The extraordinary literary output of John Kinsella has thus far exceeded the capacity of criticism to deal with it. This special issue of Angelaki is an attempt to close the gap, but as the guest editors we are only too aware of how we must still fall short.Footnote1 This issue draws on a range of scholars who have followed Kinsella’s work, often over many years. While John Kinsella was born and grew up in the southwest of Western Australia, his reach has extended globally, particularly through the anglophone centres of Britain and the United States, but increasingly through other parts of the world including continental Europe and China. We will not attempt to catalogue Kinsella’s works here since, with Kinsella, such lists are almost immediately out of date. But more importantly, the totalising gesture of doing so runs against the basic ethos of Kinsella’s project. Despite its epic scale, Kinsella’s work always exists as an intervention and not an edifice. It has a negative capability, akin to the sublime and serial grandeur of paintings of the Last Judgement in Christian eschatology or the sprawling tableaux of medieval tapestry. But if his work is a tapestry, then Kinsella presents his images from the other side, as an assemblage of knots and ends. In this issue, we as critics have occasionally presumed to flip the work around and offer an image in more conventional terms, but readers will know that this procedure is something that must always remain critically contingent.
Within his native Australia, Kinsella was first apprehended as a “landscape” poet. Appearing in the late 1980s, however, his work was consonant with an emerging postcolonial critique that had made landscape, such a staple of Australian poetry, no longer the simple backdrop of a colonial nation. The bicentenary of Australia’s invasion in 1988 threw open the contradictions of a settler state that had worked so assiduously to will them away. So, that is the first, and perhaps founding, contradiction of Kinsella’s work. He is a landscape poet who repudiates the claims of landscape. The work that shot him to national, and then international, prominence was his volume of poems Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995), which anatomised the Western Australian wheatbelt in the mode of postmodern gothic. The wheatbelt had appeared in his poetry prior to this point, but with Silo the wheatbelt took on the proportions of a fully populated (and postulated) space, a universe replete with features that were both intrapsychic and catastrophically historical. In this wheatbelt, we find the colonial settler state reaching its tragic limits as primordial ecosystems collapse and humans live out lives irradiated by impossibilities they cannot quite face.
The wheatbelt was but one of the directions that Kinsella’s work would take in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, but this remarkable terrain, with its devastating discontinuities, remains a kind of Dantesque ur-landscape that often irrupts into other Kinsella works which seem a million miles from southwest Australia. In this issue, Hughes-d’Aeth’s essay on the “Cybernetic Wheatbelt” explores Kinsella’s deconstruction of the wheatbelt in his great intertextual work Divine Comedy: Three Journeys through a Regional Geography (2008). The increasingly rickety concept of “landscape” received a fatal ontological blow when the High Court of Australia decided in favour of the plaintiffs in the Mabo case in 1992 and overturned the doctrine of terra nullius that had maintained the fiction that Indigenous Australians held no title to their land when it was colonised in 1788. The belated recognition of Native Title in 1992 was an epochal moment in Australia’s history. While the campaign for Indigenous land rights, sovereignty and recognition did not begin or end with the Mabo decision, this decision did instigate a binding alteration to the common law. Kinsella’s position is complicated when it comes to land rights, but he is never afraid to occupy a complicated position. For eco-philosophical reasons he fundamentally denies that humans “own” land or that land can be owned in any conventional sense. The repudiation of property is also consonant with his dismantling of the proprietary concept of landscape. But Kinsella simultaneously, and with increasing stridency, asserts the continuing claim of Indigenous Australians to the custodianship of land. What many of the essays in this collection show is that Kinsella is a dynamic intellectual and his work evolves in dialogue with the public sphere. Thus, Kieran Dolin’s essay helps chart the vicissitudes of Indigenous recognition as they manifest through Kinsella’s work. Russell West-Pavlov’s essay “Killing Time” also addresses the issue of Native Title, drawing it into the matrix of climate catastrophe, through a close reading of Kinsella’s “Extinguishment Villanelle.” In his essay on Kinsella’s collaborations, Dan Disney considers the intersection of Kinsella’s poetry with Indigenous activism through the collaboration with Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green, The False Claims of Colonial Thieves (2018).
Another key dimension of Kinsella’s work is its avowed activism. Again, this is something that has grown in significance and prominence in Kinsella’s creative work and critical interventions in recent decades. His occasional poems in national dailies and international journals address social issues and ills, from Indigenous and refugee rights to capital punishment. But above all, his activism has been directed to the non-human world and its decimation at the hands of human agents. Along with Russell West-Pavlov’s essay, Thomas Bristow’s essay on the ecological elegy also examines the poetics of Kinsella’s environmentalism, with particular reference to the “Jam Tree Gully” cycle. Bristow writes of Kinsella’s approach to elegy: “It is discourse as symbolic action. For Kinsella, elegy must evolve into the fragments of pain.” Kinsella’s postmodern jeremiads bend language into shapes that hope to capture the unprecedented quality of the contemporary ecological catastrophe.
