[00:00:05] John Kinsella: Bulldozers. Red flash bulldozers make devils of good people. Bulldozers are compelled to do as they are told. Bulldozers grimace when they tear the Earth’s skin from Earth. They came. 

[00:00:20] Anna Funder: Welcome to Fully Lit, a podcast about Australian writing. That’s the voice of poet John Kinsella. 

[00:00:28] John Kinsella: On one day I wrote a poem about creatures being squashed on the road and by bulldozers and so on, and I yell, read it! And they downed tools for the day. 

[00:00:38] Anna Funder: I’m Anna Funder. This episode is about poetry and what it can do in the world. 

[00:00:45] John Kinsella: As a protest. It was an epiphany that poetry could actually intervene in its own right. 

[00:00:51] Anna Funder: John speaks with host and fellow poet Lisa Gorton. 

[00:00:55] John Kinsella: He gets inside people, and even if they say they don’t understand it, or they say they’re not interested. It does something. 

[00:01:03] Anna Funder: It’s time to get fully lit. 

[00:01:08] Lisa Gorton: I’m at home in Melbourne on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung of the Kulin nation, and I offer and pay respects to their elders, custodians and storytellers. 

[00:01:23] John Kinsella: Hi, Lisa. I also want to pay my deep respects and acknowledgement to the Ballardong, Noongar, Whadjuk, Noongar and Noongar peoples of the land. I write it’s stolen country and have a deep belief that I’m responsible as much as anyone else for rectifying the wrongs that have been committed by my ancestors, and it’s a shared culpability. 

[00:01:48] Lisa Gorton: I feel those two words come together poetry and responsibility in your work so that they are almost synonymous. Is that right for you or how do they diverge? 

[00:01:57] John Kinsella: That’s totally right. Every waking moment and probably many of the sleeping moments, though there are not that many sleeping moments, unfortunately, are about that absolute fusion of rising and responsibility. The thing is that every moment for me is actually a pained moment, because I can’t meet my responsibilities in the way I wish. Those responsibilities are rectifying the wrongs just of my own presence. And the only way I can actually keep stepping into my life is to deal with the ethical contradictions and conundrums and paradoxes, so it requires a rising of permanent activism. 

[00:02:37] Lisa Gorton: Is there something about poetry that makes the feeling of responsibility different from your experience of writing in short story forms, or in the other academic and public writing that you do? 

[00:02:48] John Kinsella: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, poetry is the, for me, the Urtext. It all begins with poetry. It all comes back to poetry. It’s how I think. It’s how I grew up. It’s the way I process everything. Language is reduced down to a set of symbols and sounds and images, and then I reprocessed through them. So when I write academically, I always write out of a poem. In fact, at some point somewhere in them will be referenced to poetry or a poetic gesture or whatever. So my responsibility exists in the poem, and my poem is an articulation of that responsibility. So they’re entangled. 

[00:03:27] Lisa Gorton: Well, I agree with that. And I think poetry is the form that’s probably closest to how a mind thinks or how experience works. There aren’t separable logics for the image and the fact they’re bound up, but in a sense, sometimes it might be thought, I suppose, that that’s that’s not a public language. And I feel that in your work, there’s a really stringent effort to make sure that poetry is not a retreat from the world. I’ve read that your mother read to you from Wordsworth, I think, and Milton, when you were a child, and therefrom another register of experience, I suppose, from the one that you would have had in the wheat belt, so that I can see that there’s a tension pulling in poetry between the inner logic of the dream and the image, and the commitment that you must have wakened into very early. 

[00:04:20] John Kinsella: I was really young. I mean, I heard Paradise Loss read when I was seven. I still remember vast tracts of this because, you know, that’s the age you remember things best from.  

Reading Paradise Lost by John Milton 

 I had been saturated in the language of the Romantics. What’s interesting is, of course, the gap across time. When you’re looking at the romantics and you’re looking across 200 years, the language shifts so much. It’s like another language. And so you’re undergoing a process of translation constantly. And I find that when I’m writing poetry is I’m translating out from these template forms I have in my head into the vernacular of. Now that slippage is really interesting. It’s a generator in some ways. But getting back to that overall point is that in our life, as I have it, where I live in the Wheatbelt, in Western Australia, and the kind of responsibilities of every day, for example, as an animal rights person, as a vegan of nearly 40 years, 38 years, I think now is that obviously I’m surrounded by a very different culture regarding the use of animals than the one I live by with different views. What happens is that public and private become very vulnerable. 

