Australia the Warlord

             John Kinsella

 

 

It seems appropriate that regret should be uttered at a time of mourning. We have just suffered close personal loss, and there’s something very specific about the way a family deals with such loss in day-to-day activities, in the ‘emptiness’ of the early hours, and in reprocessing the nature of close relationships and what they mean.

 

And the regret I wish to utter is that Australia has fully committed itself to the path of militarism. The militarisation of universities that some of us spoke out against over the last decade in particular has come to a very rotten fruition under the present federal government. More and more arms companies (in all their tech ideations) are becoming entrenched in Australia, and from AUKUS to the manufacturing of missiles, from high energy yield weapons to sonar guidance systems, the speech of warfare is becoming normalised in Australian public discourse.

 

What bemuses me, as an extension of grief, is why I’m not seeing activists standing against this. In universities (in Australia and other countries) I have witnessed what amounts to quietism at best, and even in one instance, overt pressure applied by militarists (in various guises) to quell a pacifist voice as such as my own. People so readily accept a new status quo; under the ‘military solution’ approach to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ‘be prepared’ stance regarding China’s own militarism, the voices of difference and opposition are crushed.

 

Witness the Australian Labor Party’s verbal attacks on one of their own in Josh Wilson, who along with others was accused of ‘appeasement’ for resisting the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Witness the deployment of war-time prime minister John Curtin as talisman (a racist and a militarist), and as lethal force of persuasion, based on an idea of history as conflict dialectic. ‘Appeasement’ is one of those vox-pop snap-grab terms that twists like the knife it is intended to be: it carries the white feather, cowardice, betrayal, and delusion in its militarist etymologising. As it is used with respect to an arms-race, it seeks to disarm the already disarmed. It’s pernicious and easy. Those who wield it ‘appease’ death and hatred as they do so.

 

No. It’s time to stand up to this endgaming, to deny the euphemisms of ‘defence’ and position it for what it is. People can get out there and protest fossil fuel usage (as they should), yet they don’t take on the defence industries? Come on!

 

Every day we are greeted with yet another extension of the ‘military vision’ (essentialised around the idea of ‘pillars’, what’s more), as today I rose out of sleeplessness and processing a lost life to read that Cocos (Keeling) Islands, where I lived for a short while in the mid-90s, is having its runway ‘upgraded’ for military purposes; that this ‘pivot’ of surveillance is necessarily going to become more and more a focus of ‘protecting’ Australian interests (and assets), as well as those of its ‘allies’.

 

The fate of sea turtles on the Cocos is another aside, of course. The lack of environmental scrutiny and clearances another. And then an article that has sad visuals of boys with their toys, and yet another exploiting military tech company using Indigenous country for their exploits: laser weapons. So many of these companies with their university graduates in enthusiasm-mode are inculcating themselves into the day-to-day functionality of the body politic and the ‘social organism’. An organism that is building-in its own death. What is literature to all this? A mode of decorative mourning? Literature won’t be there in the end because it can only write after the fact and not in medias res? The writing is now, the writing is not accepting the status quo, not expecting to be value-added by peers and official mechanisms. And yet we do, because writing is an extension of the self into the ‘outside world’. We need to work through this.

 

Apropos of all this, and related because the arc towards military arms dealer status (already was, but now aiming for warlord status) that comes out of the military occupation and oppression of Indigenous peoples: a comment on The Voice and where I stand.

 

I fully support all Indigenous moves towards the reclamation of their lands and rights, and I support the position of the YES vote as I totally oppose all that the NO vote stands for. However, I think that anything connected with the system of governance (colonial, oppressive) that rules Australia is inevitably going to be compromised and limited by definition (and legal actuality). So YES, of course, but only in itself, not by way of vicariously supporting the colonial militarist system of governance by proxy.

