John Anderson and maybe even Charles Buckmaster. Which is not to say Quinton’s ‘voice’ is the result of absorbing his models, but rather that he always writes meta-textually and always with an ironic awareness of how ‘voice’ can only ever be derivative and comparative. He says it as he hears it, and as he ‘speaks’ to his mates, the bloke in the street, in the bush, on the road.

This is Quinton’s genius; this most ‘voiced’ poet really writes outside poetic voice. He writes and speaks in his poem as he sees and experiences it. It’s what we used to call, in my ‘out-of-it days’, a ‘no-bullshit voice’. You believe it, whether it’s true or not. It counts as witness. When I said ‘studied intricacies’, I meant that Quinton’s ‘talk’ in the poems is both casual and immediate, and highly studied. He is a master of open-form poetry that gives the impression of having been written in stricter forms. In his work there is a kind of formal and tonal mimesis which are not replicable. At its most blunt, you might even think Charles Bukowski or Banjo Paterson; at its most sharpened and deadly you might think John Donne.

Little River is a book of range and variation. From engagements with localised popular culture in which tropes work hand-in-hand with the blunt reality of their application (or where ideas and theories of their nature derive from), through to environmental poems, poems in which the relationship between the ‘self’ and the transcendentalised ‘natural’ world is pondered and troubled over (the Swan River in Perth is a vital focal-point for Quinton), through to elegies that overwhelm with their bluntness and clarity, their almost brutal confrontation with loss of an older brother.

To give a sense of how a Quinton poem fuses casual language usage with formal (seemingly almost accidental) constraint, the ‘throw-away’ observation with sharp, cutting insight, and a simultaneous respect and trashing of ‘art’, we might consider the devastatingly ironic ‘Art for Life’s Sake’. Quinton can be gauche, brutal, frank and razor-sharp in the same line. Once again, as characteristic of Rooksby and Mitchell, Quinton is a deft poet of beginnings:

Your brain-damaged neighbour checks the mail ten times a day
for a bill he knows is due next week. Here, the sky is forgotten.

But Quinton is a poet of endings as well, maybe because loss and death are never far behind an observation, a thought, a recording. The last three lines of ‘Art for Life’s Sake’ say it all, and more. And it’s the more that comes out of confronting loss every time you wake that does it:

Having kids means spending all your time trying not to hand down
the malignant shit your parents gave you. At least with art you’ve only got
yourself to blame and perhaps Mr Imagination will stick around.

One gets the sense there is no other way to write it. Take these lines from the elegiac ‘All the Albums We Listened to Together’:

Is it you
Your deadness
Or me
My unforgiveness.

Air-drumming along
In your kombi
With its over-adjusted headlight

The first stanza quote shows inversion and play on primary and all-encompassing ‘values’: death and forgiveness. The person addressed is dead. Forgiveness has not been forthcoming. And yet the absoluteness of the dead is questioned in the irony of the ‘ness’, and the failure of forgiveness is countered by the guilt of the ‘un’. Suffix and prefix become the values, rather than the concrete reference. In the second stanza it’s the ‘over-adjusted headlight’. The light works, but doesn’t work right. This contains condemnation and understanding without saying so: nothing is precise, there is no exact measurement of death and its causes, and of how we deal with loss.

Quinton is a landscape architect, and his poems are landscapes. The persona is out in nature to remake and qualify himself, to give purpose. But the intellect behind this subjectivity can’t give way to ‘feeling’. Feeling is brutal. Reality is all-consuming. The poem ‘The Lookout’ shows closure up for what it is, and architecture of place, emotions and ideas, cancels itself out. We survey place from our privileged position of life. We begin:

Ice melts, green belts.
Alpine cold, frozen eucalypts
mountains near and far off.

and thirteen lines later we close off with:

Not so long ago
siphoning the world
my brother broke down and gassed himself —

a total, fucking, gas.

Endgame. Quinton will be one of the most significant poets of his generation.

So, one asks how three such vital poets can be merely described as ‘competent’. These are groundbreaking poets in a groundbreaking collection. Tracy saw it when she selected their work, I saw it while she was doing so. It has to be said. These poets have to be heard.


[Fremantle Poets 1: New Poets. Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell; J. P. Quinton; Edited by Tracy Ryan. Published by Fremantle Press, Fremantle, 2010]

The Latest Westerly

By Tracy

The newest issue of Westerly, guest-edited by Sally Morgan and Blaze Kwaymullina, is entirely focussed on "Indigenous writing and art", with a great variety of articles, stories, poems and images from Aboriginal contributors.

It has a striking cover ("Paradox of Inequality 2007") by Bronwyn Bancroft, who also writes in this issue of her background and context as an artist, accompanied by further colour reproductions of some of her works. (Tim, aged 6, has long been a fan of her children's-book illustrations, and though this Westerly material is not in that mode, when it arrived, he said immediately, "Is that art by Bronwyn Bancroft?", before I'd even told him anything about the journal...!)

Another great highlight for me is the piece that opens the issue: Nyungar yarns about specific birds, contributed by Leonard M. Collard ("Djidi djidi, Wardong, Kulbardi, Walitj and Weitj: Nyungar Dream Time Messengers").

I also learned a lot from the inspiring family history-writing by Pat Dudgeon and Sabrina Dudgeon, about their mother and grandmother's life.

But there's much more in this current journal issue than I can cover in a blog entry. You can check out the details here.