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John Kinsella

A selection of poems

These poems were first published in various issues of Jacket magazine.

Graphology 108

In the gallery, he realised
there was nothing but sound: all sight
rang in his ears, and all colour
tasted like his own blood in his mouth.
Passing, even idling away the time,
it was visceral: elemental  the swirl, or slight negligence
of penumbra, so many chiming planets
on the walls. He called, “curatorial!” and guards
eyed him curiously, a jagged glint of pink birds
sounding grey in the building’s tree harmonies,
wavering and stilled as fountain ripples,
a monograph at the city’s centre.
Tyres’ rapid sticky friction; the nearness of people
whispering, slightly gesticulating. Parse. Sarcoidal.
The flushing of a toilet. All were loud, too loud
to fix technique.


Graphology 111

“It wasn’t a rock
It was a rock lobster.”
                    — The B52s

I thought it was a mallee fowl
but it was a banded plover,
bush too thin to sustain the mound,
to hide out from kids eroding undergrowth,
winter-wood robbing, horses working inwards
from firebreaks; but it looked like one — pictures,
maybe one I saw further north as a kid also,
it looked like one though was probably a banded plover,
a faint resemblance at best: a malley fowl,
a modernist hiccup in the bush
that we grow poetically fat on, fat on the cats
shredding small birds in lower branches,
fat on salt runnels around the trunks,
fat on the shotgun fox lancing
out to houses, fat on poison baits
and weeds that also move inwards, escaping
sort of, pure concentration of herbicides.
It’s predictable, and this linear poetry is as expected
as the southerly ripping into the valley;                         sock glyph Jonah,
oh word as excited as                                                              sock glyph Jonah

mountain and the sweat hike powder chiropodist playing canasta samba
unfolding of the table

sock glyph Jonah

fucking whale of a mountain from the right angle, and we love it for it
for obscene libel at common law
for the stone that walks
a hanging over, a garden, a break-away, an abbey
dynamically: I should have gone out when my cousin, using old machinery,
put in the crop: 180 acres in that spot, should have looked back to the wheel,
to the cut-up, towing the line;
                                                    nickel cadmium  nicad, NI-CD, nikad, norad, nike
                                                    to leak and irritate and a third of a swimming pool,
rechargeable, and the choice of seed-typing, seeing them out,
the mallee fowl,
so territorial
so leipoa ocellata : our words, as
                                  astringent


Graphology 112

All borders down, tongues fused,
delight saline — it can be like that, manically
denying nation at borders, the SSSS boarding pass
gleaned in the rural cliché; prepping the bowel
or watching 21 Grams again, Naomi Watts busting
out of the shadow of her friend (really),
screaming her way into talent; motels,
time-space conduits, and euro-bureau cafe poetics,
default, English the result.


Graphology 114

Singer, it’s not whether the horse feels pain it’s the slapping
it that matters — leave the animal alone,
it’s not your sex toy. The blue emollient of winter
says that water will bring down bio-diversity;
no scaremongering says the engineer.

You can be Halal and Kosher and observe lean days
and follow Buddha and not eat animals... the fog has lifted here
and ploughing and seeding is coming to an end.
Costello says three children are good:
one for dad, one for mum, one for country.

An orange tree went into the bank yesterday;
white ants are annexing another York gum — mud
annex on the trunk, expanding proportionally
at the base; reading the I Ching will not make the bucket
sing — bright ideas nearer the equinox.

The prime minister insists all schools raise the flag
if they want funding; herbicide ads on regional television
show a flasher shocking weeds to death; John’s out there
scraping the firebreaks — it’s better that way.
A memo: the president condones torture.


Graphology 115: Hobbies?

Astronomy without a telescope;
Theology and teleology without a belief system
and a belief in an idea of God without any of the above;
constructing illuminated books with no more than a black & red
typewriter ribbon in an Olivetti Lettera 32, reading Stendhal
by way of remembering; playing
electronic chess and then getting it to play itself
when the solution is merely semantic;
no eating — ever; time-sharing contemplations
of what might have been, thoroughly enjoying the waste of time
which people assume for me is an oxymoron or an absolute truth,
happy mediums by the wayside, falling like manic
confetti: the sweat pain of Adonais; the tongue-ties
tend not to speech, hasta la vista, bonsoir
it is evening at noon, and the rocks I like are mercifully
in the ground, it being closer between Northam
and York than you’d think.