 

The collective vision of ‘Australia’ is compromised because of its colonial focus, and because it subscribes to an exploitive state-business collaboration, but it will inevitably become even more compromised with its leap into major arms dealer status. War is exploitation on every level, and people who would normally oppose the doings of arms companies quickly become silent at times of conflict (that concern them... whilst ignoring conflicts elsewhere that do not threaten their personal, ideological, profit or well-being status), even promoting, say, the manufacture of arms to send to Ukraine.

 

To oppose such gratuitous death industrialising is seen as relative, only belonging to ‘times of peace’ and to ‘better circumstances’. A whole ‘realism’/’realistic’ semantic construct is established to control discourse and to bring about an acceptance of a new militarised status quo. Violence is sold as peace, and ‘attack’, ‘defence’, and ‘justice’ are intertwined and made determinate of each other.

 

But mourning is mourning, no loss is acceptable, and no loss in its essence, in its actuality, is prevented by inflicting loss (and that includes on animals). The broader silence of many writers (especially poets) in particular bemuses me. While many relish there being a ‘leftish’ government in place, it’s a furphy — politics are shown by actions, not words, and the actions of the federal government are militaristic, nationalist in extremis, and citizenship-orientated. For such governments, environment is about functionality (even positive climate-change preventative actions are dressed in economics, common sense and survivalism), not about quiddity or something that might exist in itself outside utility. And to separate the damage of environment from the well-being of people is to create the destructive dualism underpinning the horrors of Western colonialism that has wreaked havoc on the planet for centuries.

 

In Support of the African Communities in Tübingen

We wish to express our absolute support for the African community/communities of Tübingen in the face of the racism it has to endure, especially at times of distress and tragedy. Being 'green' (which Tübingen prides itself on being) is meaningless if human rights and respect for humanity aren't part of the equation. For context, see this article in The African Courier.

Forks

 

Lightning touched a clinic

near where the medical helicopter

lands and then it touched the old botanical gardens.

 

When a young African man was murdered

in the botanical gardens some months ago,

the mayor aligned cause with refugee status.

 

The dead man was blamed for his own death.

The man stabbed beneath the trees was said

to have been part of a drug syndicate.

 

The dead man under the trees which in March

were starting to reach towards their summer leaves

wasn’t numbered as a specimen in the arboretum.

 

In this ‘green city’ there is a failure of alignment

between cause and effect, and the behaviour

of the storm is placed on the behaviour

 

of others — behaviour, behaviouralism,

meteorology, shifting blame, enclave — a ginkgo

tree was planted for the 200th of the university hospital.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Working with Russell-West-Pavlov

John Kinsella

The collaboration between Russell West-Pavlov and myself has relied on two material actualities: proximity and interstices. These can be geographical — being in Tübingen — or they can be conceptual, an overlapping of ideas and interests. But they are both material in the sense that we configure them as ‘real’ and expect ‘real-time' occurrences. We might occasionally work with abstraction, and I certainly do in making poems, but ultimately our making relies on pragmatic and temporal actuality. 

Proximity might seem to speak for itself, but it doesn’t. Our first shared qualification of ‘proximity’, as opposed to our own individuated notions, came about across the distance — on a link-up between Schull, West Cork and Tübingen Germany. There was a virtual proximity, and also the proximity of thinking and what we hoped might be achieved by sharing ideas and making discrete writings out of this. 

So, collaboration was very much grounded in the dichotomy and paradox of distance and closeness. Apropos of this, when I have been in Tübingen, we find occasions and to meet and talk and walk and ‘congeal’ our ideas. Sometimes this has taken the form of notes, most often of conversation that shares ideals. When our working together was first mooted in 2016, we discussed the possibility of ‘mini essays’, and how they might form interludes to more explorative and discursive making in the greater context. And that’s what happened, I think.

Interstices are where we overlap in thinking, while sometimes holding quite different ways of seeing and interpreting. That necessarily comes through our different life experiences, our different ‘positions’ qua how we do and don’t interface with the world, in conjunction with our strong overlaps in political, ethical and social views. We also share certain experiences in a proximate ways (complex relationships with ‘Australia’, ‘authority’ etc, the rejection of values that inform our gender-ethnic-class statuses and so on), and this combination of difference and similarity creates those interstices from which we write. Our differences are as strong an informant of our sharing textuality as our similarities.