[00:05:55] Lisa Gorton: Well, the strange thing is you actually came to something that I was thinking about a lot today. I was thinking that environmental activism and belated colonial reckonings are so essential to Australian poetry now. And I feel that some aspects of your early commitment to them might be lost, the courage of your original commitment to them obscured. And it was an unusual or a courageous choice that you made, I feel. What drove you to bring environmental activism into poetry at that time? 

[00:06:29] John Kinsella: You know, it really wasn’t a choice. I was very physically active in the 80s at protests. I lived in communes. I lived on the street. I lived in a cave. I lived a really different kind of life. And protest became, because I wasn’t yet equipped as a poet to do what I wanted to do. That doesn’t mean I do it well now, but I know how to do what I want to do now. And early on I hadn’t worked out fully how to do it. I knew how to write poems. I’d ​​been writing poems all my life, but I didn’t know yet. All I could do in a poem as an activist and join the poetry with the activism. So when I saw environmental degradation, I saw suffering of animals, and I saw the most extreme, overt racism. It sent me into an absolute youthful fury. And so I went out and I spoke and I yelled, and I was there. And then I started bringing poetry into it. And I remember actually, um, there was quite a pivotal moment of my life as a protester was I was about 20, and they were bulldozing Bush behind Murdoch University to extend the university. And I was involved in a campaign to try and stop the, you know, just devastating what was happening to the wetlands. 

[00:07:41] John Kinsella: On one day, I wrote a poem about creatures being squashed on the road and by bulldozers and so on. And they youll read it, as I still do, probably when I’m at a protest, you’ll read the bulldozer driving in front of me, stopped, got out and thought, here I am, I’m going to be worked over, came up to me and said, what do you want about? And I read him the poem. They downed tools for the day. Now, it didn’t stop the destruction of the bush. And we got talking about unionism. And about workers rights and about the fact he was feeding a family and that as far as he was concerned, it’s not necessarily what he believed in, but what choice did he have? And I think as a protest, it was not only an epiphany in terms of what poetry could do, but it was an epiphany in terms of often you’re protesting against people you don’t dislike and you would never dislike, and you feel great empathy for. And they’re in compromised positions because the world has put them in a compromised position. So that epiphany started gradually, took another 12 years before it properly shifted, but it started to shift mentally that poetry could actually intervene in its own right. 

[00:08:46] Lisa Gorton: When you were talking about that epiphany with the bulldozer, part of that has lodged in a poem that you wrote much later for a different protest called The Bulldozer. 

[00:09:05] READING “Bulldozer” by John Kinsella 

[00:12:32] John Kinsella: The bulldozer poems a poem also about empathy. Hate is a very terrible emotion, I think. And the hating of people who you think are doing wrong, or probably are doing wrong, is part of the problem is, if you get caught in that emotion, you lose out, the cause loses out, and the biosphere ultimately loses out. It was written about 7 or 8 years ago now, and it’s had a life of its own and has been picked up by protest movements and read at. Environmental protests in front of machinery adapted to each particular situation. 

[00:13:05] Lisa Gorton: It’s an amazing poem and it does have that mantra quality with its repetition, but also the tension within it between almost an empathy growing towards the speechlessness and ignorance of the machinery, I suppose. What was it like to feel that it’s been taken up and changed and used elsewhere? 

[00:13:26] John Kinsella: Well, as I say in the back of the book, it’s been published in this is a poem without copyright. Anyone can use it. I’ve seen my work used in millions of ways. I’ve seen lines of mine in people. I think that’s great. Go for it, people. It’s. I’m the inheritor of everything I’ve read. And I spend my life reading. I’ve read tens and tens of thousands of books. They are all part of me as well. I share this language. Let’s use it for positive effect. If it’s going to do some good out there, however, it’s dispersed is not a problem from my point of view, as long as it’s adapted in a respectful way, and also because there’s a respect for, um, Indigenous peoples in the poem. It’s absolutely emphatic. I don’t want that messed with. If you’re protesting to stop environment being damaged. Talk to the people who are, um, local. Poetry and protest are also about their about the kind of intimacy shared humanity, a shared common purpose and trying to keep the biosphere is intact as we can. That intimacy, the intimacy of responsibility and of generosity, I think, are important. And it’s not like virtue signalling or holier than thou, that sort of stuff, which are also terms designed to demean any act of trying to do something better anyway. So I don’t take any notice of any of that stuff. 

[00:14:37] Lisa Gorton: How do your different works relate to each other? Do you see it as one long life project, one continuous project? Or are there, um, different spectrums of work or thinking that you’re, you’re dealing with and related to that? What is publishing for? 

[00:14:54] John Kinsella: Yeah. Well, there’s a very good question. First of all, I do see it as all interconnected from a very young age. Decided I wanted to do something that was interconnected across my life, and I work different mediums and art and all sorts of things, music and so on. But it all comes back to, I suppose, that melamine kind of obsessive vision of the big artwork. But it’s a big activist artwork for me. 