Graphology 116: Pre- Composition

The tornado siren runs roughshod
over domestic and public peace
every Friday

tornadoes have shattered
counties    towns    of neighbouring states

given the possibility, and despite the hills here,
it would be testing fate
to complain



The neo-conservatives have a system
of politeness and intimidation

the rain heavy — that front coming through slate blue
just prior dawn, as airmail heads of state,
Machin stamp insinuations
run against the straight edge,
the rainbow parks    we rely on mail here,
but it’s only one option



House finch, spread this red as red only
anneals the garden, lopped-off asparagus
spears, this machination

known as Hollywood finch, a depression sale that spreads
along the river, as if makeshift might leak
and raccoon skins hang drip dry
close to the road: hey, here
nothing is explained! inside, deep shag-pile carpets



Pre-emptive, this first amendment
they kind of like to have but equally
would like not to have; these haves
and have-nots. Like Cadillacs.


Twin neck-rings of the killdeer, plover:
heavy vehicles have bitten fields during downpours,
chewed them up, chewed up their


                          apodal notes.

Living Conditions. Cambridge

This flat is said to mirror
the last one we occupied. It’s not 4,
the previous or earlier flat was 7,
the poisoned flat, the one
with the fuming glacier
of a wasp’s nest in the wall cavity,
a vast horizon fermenting in the ceiling.
It was a sad case but not the case now.
I urge towards Wittgenstein’s grave,
just behind here and there.
No other grave does this to me.
The walk to the library
is variable: pipeworks, clay-sludge
back-hoed, chewed out
beneath the road surface.
The Thatcher papers
will be housed without humility,
alongside those of Churchill.
Donors have been generous.
The alleyways are bordered
by annuals — lush, green.
Overcast, morning strains towards humidity.
Flat 4 is not a repetition or reproduction
or even mimicry of flat 7.
Convolution of bird noise,
same floor plan, same light frames,
but the depth isn’t there.
Out by about two feet or sixty centimetres
if we’re thinking euros. Looking
into the rooms, we see our actions
from before, when we weren’t
so happy. We are okay here —
a baby is forming, space
textually uncertain
but realigned. The damp
can’t get in because the world
is sealed off, in its own liquid.
People don’t realise that
in the middle of the old town
there’s a reactor: it carries
its own silent poison,
and the grace of it is clear.


Cambridge Morning Meditation

What we know is nothing of these instruments
set to porcine light, or tacked against domes
and covertones, scaline frosts that temper

nitre and satellites and systems that guard
their honours, making them ours. In here, this lowland,
a highlight aerials against the plane, as if density

of our intras and conversations suggests
nodes and trip wires; I take the line that fencing
traces feuds and fear: a forest edge condensed

to hedgerow, a lining up of the dead.
How porous is the stone that shelters them,
prayers drained to drinking water, wells

the machinery of hearing, hammer-call —
that bird we can’t identify? Rote and rived,
penitent as listening, mowers

and their drivers insist the air is colour:
as spiked greens sport flags and boundaries,
and councils levitate on postcodes.


The leaden light

The leaden light
is almost blue
but taint won’t cross
meniscus of belief,
the apples flung
from that tree, high winds
in building projects,
and we’re back to illustrations
crackling on datelines;
prophetic or narrative
the chapel outlined
for a funeral, radio telescope
primed for arrivals: I will take up that offer
to visit with the astronomer,
scratch and pass through the place
that burns up debris.


moral poetry in cambridge...