Though we have written at many tangents to our core ‘themes’, the focal points of our work till now have very much been orientated around time and place — both fundamental themes in both our work across the decades. In part, I am sure these interests are what drew us together. Further, a deep respect and interest around issues of the Global South, and resisting the abuses of capital, wealth and privilege, solidified our approach and ‘content’. And a major overlap on the Venn diagram of concerns is the environment in its spatial-temporal vulnerabilities around intactness.

Very often, in writing poems that relate to the foci of our book, I work in the overtly figurative and allusive. So, a poem that seems to be about, say, seeing or hearing a bird, or observing a tree, is also about the issues we tend to talk about between ourselves (via email, video link or in person). Sometimes I focalise a mutual concern/interest in a different way, and reflect over the independent threads that lead us to shared processing or a commonality that also emphasises difference:

Proximity Reciprocities and Contraindications

for RW-P 

 

This is return. Used so much, by us. Too much?

The meat ants have new volcanoes on their old range

and, to mirror, sugar ants have raised funnels. Click?

That’s taking liberties. Collecting wood, I hear machinery

of hunting, of tree clearing, of breaking up. But weirdly

there’s a certain intactness, even if a bullet pierces.

Membrane. The stench of herbicide on the air. And from

the hefty paddocks of Victoria Plains, the defcon smell

of pesticide. Early stages of crops. Protection. And NuSeed

signs proliferating in contrariness — their barren seed.

In return we measure change: storm damage, erosion — dry 

more than wet. What’s left behind. Inside the house,

compacted but at different points, new and overlapping

and reconvened narratives. Those who’d have us gone

before arriving again, though ‘before’ is as relevant

as the self-seeded rare tree — where did the seed 

come from? Dormant so long? Blow-in? Birdshit, claw, beak? 

Tail of kangaroo. Signs still here — tracks, scats. And ours.

Another type of poem is a response poem to an idea, text or situation that I send to Russell in the hope that it might prompt something back from him. And yet another is in response to something Russel has said or written, or that has arisen from a shared experience. Often those experiences have been based on walks or journeys around Tübingen in which Russell has imparted a piece of knowledge that has fascinated me, and created a potential for proximities and interstices for future response. 

In the case of the following poem, Russell did (I think) include it in something he was working on — a tangent, but also a shared temporality and a placing it in a zone of mutuality. So, separate and overlapping. Ourselves, and a common body of idea-making and intertextuality. Both of us emphatically believe that no one owns ideas, and that ideas proliferate and overlap and are part of a greater body of thought and works that share a concern for ‘rights’, so having these ‘whispers’ of connection are every bit as important as the more overt textual blocks with our name below:

Failed Narratives of Extinct Volcanoes

 

On the ledge

of the extinct volcano

facing another extinct volcano —

Georgenberg — sore thumb —

alp-life with villages

and factories, small or large

as families: castle keep,

bare-limbed forest

tries to hold its own

in cold rain, not sleet,

as lookout comes home

to roost, real city

below. Rain eases

into mistranslation,

generative phonology

of migration.

Whose ‘spanner

on the works’

makes production

skilled, well-engineered?

Winding down the cone —

Achalm, yes — lathed

mountains higher

or high enough, 

down into

Reutlingen, 

past oaks, word 

fragmentation.

And maybe the most common mode for me is when I am working in my own mental space, and observing things far removed from Russell’s physical location and life, and link some thought in the poem with something he has said or we have discussed. So, the poem is about completely different things — e.g. seeing an echidna and watching the films of Stan Brakhage (Russell and I have never discussed cinema, which makes the ‘linkage’ even more interesting to me... and as the poem below is also part of a completely separate series of poems it creates silent links for me that I find generative and hopefully ‘opening out’ for future discussions and interactions):

Liquid Flow of Echidna from Gravel to Grass Bank — Reflecting Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987) While Painting Eye-Images

 