While he is known primarily as a poet, Kinsella has written across all the contemporary literary forms – short story collections, novels, memoirs, plays, libretti – sometimes within the accepted dimensions of a genre (his short stories are relatively conventional), but sometimes in highly experimental variations, such as his novels and memoirs. Nicholas Birns’ essay “The Scrub of Vicissitude” focuses on Kinsella’s experimental fiction, a remarkable and fecund field of his creative work. It is fair to say that critics have not really known what to do with part of Kinsella’s oeuvre and Birns provides the first real roadmap to his extended experimental prose, bringing into the critical compass works like Post/Colonial (2009), Morpheus (2013), Lucida Intervalla (2019), Hollow Earth (2019) and The Mahler Erasures (forthcoming). Also in this issue, there is a detailed consideration of John Kinsella as a “life writer” by David McCooey. McCooey’s essay looks not only at the more overt memoirs – Auto (2001), Fast, Loose Beginnings (2006), Displaced (2020) – but also at the various speakers, avatars, narrators, voices and subjects that connote the author’s life in his other works. In his essay, McCooey plays with the concept of “dirt” which in various intriguing ways inflects the autobiographical dimensions of Kinsella’s work.
Despite the emphasis on activism and activist poetics, as Birns’ essay on Kinsella’s experimental prose makes clear, Kinsella is also deeply involved in aesthetic innovation. One of the most sustained experimental projects in Kinsella’s oeuvre are the intermittent series of poems known as “Graphology,” recently gathered together in the three-volume edition Graphology Poems: 1995–2015. While these poems are touched upon by various authors in this special issue, Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton’s essay looks in detail at this retrospective of Kinsella’s most explicitly experimental poetry. Indeed, they explode the basic contrast between activism and experimentation by suggesting that the Graphology poems offer a model of how “an activist poetry may inscribe aspects of being, self and experience while protesting against environmental challenges and degradation.” The Graphology poems, they say, are “conspicuously meta-poetic” and present Kinsella at his most dizzying and ontologically challenging. In a different way, Ann Vickery’s essay “Art and Acts of Seeing” draws attention to Kinsella’s persistent interest in visual art (and visuality more generally), tracing this element from his very earliest poems into his later works. As well as overtly ekphrastic poems – such as those on Warhol in Full Fathom Five (1995) or on Blake’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy in On the Outskirts (2017) – Vickery shows how Kinsella’s poems are peppered with references to art, artists, photographers and photography. Her essay brings out the very decided visualism of Kinsella’s poems and the sheer range of their intermedial engagement with visual art. Vickery closes her essay with an important meditation on the visual elements in the Graphology poems, picking up on points made by Hetherington and Atherton.
This special issue also looks carefully at Kinsella in an international context and, in particular, his status as a “World” writer. One aspect of this emerges in Dan Disney’s essay on Kinsella’s creative collaborations and Kinsella’s collaborations are one of the key ways that he crosses and upsets geographical spaces. He has collaborated with writers and artists all over the world, often in ways that forge new modes of translatability. In Yanli He’s essay, she takes up Kinsella’s invocation of the term “international regionalism” and considers his uptake in the circuitry of world literature. As part of her critical genealogy of the term international regionalism (“IR”), He notes that while Kinsella did not invent the term, he does exemplify it in a very particular way and has helped provide a model for what it might mean. Like He, Philip Mead analyses Kinsella’s work in terms of IR, while also citing a more recent coinage, “polysituatedness.” Mead’s essay usefully returns us to the Mabo decision as the event which made a latently fraught Australian national identity into a visible fault line. Mead locates Kinsella’s work within “one of the most energized strands in contemporary Australian writing,” namely “in representations of place, in literary geographies, in historical and contemporary reconsiderations of globe and hemisphere, and in the existential language of the local and the regional.” Both He and Mead see Kinsella’s poetic project as very much defined by the negotiation of identity through the filiations of geography, and the problematisation of basic distinctions between “local” and “global” poetry. Kinsella’s poetry is not just local poetry that has travelled the world, but an international poetry that transpires in the micro-localities of place we have tended to call “regions.” He and Mead, in other words, discern a collapse that Kinsella’s poetry effects between centre and periphery.
As we noted at the outset to this introduction, what we have collected here in no way purports to encompass Kinsella’s work. What our authors have seized upon, instead, are active vectors in Kinsella’s work – vectors of Indigenous belonging, poetic activism, environmental elegy, life writing, literary experimentation and IR. These essays bring a contemporary understanding of Kinsella’s work into much needed view. What is notable in almost all the essays is that while we set out, perhaps implicitly, to survey Kinsella’s work, none of us ended up doing so, overborne as it were by the realisation that Kinsella’s literature is happening right now. It is growing, expanding, mutating and propagating. This special issue is not a retrospective, but a present-tense tarrying with the emergent realities of Kinsella’s art.
Notes
1 We would like to pay tribute to the only other collection of critical essays on Kinsella’s work, Rod Mengham and Glen Phillips’ edited collection, Fairly Obsessive: Essays on the Work of John Kinsella (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre, 2001). Some twenty years later, it stands up very well and provided us with an important baseline in preparing the current special issue.