​​​[00:15:17] Lisa Gorton: When you started publishing, I think Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal stood as role models. I think I’ve heard you mention that at that time, there were probably more obvious or expected styles for a hyper smart young poet to take up. I’m thinking of the tough glamour of the urban writers like John Forbes and Vicki Viidikas and Gig Ryan and Martin Johnson. 

[00:15:41] John Kinsella: They, of course, all profoundly affected me as a poet. And I, you know, had a long and complex close relationship with John Forbes. I knew him very well. In fact, he’s the person who edited The Silo, though it’s a completely contrary vision to the one he had. He said it was so weird and unusual, and there wasn’t anything like it around that you’ll find a place. So there was a real intimacy with their work and a strong respect for it. But I didn’t want to do what they were doing because they do it so much better, and they’re doing it with a particular purpose and vision and an aesthetics as well. And I’m anti-aesthetics I wanted to do something else because I felt I had to, because that that bigger view of which is no bigger a view than they had, or maybe it’s a smaller view, but trying to create an environmental activist poetry at first that was indirect and had nature in it and referred to things like salinity damage and over ploughing of land and racism and these kind of markers of wrong. But as time went on to actually start introducing the arguments around how one could tackle them into the poems so that merging of different registers of ambiguity and non ambiguity. Yeah. 

[00:16:58] Lisa Gorton: Well, I, I mean, I think that was what I felt that it was unusual at the time. It was bold and weird. And I can see what you mean. That ability to disarray the sort of central perspective of the narrator, sort of poet, so that you could use techniques of disruption and shifting the point of view, single parts are animated. And I can see that you could bring that kind of linguistic way of seeing to bear on language. But I’m fascinated. I did not know that John Forbes edited that book, and I wonder what that was like. 

[00:17:33] John Kinsella: Oh, it was actually it was fantastic experience. And he edited Full Fathom 5 in 1993 as well. John’s editing of my quotation marks rural work was, I thought, perfectly apt, because what I wouldn’t want is someone coming out writing about those worlds without distance from them, coming from within it, because they’re necessarily going to try and pull it in some direction, whereas John was very, very comfortable with my, um, kicking against the pricks, as he would say. He had a wonderful sense of, uh, the line. He knew exactly how far a line could go. He also, which I really loved, didn’t have a problem with the vernacular, even if it was a constructed vernacular, because sometimes in some of the poems is intentionally a constructed vernacular to make irony. He was very nuanced. He didn’t say, oh, that’s not how someone sounds. Or he’d say, oh, that does is. He’d look at it what you were trying to do. Okay. Irony. Got that? Works a very complex person, John. I don’t even know where you begin to talk about him. I suppose that’s why biographies have been written of him. He was a very complex person, and we had our ups and downs. But, um, the editing process was all positive. 

[00:18:50] Lisa Gorton: In the panel, I’ll be talking with Ellen Van Neerven and Bella Li and Ellen sent a question in to me, to ask you so that our conversations could be in conversation. They said they were really impressed by your collaborative work with the distinguished Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green. This is in False Claims of Colonial Thieves and art books, both published by McGraw-Hill. Ellen was impressed by how the two of you, as they put it, stay in your lanes, and they wondered whether that was something that arose intuitively or something that was determined from the beginning. 

[00:19:30] John Kinsella: It’s an interesting thing because in many ways, there was an obligation on both our parts to articulate the positions we were coming from, because what we have always been trying to do and continue, I think to try and do, is Charmaine’s speaking out of her community and her own life within that community and of her country. And I’m speaking as someone with colonial heritage who wants to deal with the responsibility of what that means, not to try and find a way to excuse any of it, but to examine it and to use it in a way that might help heal things to some extent in public discourse and privately as well. So they’re quite articulated positions. They can’t, in a sense, ultimately ever but be in their lanes. Now the temptation is, of course, to start blurring those lines, but in a sense can’t happen for the kind of activism we’re working with. We both have responsibilities to meet in what we’re doing. I have a responsibility to Indigenous communities in Australia, not to appropriate or inculcate myself into, um, experience that is not mine. Charmaine has a deep responsibility to her community as well. Obviously it goes without saying. They are separate things. However, they are things that can be alongside each other. 