To roll and sway and merge

is to paint the path and deny

the tracks of pursuit, to crack

paint of script and rise and part,

push aside marbling and viscosity

of dry and wet, to roll uphill

to sway an orthography a writing 

of blur and merge: qualities

of sky and mouse-excavated 

tailings to nose into sense for

termites deeper than old tunnels

the awakening season for flame

to a-priori its ways into traces

of aquifer-augmentation — yes, beneath

hillside eroded; what reptiles

crossed in ascent or insects

with pre-fossil wings, pause

and sample, test and surge

a quartet out of crescent

of declining sun dazzle

in shadow of spines or spikes

or inverted feathers — inside to fly

bodily further in from the body

of valley while remaining so grounded, levitating

despite ‘poor eyesight’ — such misnomers of biology,

such occlusions of echidna-speak 

as close to ground they absorb and muffle 

our vibrations of passing or breathing hard:

shock-absorber psyches framed by

frames of universalised structures of art-speak,

skincells, hair follicles, applique and palette frescoes

of crossing over, of circumventing a branch,

of refreshing trails laid over a range

of terrains so specific you read

‘only’ into the allegories

the metaphors of consequence

for life overlaying their space — add quick light,

add flicker or flash, texture

to hair root and shadow enfilade

cosmos singing interior 

breaking of forms and refolding

to draw into a surface a logography

of constituents for all-time,

shared prognosis, differing

signatures and tellings, 

ends of lines.

And a new one for Russell to respond to, re-process, depart from (‘riff off’), or to leave floating in its own terms of reference... he hasn’t seen this one yet! When we were walking with our sons (Russell sorted the walk), I noticed a log covered in moss that looked animal-like... maybe a massive dog emerging from the side of a ravine. I took photos and pointed it out to Russell, describing what it looked like to me. I said, I will be writing stories about this, and asked him to take a look. As soon as I saw the strange shape, it sparked with ideas and scenarios I have been working with in my recent poetry: the politics of metamorphosis, transition, shifts, mergings... along with my usual concerns for protecting habitats. 

The place was the Seven Mills Forest near Stuttgart, and there is actually a working wood mill near where we entered, and near where I came across this was a hunter’s shooting platform, and that all bothers me. In a way, the animal-plant imagery is a kind of resistance, something beyond the human controls of the area. I did a series of poems and illustrations around the image, but when I got back to where we are staying in Tübingen I immediately wrote what follows. It's not dedicated, and I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of our collaboration when I wrote it, but we were there together, and sometimes such moments can become something else. And in the spirit of metamorphosis, it’s over to you, Russell:

Animal Log Is Cautious But Determined 

 

These are not qualities of lurk

or weirdness, not cryptic

beyond cryptic colouration,

but its emergence is cautious

and its transition remains

private though it reveals

itself from the bank — moss

hair, wood trunk torso,

branch legs. Hear it speak

over murmur of stream,

hear it deny the hunter

a mortal point of aim.

(April, 2023)

And maybe in writing we might think back to our 2019 walk in the Black Forest and our discussion over its fate... different places, if places in relatively close proximity (especially when compared with my writing of forests near where we live in the Western Australia wheatbelt), across time — one pre-pandemic, one post- (or still during, depending on definitions). One on a short visit from me, and the second at the start of a long stay. Both walks were with Russell as ‘guide’ and facilitator.

With Russ in Neckar Valley: mountain forest walk

 

The fork feeds back

Up the hill to take

River away from

Its restrictions

Raptor whistle black

Woodpecker call

But without the tap tap

To decode, without

The ratcheting up

To grub the leafless

Beech which holds

Designs on a tolerable

Summer to come,

Of tolerance, specs

Of walkers’ passing

Interest, collective

Breath, body heat

Of Kant’s working out.

