A TYPE OF HOUSE-PAINT FOR ALL WEATHERS

Criticism on the work of John Kinsella is made particularly lively by the fact that Kinsella himself practices so much criticism, and self-criticism, in his poetry, fiction, and essays. This can make it, though, harder as well as easier for the critic to operate, to gain a foothold or angle of vision, to trace without trying to rival the primary author’s creativity, ingenuity, and verve. Also posing a daunting hurdle is the sheer stamina Kinsella has as an author; that he produces so much in so many different genres that, while always remaining in a coherent field of meaning, is consistently original and diverse.

The critics in this issue of Angelaki read Kinsella’s internationalist, avant-garde, and politically vigilant oeuvre through distinct lenses and interpretive procedures. Yanli He interrogates Kinsella’s practice of “international regionalism,” examining the genealogy of concepts of regionalism in international affairs and gauging the extent to which the concept of international regionalism itself inscribes the limits and coverages of Kinsella’s own canonicity. Philip Mead also discusses international regionalism, seeing it less as a conclusive global project than a liberating extension of Australian space. David McCooey examines Kinsella’s life-writing, a genre he delineates as extending beyond mere biography or autobiography, to include all nonfiction about identity. McCooey focuses on the role of dirt in Kinsella’s work, how it can be at once rooted and mobile, as a crucial substrate of the granularity through which Kinsella sources his personal experience in the light of his own identity as an author and conveys it to the reader. Dirt can be the replenishing soil of nature but also the detritus of corporate exploitation of the land, and McCooey’s analysis attends alertly to this ambiguity.

Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton write on the central achievement of Kinsella’s work as lyric poet, the “Graphology” series. This series, comprising at its core thousands of poems written between 1995 and 2015, is discussed by Hetherington and Atherton as combining radical subjectivity and explicit activism, something that has been underscored by critics ranging in mien from Harold Bloom (Kinsella was one of the very few poets born after 1960 to whom he devoted significant attention) to Lyn Hejinian. Discontinuous and serial but also, albeit refractedly, evoking a powerful, charged central intelligence, Hetherington and Atherton reveal the “Graphology” series as one of the most ambitious poetic projects of its era. Kieran Dolin writes on Kinsella and the issue of Aboriginal land. Dolin examines the posture of Kinsella on issues of property and custodianship after the Mabo land-rights decision, a time period nearly coextensive with Kinsella’s mature authorial career. Dolin not only examines Kinsella’s critique of the legal doctrine of terra nullius and the author’s advocacy of native title, but draws links between the creativity of Kinsella’s poetry and potential elasticity in a legal structure that has to be reimagined for a post-imperial age. Kinsella, in Dolin’s analysis, critiques the lack of self-awareness in previous colonial landscape poetry, and concedes his continuing privilege in what is otherwise a far more self-exposing and anti-colonial project.

Nicholas Birns reads Kinsella’s fiction, a body of work that has garnered far less attention than his poetry, although 2019’s Hollow Earth received wide reviews and accolades. Kinsella’s fiction reflects the same themes of environmental activism and re-orchestrated perception as does his poetry, but also emphasizes a radical questioning of its central protagonists and a dialogue with precursor texts and genres. Thomas Bristow scrutinizes Kinsella’s poetry as pastoral elegy, slightly swerving away from the idea of “dark pastoral” that dominated early analyses of Kinsella to examine how Kinsella’s rural landscapes solicit a plangent if disillusioned rhetoric of loss.

Ann Vickery takes an aesthetic and perceptual look at Kinsella’s poetry, examining how acts of seeing serve as both a breakthrough of affect and an exposure of oppressive structure, in examining Kinsella’s collaboration with artists and photographers and the way they conjure an open eye to being. Dan Disney examines aspects of Kinsella’s collaborative works, with the sundry fellow poets and prose writers he has collaborated with or with whom his work has discursively intersected. This collaboration, as exemplified by his volume co-authored with the Indigenous poet Charmaine Papertalk Green, goes beyond constructive cooperation to engage in a radical positioning of community as resistance to inequality, exploitation, and what Roberto Esposito terms “immunitarianism.” Tony Hughes-d’Aeth examines the Wheatbelt of Western Australia as Kinsella’s personal landscape, depicting the territory as at once a real site of profound attachment and pop-Yoknapatawpha cyberspace of imaginative affiliation. In Kinsella’s micro-rewriting of Dante, Divine Comedy, Walwalinj becomes a mountain site of pilgrimage and eco-resistance. Russell West-Pavlov examines the disruptions and suspensions of space and time in Kinsella’s work, distilling the way a global but hardly consensus idea of disrupted temporality gives philosophical depth to an innovative poetics.

Importantly, these essays are not just tributes, testimonials, or éloges; they are full-fledged probings of Kinsella’s work, seeking to explicate it rather than merely lionize it. They tell us not just that the work has merit, but that it is important, and invite us to re-read and re-edit, to assess and measure it. They limn how Kinsella’s imaginative style has, across his forty-year career, become a “type of house-paint / for all weathers” (Graphology III: 178).

Issue image: John Kinsella, Bilya Koort Boodja, Northam, Western Australia, July 2020. Photo: Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.