JOHN KINSELLA AS LIFE WRITER

Abstract

Life writing is ubiquitous in John Kinsella’s vast oeuvre. Kinsella’s employment of the diversity of modes collected under the rubric of “life writing” is underpinned by a “poetics of dirt.” Such a poetics is visible in the central role that material dirt (as both pollution and terrain) plays in Kinsella’s work, as well as the more general concept of impurity, as seen in Kinsella’s poetic trafficking in ideas concerning transgression, liminality, hybridity, and danger. In Purity and Danger (1966), the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined dirt as “matter out of place.” In the poem “Dirt” (from Kinsella’s 2014 collection Sack), dirt remains understandable as matter out of place, but it also becomes radically mobile, its material and symbolic weight subject to unexpected transformations. The eponymous dirt in Kinsella’s poem is being carted from one place to another by the poet’s near neighbour for “purposes unknown.” This “shitload of dirt,” dumped onto the dirt of the valley’s floor, makes its way into the disturbingly porous bodies – both human and non-human – around it. It is “something you sense in arteries” and “the haze / that lights and encompasses us all.” This poem can be taken as a metonym for Kinsella’s entire literary oeuvre. Employing his “poetics of dirt,” Kinsella attends to the dispossessed dirt of a post/colonial nation; the dirt of contemporary farming practices; the dirt of official and vernacular languages; and the dirt of personal secrets. This essay argues that Kinsella’s “poetics of dirt” cannot be disambiguated from his activist poetics, and the profoundly auto/biographical nature of his writing. Attending to postcolonial theory and life-writing studies, this essay analyses how Kinsella thematises dirt as central to both life writing (in prose and poetry) and a life of writing. In doing so, it considers dirt as something not simply “out of place,” but – in a postcolonial, post-sacred, and late-capitalist world – endlessly mobile, unstable, and transformative, moving between material and discursive realities in newly complex ways. By attending to dirt (both as matter and as pollutant) within the context of his various auto/biographical projects, Kinsella conspicuously draws attention to the relationship between the human and the material, profoundly questioning – in a way akin to a “new materialist” perspective – the consequences of a human-centred ontology. At its most radical, the “poetics of dirt” found in Kinsella’s life writing posits a world in which human subjectivity is not the only agental force in the material world.

Keywords:

• poetry
• dirt
• Australian literature
• John Kinsella
• activist poetics

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Kinsella makes this point repeatedly, sometimes in the same work. See, for instance, “Some Answers to Missing Questions”: “I consider myself an activist poet” (Kinsella, Polysituatedness 390, 393).

2 Kinsella has on a number of occasions employed scientistic language when describing his projects. For instance, in Kangaroo Virus he writes that “Science and art have much in common. As a poet, I explore the data of language for codes and truths. I develop hypotheses and search for answers” (Kinsella and Sims 9).

3 One expression of a “universalist” model of writing-as-life-writing is expressed by Kinsella himself when he states in an interview that “My writing is a composite of everything I’ve experienced. Nothing is excluded” (McLennan).

4 The potential for translations of ancient texts to produce quasi-autobiographical outcomes can be seen in a work such as “After Sweeney” (from Kinsella, The Wound), which revises and responds to an epic Irish poetry cycle. Though Kinsella explicitly states in the Introduction to The Wound that “I am not Sweeney” (10), it is impossible not to see the outline of the author in a poem such as “Sweeney the Vegan.”

5 A term I attribute to Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.