In Memory of Poet Lyn Hejinian

 

Granular

            in memory of Lyn Hejinian

 

Granular as people

            to people, arraying

with modicums

            and substantials,

setting implication

            of dead places

brought alive

            where a quote

becomes the ‘my’

            of an anecdote;

brief as interruption

            of decades, broadcast

resumed and reception

            a tool of wonder

as northern lights

            freak southern lights

and vice versa.

            Teaching-tool

of the time,

            all in thrall

but liberated;

            the clouds

were somewhere

            lost

but reform over lines

            too long

to condense.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Total Divestment from Military-related Industry

It is deeply affirming to see the peaceful campaigning against military connections and associations in Australian universities. Demilitarisation of places of learning is something I have been strongly advocating for over many years, and it surprises me that it has taken this long to become a focal point of rights issues. University involvement in militarism has frequently been the case, and it remains the case, even where universities deny such connections. My email signature at one university I am associated with reads:

for the complete demilitarisation of universities, schools, and places of learning

Having experienced ostracism and complaints (to put it mildly) within [that] university because of my stance, I wonder how the entrenched militarists feel about broader protest action? And I make this post as a plea for consistency among the protesters — ALL military associations lead to death somewhere in the world, and ALL military associations are culpable. Divestment (as the terms goes... placing it within its capitalist ambit and reflecting part of the core issue) from ALL weapons-related 'defence industry' and interests is the only just approach. 

To be selective is to condone death and suffering for 'other' people, to justify violence under 'certain circumstances' — the reason the cycles of violence persist in the world and dominate human interactions, ensuring the perpetuation of injustice. Divest should mean cease. Divest should mean there can be no learning with the spectre of death underwriting one's studies. Whether it's working on submarine sonar or receiving funding from any of the military-profiteering companies, it comes down to the same issue: these are modes predicated on death.

See this poem from 2020 written to a VC and university hierarchy about 'defence' industry ties to universities.

    John Kinsella

Letter to the Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities

 14/5/2024

 

To Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities

 

I wish to:

 

1. Support the absolute right for students to protest/camp etc. peacefully on university campuses.

2. Denounce the genocide being enacted by the Israeli military in Gaza. Further, to note the ongoing systemic oppression and neo-colonialism enacted by Israel’s government, military and settler-culture.

3. I wish to affirm universal human rights.

4. Speaking from a pacifist position that rejects all forms of violence, I wish to restate my many decades-long objection to weapons production (for anyone anywhere), the military in all its forms, and places of learning being used directly or indirectly for these purposes. It is abhorrent that universities have so deeply connected themselves with ‘defence’ — an industry of death.

5. Speak against any form of support for such violence.

6. Speak in support of diverse communities across the globe that respect each other, share space and materials, and are mutually supporting.

 

Thanks.

 

Sincerely,

 

Emeritus Professor John Kinsella, poet, environmentalist, peace activist and writer

Cease the Attacks on Rafah/Gaza

 

Cultivation

 

One of my students showed me the orchards

of her family deleted, the land rewritten.

And photos of the displaced and lost.

That was a year before the invasion

 

of Gaza and the erasure of trees

down to the splinters of stories.

The granaries broken, houses

split open, and now the last refuge

 

to be raised and offered as proof

of ‘resolve’. Buzzards, sparrow-

hawks, griffons... no longer raptors

but lost to the vanishing point.

 

Erosion is policy and endgame

its intonation. The Israeli military

is attempting to rewrite definitions

of suffering. To bulldoze lexicons.

 

Closing the crossing, harrying

the edges, compressing and dispersing

the soil until it is dust or slurry.

Cultivating a ruin whose fruit is death.

 

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

 

Threnody

 Threnody

 

Each martial act shatters the desert owl’s

hold on the grace of night which has seeped

into day through rips in walls of sky,

through holes in the carpet of earth —

fractures of rock and pits of sand.

 

Each martial act undoes the baby’s

cry for milk, the silently feeding lips

which would continue into sleep;

and when shells lob as precise

as history it wakes before it dies.

 

Each martial act is enabled by the silence

of ‘learning’, the immanence of ‘making

a living’, an expression that falls as dead

prayers over distance, over the local.

The desert owl remembers differently.

The desert owl remembers the same.

 

 

            John Kinsella

For My Friend Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024)

  

Elegy for Marjorie

 

I’ll talk as if neither of us are here,

leaves that cling or won’t fall,

fourth person in the dialogue.

 

When the body dissolves, a unity

forms around sand and leaves,

the very specific songs of remaining

 

words. In the absence of lyrics,

we make an assemblage of protests.

In a lyric of absence, we haul

 

a grammar across that landscaping.

Many meanings reduce to one

when we try to utter ‘development’.

 

Others will be having this conversation,

too. Now we’ve sorted the issue

of distance. Once. For all. And.

 

 

            John Kinsella

On Les Murray

Les and I had a complex interaction due to different ways of seeing the world, but we still had overlaps and strong shared interests. I think Les's dynamic thinking around language will always be a vital and interesting thing, and a poem like 'Bats' Ultrasound' shows an empathy with the non-human world that is moving, emphatic and genuine. You really get the sense that he not only 'feels being bat' but can draw connection between animal and human (mammal to mammal) that is both allegorical and quite real. 

Les, to me at least, seemed to identify as an outsider, and though some would say he relished this 'position', I felt that he was actually quite lonely amidst all the acclaim and public interest. Poetry for him seems to have been a bridge between his 'difference' and what he imagined the world was. As he sought to translate for us, he also sought to translate for himself. I think his finest poems are those full of 'strangeness' and yokings between the familiar and unfamiliar. Sometimes these yokings can jar and seem a little off (certainly from my pov, politically), but they can also bring a reader to self-analyse their own perceptions and use of language. 

There are many contradictions in this, but contradiction drove Les's poetry, and I am all for generative contradictions.  Because Les focalised all life through 'the glory of God', he seemingly and maybe for him necessarily created a hierarchy of humans over animals, but I always thought Les's empathy could be more than 'wonder'... in fact, it could be a form of almost secret sharing, an affinity in being unable to find a place in any hierarchy. 

I strongly believe Les's work is most often read in a reductive way — really, to get to his essence you have to almost lift him out of reality into that space where language is forming, is almost unutterable.

      John Kinsella