(December, 2019)

Or if that doesn’t spark, maybe we can reach back to our conversation around the horror of hunting towers on the edge of fields and forests, and deep in among the trees along the lines of traversal by pigs and deer. I have written many poems around these travesties and manipulations of desire lines, and they have become a focal point for an animal rights campaign involving German forests. What hope do I have? As Russell said on our recent walk, at least you are personally less likely to be shot than in a French forest, to which I glibly and lamentingly asked/replied: Ordnung? 

Here’s one from a walk I just completed... and accompanying the poem is a series of photos taken from deep within the woods which will find their place in the resistance to violence against animals as well as humans, too. This poem refers to an exhibition of Daniel Richter’s paintings I saw the other day: barriers, ‘silent’ guard towers, open and closed zones, and deep ontological and physical threat.

Lament

 

Daniel Richter’s painted towers

survey human lines

of oppression: the watch,

the fence, the zone

of destruction.

The forest is an edge

to escape to or through,

and the forest myths

entangle fate.

The hunting towers

of the forest are not

those towers, and yet

they perform a similar

and equally deadly function.

How you rate an animal

in the schema of persecution,

how qualify rights and history,

will determine your perception,

The lack of critique

resounds with the movements

of swine and deer in the crepuscular

valley. In the folkish fantasy 

of woodsman architecture.

Daniel Richter’s towers

seem to be human lines

of oppression: the watch,

the fence, the zone

of destruction.

(May, 2023)

Now it’s over to Russell, and I am looking forward to where he does and doesn’t go with this, and to what further conversations ensue. And whatever happens, he will take things through proximities and interstices that I will inevitably find surprising and generative! Here's a manifesto of a particular approach to collaborative poetics in medias res.

Ceasefire Poem

 

For all those suffering from the effects of war. And in solidarity with pacifists/conscientious objectors/anti-war activists so often working under pressure from all 'sides'. It seems almost impossible for those involved in war to see that to oppose war is not to condone the wrongs and tyrannies of an invader or attacker. To hold a position of peace is to oppose all war. To be a pacifist is to believe there is no just position in using violence against violence, and that we need to work at every turn to bring dialogue and ultimately peace. Ceasefire is the only way. The dead are never victors. Freedom of speech is freedom to oppose war. To persecute peace activists is to make war on the very essence of justice itself. The lines above are simple and to the point. I hope they say something of what needs to be said. It seems obvious, but it's clearly not. 

    John Kinsella

Poem in Memory of Poet Andrew Burke

 Belated Elegy

You and I were never close, and likely

thought we knew each other better 

than we could. But we were

familiar with each other, and earlier

spent time in company.

You attended our wedding dinner.

We visited you. In the later

days of my addiction, you were

‘on call’ on two or three or four

occasions. You stayed with AA forever. 

Once an addict... remember.

We published your local poetry

collection, Pushing at Silence. And after

we escaped to Cambridge, there

was an exchange of emails about poetry

and form, about where prosody

might make meaning. 

                                             We can barely

have drifted apart when we were

never really alongside each other.

I felt you weren’t there when I was publicly

under pressure — a bet either

way, rather than ‘all in’, but really

I was searching for something

you were in no position to deliver.

Mea culpa. The lateral drift continuing.

But there was much in common.

And there were moments of wry

humour. I valued your poems celebrating

the everyday, jazz, poetry, the earth... and simply

being. I’ve said little since your passing, 

and now this demi-hymn...

to a friendship of sorts, but of a very

particular sort, wouldn’t you say?

Or would you respond in some jazzy meter: 

read slower... read slower... read slower.

John Kinsella

and see Tracy's elegy for Andrew here.

Pride/Christopher Street Day March in Tübingen

We're just back from attending the Pride/Christopher Street Day March around the streets of the Old Town in Tübingen. It was a powerful, peaceful and joyful occasion, 'awash' with rainbows in their different iterations. Thousands marched. Interestingly, Tracy and I were among a very small number of 'older people' who marched, but given this is a university town, that's probably not surprising. But it would have been nice to see a few more of our generation showing their support. Plenty watched on from the sidelines.

