Polysituatedness

A poetics of displacement

John Kinsella

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781526113344
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526113375
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on 'praxis' book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism.

PART 1

On place itself

A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION ON PRACTICE AND CONTEXT INCLUDING SOME EXTERNAL CONSIDERATIONS OF ‘PLACE’

I am concerned with issues of presence and their cost but also affirmations. My prognosis is that we all occupy many spaces at once, and that no ‘place’ in human terms is a place isolated from others. Since moving to Jam Tree Gully, ‘our place’ on the edge of the Avon Valley and on the edge of the Victoria Plains wheat-growing area of the Western Australian wheatbelt, and arguably on the very north-eastern nub of the Darling Range, we have been much concerned with issues of belonging, possession (and its antithetical dispossession – our presence costs), ‘property’ (which I reject) and, indeed, being on the edge of community.

In the main, we don’t ‘fit in’ due to environmentalist, anarchist, pacifist and vegan politics, but we co-exist with neighbours and community, and work to encourage respect for the spatiality of other living things. Our work here is about the agency of the non-human as much as the human. Yet the picture is not of locality, but of a number of locales and ‘locals’. There’s the town of York and its environs about 80 km from here where we previously lived in the shadow of Walwalinj, there’s Cambridge and the fens with which we’ve had a long association, but also the Mizen Head Peninsula of West Cork, Ireland, where we lived for just under a year and which has strong ancestral associations for both me and my partner, Tracy Ryan. The complex policy of heritage comes into play, and is put to the test in many ways. The ‘polysituated’ model of place I developed there is a subset of the ‘international regionalism’ I have subscribed to for twenty years.

All of this book is about the ‘making’ of poems out of ‘place’, but it’s also a book questioning the politics of making and the politics of place. Displacement, but with constant renewing and ‘replacement’. In an essay entitled ‘Pastoral and the Political Possibilities of Poetry’ (published in Southerly in 1996, but later collected in Spatial Relations),¹ I wrote, ‘What I find particularly fascinating is the displacement of the lyrical “I” with the externalized, supposedly non-referential “I”.’ In a poem published in The Hierarchy of Sheep² entitled ‘Displacements’, ‘Each tree’ is a ‘totem for a dead soldier’ (trees planted in King’s Park, Perth, in memory of soldiers who died on battlefields thousands of miles away) – the sense of connected disconnection has been at the core of my modus operandi for a writing lifetime.

It is worth noting that recently, in a review of three poetry titles including my own Vision of Error: A Sextet of Activist Poems,³ the brilliant linguist, poet and critic Javant Biarujia pinpoints ‘displacement’ as the nexus of the three titles he was reviewing. He observes: ‘Displacement is apparent both geographically and textually’, and later notes, ‘Expatriation as a kind of displacement.’⁴ Displacement is an echo in this book, not an ‘unpacked’ (hideous term) word or idea: it’s a gesture towards the issue of belonging or desire to belong, or, prevalently, an ‘inability’ to belong or a loss of connection. The aim of this book is to show place, belonging and ‘international regionalism’ alive in negotiations with writing location, social and biological environment, and ‘space’. It’s a poetics of polyvalent connectedness and disconnection.⁵

I am always searching for new ways of seeing the poem because the poem, for me, ultimately escapes into an aesthetic curatorial space I deeply doubt, and see as materialistic. I am looking for the poem that divests itself of its own value as art and works as a conduit for change, as a nodal point for activist motivation and outcome. The poem of place I write to divest itself of Place. The capitalisation is important here. While looking for specificity and integrity and the value of the local – the pantheistic – I am also looking for the universal signifier, the ground rules for conservation, preservation and tolerance. Specific templates that apply everywhere. Place, for me, has become a paradoxical condition of presence.

International regionalism: a personal case

International regionalism is an expression I coined some twenty years ago that gained traction in the mid to late 1990s. In essence, it entails facilitating international lines of communication while respecting regional integrity. I have written extensively about the nuances and applications of this ‘ideology’ in earlier books,⁶ but in essence it is a way of enhancing an understanding of the local by opening up writing and conversation about that local/locale to comparison with other localities. I was developing these notions concurrently (I was to discover) with the Global/Local movement, and in fact found that my own poetry was being used by scholars such as Professor Rob Wilson of Hawaii Pacific University, who observed ‘his poetics remains largely tied to the problematics of representing a more multicultural, multilingual vision of Australia and the Asia/Pacific region’.⁷

International regionalism includes the possibility of critique of the global; it does not confer legitimacy upon global economics and marketplaces, whether by approval or disapproval. While economics plays a necessary part in understanding place, it is secondary in this study to the need to create understanding through written and oral models that highlight what makes a place unique while contextualising with comparisons to other localities, thus highlighting difference as much as similarity. Not only a respect for difference, but a belief in its necessity, is a traceable outcome of poetry and other writing of place. There is a recognition of the ‘other’ as marginalised but legitimate voice in any given place. A multi-layered and cumulative picture of place emerges (historical, communal, changing environments). In this picture relationships between people, between people and animals and plants, people and the material of the land itself, necessarily change and alter hierarchies of interaction.