tight cloisters in the runaround,
so close, steam comes down in sheets
and is cold settling in mornings,
the quiet raged out and cameras
scanning infra-red taxonomy:
a cutting from milton’s mulberry tree,
location uncertain. as if to be here
the gridwork must template
retrospectively: in the gallery
warhol hangs easily,
hanging the same elsewhere,
like byzantine iconography,
like claims for moral poetry
while Huntingdon Life Sciences
demystifies the colon:
global accrescence: seen and read
by the interested, but seen and read
nonetheless. sparks fly
as fire rolls through the hills
down south — another country —
the language lost —
tree stands and rare species —
a particular nomenclature
that industrialists of ethics
might not care for.
they read the manifestos
of repressed peoples,
they paddle between
island states of learning —
repositories of quidity
and translation, as hackt & hewd,
as if such vse they hated.
but hey, I’m you’re here too,
an outed protagonist — lover (inter alia),
of Caro, all block-headed
and squeezed amidst the ‘ugly’
architecture that flows
with light, where social activity
is scant and prayers leased.

Locating the ensign normative on the questboat
of inner mappings, survey betoken, the flock
beknights the leader; split lupins, so enriched
they triple protein, as upwind predators
gurgle in their juices. Situate the predicate,
distil sand filters, oil patches where sumps
have dumped their turgid loads, where it’s
not quite happy for journalists  —   that’s where
they madethe Aborigines. Corrugations, Boolean,
iron and galvanising, bedevilled in sutures
as down cycle, or business in speech, as if licenses
or feathers, good eating a deployable, a summons
or magnetic. Corporate, modelled in the model of,
modality and detainees, to keep the envelope
pure; all waves confer against the next
though come in sets, and the king wave lifting
out of nowhere, by far the biggest. It links
coastals and whale soundings with fingers and combs
of John Deere platforms. No respect, they enslave
as collective  —   single mass of categories,
whipper snippers on council edges, cutting down
to median strips, testing radars just outside
the station, the 40k in-town limit. This property,
permissions legal and moral, siphoning petrol
on pre-unleaded cars, stopcocks in sheep
watering troughs, the length of barbed wire
and odd echidna on the fringe of language.
The French were almost here, in force; primo-
geniture, this periodic tabulation of rare earths
and growth rates, the university letting infantile
eureka and big buck visions through considerable
holes in the wire, like old crank telephones
and local exchange. Barrier comedown on the home
trading range, with confidence, with bluster,
this corner of property, 1861, good stone
despite the trouble: family: Cornwall,
Scotland, Ireland, London. The city as country,
siting ownership as event horizon, trial and consequence
the mesh and tribute; kin and cure, constructing
social ills, devouring science fiction nervous
in the ancient outhouse. They wipe on newspaper.
The print pollutes the fissures. A Nyoongah friend
says they speak within the family, and family
is always someone else’s, as well as memory.
Personal and shared, this continual habitation, Hansard
and despair. Lipservice counts like letters to the paper,
with their colour photos of teenage prostitutes.
Readers await the coming of the demagogue,
the harbinger of prejudice. Damn her! And damn
archaeology and anthropology and the oily wash
from the Avon River; slip clutch, vee belt, running
rough as guts, as long as it takes to cross the crop
stepping gingerly, or ripping-it-up in the ute,
flat-tack bashing the shit out of the shockies,
always a target. We have permission to cross,
multiple orders, letters of approval, up to the mountain,
footheld on ridges, marking time the native grasses.
Scientific name... approbation of guilt, or to collect
chunks of childhood preserved as faded everlastings,
protected now. Clods of clay, resinous soil,
currents freed up in the rock-picked basin,
pools of sediment, and wells as eyelets
like old campfires ringed with conversation,
as if it could all be reconstituted. Here, sanctuary
is a division within division, say quarter or half
a hectare, even an acre. Rarely on the roadside
the dead kangaroo, that twenty years ago
made roo bar ‘essential’ equipment.
At the gateway, rabbits dig into soft banks,
just beginnings. Down past rail lines
lights even-out across town, streetlights intense, macro-
engagements with darkness  —   for the protection
of citizens and properties. Courthouse.
Flyscreens. Early photographs. Dartboards.
The various dreams to be had at intervals
through seasonal labours, muddy boots, socks
and shirts shot with haycarting, that slick of residue
from all applications deemed necessary  —   pastoral
paranoia barely wreaks havoc in the working
habits of the city, or the foothills. Number plates.
In the breakup, the centre piece went to the least
land hungry, who sold it at a profit to the most
land hungry, so they’ll be not getting it back
if fortunes improve. Centrifugal, topsoil
climbing up fenceposts, last of the hardwood,
genetic material barely stable, uprights in the crown,
as families lose touch during periods of intensive
sunspot activity. Caught between obligations
and permissions, bands become belts inside the body,
rusty engine cavity. Provenance. Tenure. Landfill.