As the violence of the war in Ukraine shatters lives and communities on a vast scale, and threatens so many others, this was a demonstration of what peace, love, tolerance and respect might bring. It was worth noting a committed political 'intersectionalism' present across the procession, with anti-capitalist and anti-fascist flags, songs and mantras echoing out between the buildings. We always accept these in their peaceful iterations. For us, anarchism and peace are inseparable, and we support only pacifist approaches to even complex problems. And joy, camaraderie, community, and the peaceful benefits and inclusiveness of 'queer revolution' sang to us.

Though different groups represented different political and communal aspects of the queer community, there seemed an overwhelming sense that the exploitation, greed, profit and oppression that arise from capitalism, which is so readily yoked to various versions of fascism (in overt and hidden guises), need to be resisted. Capitalism and climate change. Capitalism and arms production. Capitalism and inequality. To link identity, gender and sexual liberty with a move away from the selfishness of capital and power/hierarchies seems essential to us. I am not speaking for all marchers, of course, but that's just one strong impression we took with us as we walked with the community.

What was equally refreshing about the march is that such unity spreads a sense of safety through the communities which we hope will endure. Only a couple of weekends ago, the inaugural Christopher Street Day March in the neighbouring city of Reutlingen was violated by anti-gay counter-protesters who extended their rightwing bigotry to violence and attacked marchers after the parade. It was so important for community to come together today to show such violence will be resisted by increasing presence, by affirming rights, and by denying it any say in how people are or will be. We send our support to those who were assaulted in Reutlingen, and stand by the LGBQTI+ community in every way. Further, we send our respects to the organisers of the march and other events celebrating queerness in all its manifestations, and further out from Tübingen to the world, where minorities suffer egregiously. In solidarity. 

Here are some images from today (taken by Tracy):

And by way of saying farewell, I add a 'sonnet' I wrote the other day after being yelled at in the street. It says something, I think:

Shout

I am walking from the bus stop to the flat

when a couple of 'young blokes' passing

in a car slow down and shout abuse at

me. I turn and study them — curving

around a corner they slow further

and shout again. I shake my head and disappear

down a lane-way, wondering if I will

find them waiting at the other end.

This happens to me around the world

for no obvious reason. I don't get their angle.

This weekend Tracy and I will march

in the Pride Parade to show our support —

there have been harassments and counter-marches

by conservatives here. We will sing but won't shout.

John Kinsella

A farewell memory for poet Andrew Burke

 By Tracy Ryan

Andrew Burke (left) in 2008, with Tracy & John

Nineteen-ninety

in memory of Andrew Burke

 

 

Frank: you were always that.

 

I’ll even admit things treasured but

never shared: the way my late ex-

husband nicknamed you Balzac

and it stuck till I almost said it

to your face, not because

you were prolific, though you were,

but for the half-walrus moustache

you had back then, & the nineteenth-

century boho longhair look,

though it was poetry, not prose, for you.

 

Now: the day I think we first really met:

Three teetotal poets out on a fortnight’s

well-paid country tour of schools, dodging

teacher happy-hours, though you’d

always sit over lemonade in a pub,

letting the dark side down,

trashing the writerly reputation.

 

Collecting me at Midland station, you

laughingly noted your then-wife had

asked around about us beforehand

(me & E.)

& been reassured I was pregnant

& E. was over sixty —

let’s not even gloss it.

 

But it was never like that.

 

On the wild drive through the Mid-West you played

track after track from your full set of The Poet Speaks,

E. upset & sullen in the back seat saying turn it down,

Plath is just not poetry; me, not long turned twenty-six,

wanting those poems blaring on repeat. Yee-ha.

 

You telling me off for over-and-over loud

Sinéad O’Connor on the hotel jukebox,

rooms damp and the tea-kettle full of ants,

asking nonetheless to read the MS

of my first book, and I let you, frail self

you slashed through with that rhythmic biro

till I heard jazz not mine, & arrogant, took on none of it.

 

But what I did learn from you: it mattered —

the way you wrote all detail, each day of the journey,

into your poetry, reprocessed every minute,

poems a mode of living,

regenerating.