At the University of Western Australia, where much of the work I have been doing on place was facilitated (along with Curtin University, Western Australia, where I now work on issues relating to ‘place’), there is a strong lineage of contextualising the local within the national and international. The literary journal Westerly was founded with the intention of presenting local writing within the framework of other Australian, as well as South-East Asian, writing. There have been focuses on the Indian Ocean, or innovative poetry, and indigenous Western Australia. Professor Bruce Bennett was a pioneer of Australian ‘place’ studies in literature and positioned Western Australian writing within the ‘Australian Compass’. So much of the published writing of Western Australia has been concerned with the specificities of place, especially differentiating or qualifying experience in terms of the country as a whole, the region and the world. Peter Cowan’s stories, Sally Morgan’s My Place,⁸ Kim Scott’s breakthrough fictions of contact and its consequences,⁹ Dorothy Hewett’s Great Southern mythologies¹⁰ and Jack Davis’s political and social declarations and reclamations¹¹ are all part of a mosaic of identity-spatiality. At work are textual and intertextual poetics. This is the background from which my own concerns have emerged; when combined with a keen interest in literary theory, travel and a political poetics, an ‘international regionalism’ began to form.

I have carried such concerns with me to the various locales I have written and edited in/out of around the world. When I co-edited the British literary journal Stand in the late 1990s/early 2000s with Michael Hulse (Leeds University), we had the task of retaining the journal’s ‘Northern’ identity and increasing its international appeal and reach. We edited special issues on various countries and regions, from New Zealand to America to Africa, and on a variety of movements and ways of reading texts, ‘postmodernism’ through to various thematic groupings. The journal became a conduit for broader conversations and connections, building on its long history as a vehicle for translated literature. In my own creative practice I have for many years been recreating new poetry texts out of poems from other languages, in which poems function as completely original poems, informed by the place in which I worked on them, and also translations informed by the places embodied in the originals. This is a concrete and practical example of international regionalism at work: one place communing with another; the presence of both is relevant. The poem becomes a device for a comparative poetics, rather than a response or representation of a specific place (or set of places) experienced by one poet alone.

This extends further into collaborative work, such as that I have done with Ali Alizadeh in Six Vowels & Twenty-three Consonants: An Anthology of Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi.¹² This project produced translations of original works as well as an enhanced dialogue with Iranian poets and critical writing on this process. I see the creative and the critical as inseparable.

Editing has had a fundamental role in the pragmatics of my international regionalism. When I founded Salt magazine in Perth (first issue June, 1990) it was with a desire to create an overtly internationalist journal from the world’s so-called most isolated (state) capital city. I saw no reason why the avant-garde movement of Language Poetry, for example, wasn’t as relevant to those in the Perth suburbs or out in the Western Australian countryside as it was to New York and San Francisco. And this proved to be the case, with many of the luminaries of that movement publishing in Salt magazine. Salt eventually grew into a major international publisher of poetry, criticism and more recently fiction.

One might say the same regarding my international editorship of the Kenyon Review, based in Ohio. The point isn’t being an editor but rather an ‘international editor’. From wherever I am living, I act in that role. If I am out in the bush in Western Australia, surrounded by kangaroos and echidnas, I retain and carry out that role. More recently, in London, I agreed to sit on the ecological panel at the Parnassus International Poetry Festival because decisions made in, say, a heavily polluting country like the one I come from affect people’s lives on low-lying islands where rising sea levels mean destruction. The regional affects the international, and vice versa. I lived for some time in the mid-1990s on the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, islands only fifteen metres at their highest (sand-dune) point, and mostly not much above coral-reef level. Rising seas will have drastic implications there.

The creation of poetic texts is necessarily informed by many obvious external referents and many un-noted or undetected subtexts. An anti-war poem written in Afghanistan might be about a very local tragedy but it is also written against the backdrop of international relations. A local image is broadcast on a national and international scree...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface/synopsis
• A polysituated ode with occasional, demi-Boustrophedon
• 1 On place itself
• 2 Where we are
• 3 Displaced acts of writing
• 4 Sublimated displacements in read texts
• 5 Emplacement
• 6 Weirding place/Anti-bucolic
• 7 Appendices
• Bibliography