Welcome to Australian poetry - May 2005

January 18, 2006 Questions of nation and the international are very close to the poetry and criticism of Australian poet, John Kinsella. As an advocate of international regionalism, Kinsella might be considered an ex-patriot in a sharply defined stance against the conceptions of ‘nation’ and ‘patriotism’ formed through boundary and exclusion, of the determination of ‘Australia’ not simply geographically as an island but ideologically. Kinsella sees that it is through the suppression and containment of difference in its various interweaving ethnic, linguistic, racial and cultural forms, that a nation is ‘built’:

Australia is defined as nation not as a sense of people, but as a set of containments, coastline co-ordinates. It suppresses its indigenous people to avoid dissolution of conceptual borders within (or the establishment of a concrete border such as a separate indigenous state within), as it suppresses those who might try to cross into its space without abiding by the rules that define its being. Human rights, human dignity, never have had and never will have anything to do with this equation unless the model of nation itself is questioned, challenged, and changed.

(from Anthologising the Nation)

In recent years, the Howard government has provided ample and all-too real examples of this process of containment and exclusion to be questioned and challenged through its treatment not only of the ‘oldest Australians’, the indigenous population, as Kinsella notes but also the most recent ‘Australians’, the latest tides of refugees, who have been placed in ‘concentration camps’ (cf Macquarie Dictionary) and detained for (an equally heavily weighted word) ‘processing’. If we can see the truth of our contemporary history by paying attention to the words that gather to express it, poets such as Kinsella would argue, change itself might come through an equally careful attention to the words we use to question and challenge that history.

Kinsella comments, “The myths of nation are firmly lashed to monolingualism. So one can have a diverse range of ethnic minorities, yet their power is hedged and contained not only by government policy, but also by circumstances of language. As a poet, I see it as imperative that I undo the strictures of this English, even while working within it. The figurative becomes an agency, a resistance to the rules and regulations that have become a constitution of denial.” This ‘Trojan Horse’ theory is common to many poets currently writing, and equally to their earlier counterparts. A fitting example of Kinsella’s understanding of poetry might in part be given in Mallarmé’s famous comment, “La vraie bombe c’est le livre”, when asked about the spate of Anarchist bombings in Paris toward the end of the nineteenth century. The true bomb is the book.

In this issue of the Australian magazine of Poetry International Web, it’s a pleasure to present work by John Kinsella, Adam Aitken and Jane Gibian. Each of these poet’s distinctive voices brings new challenge to the formation of ‘Australia’ beyond the confines of nation. Kinsella’s work couples fiercely held political ideals and beliefs, with a deeply conceived sense of both land and language. In many of his poems, the pastoral idyll has long been spent, and is set to devour itself:

Outflanked by the sheep run, wild oats
dry and riotous, barbed wire bleeding rust
over fence posts, even quartz chunks
flaking with a lime canker, the theme
chooses itself: ubi sunt motif, but the verse
becomes as deceptive as an idle plough

Aitken’s work is equally a working of and against received determinations of identity and cultural inheritance or accretion. In the febrile first moments of ‘Learning Para-Linguistics’, we are introduced the war as it is waged in poetry:

Hoping to articulate my relation to The Other
downmarket I move,
Swiss hotel hierarchies
shadow-play of Samosir bars.
A German pulls up his socks,
the textile boss smooches his Euro-babe
wide-eyed and learning maritime knots
smiles a lot and tastes his special broth
of chicken tainted lake water.
This is how we do it over here.

Deploying and layering references with more accuracy than a smart bomb, in Aitken’s hands the book becomes fissile material, a revolution underway in both the subject at work in language and language working the subject. In ‘Terra Nullius’, Adam Aitken writes, “You could drive backwards, in reverse, – forever – the road ruled straight and narrow . . .’ and you can almost tune into the “drivetime talk of a national style” which underwrites that long straight road into the ‘sovereign’ and empty-hearted past.

Jane Gibian’s poetry offers a sense of consolation and well-measured reflection on the collusions of language and the world. Never quite political, Gibian’s voice vitrifies the world, so that its edges appear more sharply defined, almost dreamlike for their intensity, and for the way the eye is drawn to things as to the vanishing points of consciousness, all with a humour eye-catching and sharp as broken glass:

You hunt for modern equivalents
of One hundred ways with mince
and watch his hand become
refined under its wedding ring,
the fingers longer and nails less bitten

He coaxes your shoulders straight,
uncurling them with firm hands

but you were merely bent over
with laughter

Through the ‘Australian’ pages of Poetry International Web, it has been my aim to give a glimpse of the diversity of voices, politics and poetics that form ‘Australian’ poetry currently. Each of the poets in the current issue challenge monolingualism and a centred sense of self and equally the place in which that self dwells. Such challenges destabilise the way we perceive and draw into relation with the world, opening our world as a question, often without a clear answer beyond another question. In each of these poet’s works, you will find moments in which the self – and equally ideas such as ‘nation’ – is given up to the influx of language as much as the experience of the world. The beauty of many of these poems is that they show that it is not in the moment of containment and exclusion that identity is formed but in the ongoing creation of relation, the loss of identity through the welcoming of difference, the challenges of the negative, and the affirmation of the other.