The place of reading: the geographical context of (re)reading The Jindyworobaks and self – from Schull to an imaginary Australia

1. I picked up a copy of Brian Elliot’s volume The Jindyworobaks 1 in a second-hand bookshop in Skibbereen. I am thrilled to have it as much as I detest (most of) the values of the ‘Jindys’ – I find it useful and generative re-encountering them ...

Storage

Another batch of our ‘stuff’ (books, papers, kitchen items, clothes etc.) collected from the storage lock-up in Skibbereen where we placed all we had in Ireland while we were away and between rentals. Everything wrapped in plastic against the dust. In the boxes are our poetry manuscripts-in-progress, in a bizarre state of non-being. In the process of their unwrapping, their disinterring, there is something over-invested and painfully private. They’re not ...

Irredentism

In the context of ‘Putin’s Russia’ (which it is not!) annexing the Crimea, the word ‘Irredentism’ is being bandied about. According to the Guardian newspaper of the 28/03/2014 in an article by Luke Harding, ‘Talbott was referring to the doctrine that a country is entitled to control areas or territories outside its borders to which it has an ethnic or historical claim. The word comes from the Italian for unredeemed – ...

More ‘ways of seeing’

2.15 pm Day was foggy until 11-ish, then haze set in. Sun out now. Did the same walk as yesterday but with Tracy and it was terrific. One looks in different ways when walking and conversing with someone close. The furze was erupting – both the ‘western gorse’ and the regular gorse – the longer-thorned and shorter-thorned varieties....

Auguste Lacaussade

Le Réunion has become a significant point in my lived geography (and that of my family). It is an island of diverse cultures and heritages, and in all discourse and life on the island the spectre and reality of its history of slavery is present. The affirmation of identity of those people with slave heritage and the crimes committed in the name of the French state (and financial gain in itself) make of the island a memorial place, a place of warning of the evils of colonial displacement and profiteering, as well as an affirmation of the strength of individuals and communities to overcome such traumatic origins. This remarkable (geologically young) island with its semi-tropical volcanic and mountainous habitats, its isolated cirques, its vibrant Creole language, its religious and ethnic diversity, and its pluralism ‘wrestling’ with the notion (and reality) of the French state, makes for a remarkable history of polysituatedness in poetry and literature in general....

The eternal work-in-progress

Writing Morpheus in my late teens went hand-in-hand with my fascination for long, cumulative works of poetry. In Morpheus, through the character of Thomas, I was subtextually mapping possible approaches to creating the work-in-progress, with its echoes of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Also, though I despised him politically, like many of the ‘left’ I felt intrigued and compelled by Ezra Pound’s unfinishable life-work, ...

Anti-‘craft’ in the context of Western capitalist cultures

There’s a major issue around notions and terms such as ‘craft’. I am concerned with the way ‘craft’ in present discourse is a mode and articulation of reactionary constraint, and fear of innovation, and embodies a pro-aesthetics control (I am anti ‘aesthetics’) over how we see and experience. It mediates experience, gives it a setting and validates it through rule-compliance to fit a world order that has long suppressed liberty and fairness....

Living with Moondyne Joe: Points De Repère

for Niall Lucy When the ticket-of-leave convict Joseph Bolitho Johns escaped the Toodyay West lock-up in 1861, his history as ‘Moondyne Joe’ began, though the nickname came later. The location name ‘Moondyne’ probably came from a coloniser/settler re-pronunciation of a Whadjuk Noongar place name. Moondyne is near Julimar Brook where Johns had set up his horse cage in the bush, where he’d originally trapped the ‘clean-skin’ horse and marked it with his own brand that led to his first colonial (re)incarceration and that first escape of 1861. This escape certainly encouraged the building of the Newcastle Gaol (which was to become the Toodyay Gaol), a building of stone, wood and metal which is now a popular tourist destination in Toodyay, often associated with the bushranger probably more than it should be....

For beauty’s sake

Poetry is so often less about ‘Art’ and more about ‘activism’ than many like to think. The poem that captures a glimpse of ‘nature’, or human loss, or reconstitutes a family memory through an object found while going through the belongings of a deceased relative, might seem to be little to do with activism but everything to do with art. That is, to do with the art of compacting, containing and adding ‘depth’/layering/nuance to an idea so it creates conduits into other ways of seeing – creating the poem-object. But for me, rather than the ‘artiness of art’, I am interested in the poem’s potential for resistance, not its compliance with a status quo, not as the production of what will become an ...

Redefining or maybe replacing ‘place’: towards a theology of presence? consequences and responsibility

and the place has become part of us. Nettie Palmer (from Fourteen Years) I have an intense dissatisfaction with the word ‘place’ and its definitions, as it applies to presence, location and spatiality when it is used outside poetic texts, and even, on occasion, if used ‘uncritically’ within poems. Though maybe it’s impossible for ‘place’ to be used uncritically within a poem: a poem displaces language from its standard and ‘user-friendly’ contexts, and applies pressure to all words and their frameworks. The act of the poem leads us to question, whatever the intention of the poet. But is this in itself adequate? To question is not necessarily to act; to wonder is not necessarily to respond in a pragmatic, activist way....