[00:20:50] John Kinsella: The keeping in lanes is a negotiation, actually respect because you do keep in your lane, but you always easily veer from one side within the lane to the other, and you’re very conscious of that. And the blurring and the blending happen in the ironing process, as Charmaine calls it. In that exchange, it does create a liminality. It does create much common empathy, much sharing much of who we are. We can be friends in that space. We are friends. It’s like the ambiguous and the unambiguous. We share the ambiguities, but we don’t share the unambiguous because we can’t. Because we’re still in colonialism, we’re well and truly entrenched in it. And all the talk and chatter about it makes no difference to the fact that systemically we are in a colonial, um, binary. But there’s still a collaboration. Inevitably, if we look at the painting, we are going to each respond in a different way, not only in how we visually respond, but of course, because we come from completely different visual coordinates or ways of processing that visual information. That’s a cultural thing as well. We speak to each other across those lanes. We yell through the windows. 

[00:21:55] Lisa Gorton: Yeah, it’s a very powerful book. And I think one of the ways in which it’s powerful is the way in which the different memories of family are juxtaposed, so that it’s a way of negotiating this country’s deliberate forgetting, and the way in which certain colonisers family memories can seem lyrical and removed and protected in certain ways, and then set in contrast against those others. There’s a negotiation of memory. I found that really powerful in that work. 

[00:22:29] John Kinsella: This is indexing from my collaborative work with Charmaine Papertalk Green, Art. It came about because I was perusing colonial texts about the apportioning of land in surveys, and I had to consult the index, and I found an amazing agglomeration of reductive terminologies and then started writing the index on indexing.  

Reading “Indexing” by John Kinsella 

[00:25:46] Lisa Gorton: There’s been talk of an Australian poet laureate. How would you want to see that work or what do you feel about it as a concept? 

[00:25:55] John Kinsella: Well, first of all, the relationship between the poet and the state is a very, very problematical one. I say this as someone who has received funding from government organisations and so on. So I’m not inoculating myself against that relationship. But I think in those relationships you at least define what you’re writing and how you write it, and you speak within the context of a broader community. You’ve acquired money from. And I think that relationship is important to understand and to constantly critique. In the case of a poet laureate, I think that the responsibility for whomsoever takes such a position or is offered such a position and takes it up, is that they have to be entirely free to critique the hand that feeds them. Otherwise, you get this just someone being a servant of the colonial state. If you find some rights in it, you’ll find equally or a greater number of wrongs. And the relationship, I think, is an uncomfortable one. I don’t know how a single person can do it, because it seems to me something that requires a lot of voices, but to be the sole representative of a nation, how anyone can do that? I don’t actually know. I wrote an article many years ago about the problems of poet laureates, and how I could never see it working in Australia, if anywhere, because of those contradictions. Um, I’m interested in what you think because I don’t talk about it with people very often. 

[00:27:21] Lisa Gorton: It is intriguing how it can seem to work in other nations, but we have all of us actually such queries about how it could work here. I guess that is because of the sense that it is still a colonial place, with so much that is deliberately forgotten and hidden through Australian amnesia that people don’t really want a voice speaking for other voices. It’s not the epoch for a voice to speak for other voices. It’s the epoch for hearing many voices, maybe. 

[00:27:48] John Kinsella: Yeah. And in a sense, when we write poems, even though we think we’re writing our own views and our own language. We are writing many things, even if we’re working hard not to be appropriative and respectful and all. We’re still using language, which is, you know, constantly changing in flux and so on. I mean, I think that the poet laureateship in Britain, and I think Simon Armitage is a, you know, a good poet, and I think he deeply cares for the environment. But his role as the official poet laureate is irrelevant. Writing bits of propaganda for the royal family and so on is exactly that. It’s, you know, Monachist garbage. I separate that from his action as a poet in America, with the changing Library of Congress kind of situation, you get many different voices. You get articulations of the ongoing colonialism in America, certainly, of the fact that a deeply traumatised space in terms of intersectionality and respect for difference. It’s highly conflicted. And it’s still operating in many ways as a colonial state and an oppressive state. I don’t know these things. I mean, you know, there are different forms of laureates all around the world, too, and they do different things. Of course, in the United States, they also have state laureates in many states. It’s a complex picture, but overall, I think the relationship to authority is the one that needs to be questioned. And poets should be questioning those relationships and not only authority in terms of government, but authority in terms of business or any power structures at all. That can be religion, it can be business, it can be any power structures. You’re thinking about issues of exclusion and inclusivity and so on. These are very complex issues. I don’t know if position can deal with that. 

[00:29:26] Lisa Gorton: It’s interesting. It’ll be a brave poet who takes it on in Australia. John, thank you so much for talking with me about poetry and responsibility. It’s been fascinating. Thank you.  

John Kinsella: My pleasure. 

[00:29:38] Anna Funder: This series is brought to you by Impact Studios at UTS, the Sydney Review of Books with the UTS Writing and Publishing Program, and is produced by Regina Botros. I’m Anna Funder.