for Kenneth Koch

Suffering from amnesia I don’t recognise
my friends or family, and I guess
it’s plausible you were a close buddy
in my other life, but then, if you can’t recall
knowing me, I guess you’ve got the same problem
or someone’s pulling my leg. Another friend
— apparently — tells me, even insists
that I had sex with a prominent
politician on at least a dozen occasions,
and though suited men with earpieces
declare it never happened,
that I’d better be wary of cracks
in the pavement, I like to wonder!
I’m told I had a bad habit of bragging
at cocktail parties after dragging the tone down
with straight brandies, and at public bars
after a few bloody marys. But I’ve only
got his word for it, and since I can’t remember
bars or cocktail parties, I can’t follow up
effectively, though I do ask randomly —
those unfamiliar faces, even blank faces,
that appear before me, confront me, with “Hey,
remember me...?” — and I do systematically
work my way through photograph albums
and old correspondence but have found no trace
of a subtextual or subversive history.
Someone said I should reconstruct
identity through the credit cards
I carry. It worked, up to a point.
I learnt that while I am not wealthy
vast amounts of credit are available to me —
the same friend says this is more to do with poverty
than good standing or a sound financial record;
bad debts repaid slowly and agonisingly
over a long period would account for a high credit rating.
I can fly around the world on a platinum card
twenty times over if I want, and join
the legions of the unpaying, of the life-debtors
reminiscing over their big fling before cutting the card
into the bin. Platinum isn’t as strong as the market
would have us think. I also discovered my
mother’s maiden name, my birth date,
and the date I expire, or my dreams
of action and fulfilment might come to an end.
I learnt that I went for Mastercard over Visa,
that I must have eaten out regularly
as my Diner’s Club was booked up to the hilt.
I drew on the platinum to put that right.
I assume marriage, as another card has my surname
but with a female Christian name, unless I’m
into fraud, which is possible. No woman
has put her hand up. I meant to ask at the bank
about that one but left it, my wardrobe full of dresses —
nice evening dresses, little black numbers, pant-suits.
Amnesia might come from a blow
to the head or deep emotional trauma,
a shock so great the mind shuts down
to preserve the body. No physical injury
can be detected, so I guess it’s a matter
of not pushing my luck, and enjoying
a life without a past. To me, it’s definitely not a case
of remembrance of things or the more things change
the more they remain the same, but your voice
is familiar, and furthermore, your name
is written all over my books...

Vaporised skin cells, almost,
drop sheet, not the sweat
of the wheatbelt, though grain
is grown out on the fens.

Pulls together the particles
that won’t reconcile, liminal
syntax composed of sleep-
residue — linnets becoming

rarer, the poison, the top-dressing.
Fog, and what it covers up.
Swing high, swing low, the chatter
of the linnet growing rarer.

The fog is the ur-body,
the texture is flesh or a feather.
Which? The murky strains,
the classic banter: rarer, rarer.

In the Parish of Ascension,
up All Souls Lane, tucked away
burial plan and nettles
absent, a disagreement
with cold space this visible
reality:
picture its form: on the other side
of the sentence, logical dulled stone
with name and life-range,
flat as . . . no celebration . . . 
snug or uncomfortable
in the tightly packed plot
plot 5, row D, almost passed over
as you sightsee, weaving
in the frost-glaze and suncut
of midwinter, alone
with no one to speak . . . of, to . . . 
as if you could be there too,
a description and a municipal fact,
to say unordered thoughts
aren't protracted, a discernible
condition, quietly
to propose blackbirds
so much louder

for Robert Adamson

And suddenly there was a presence,
as if it were worth something,
the pylons sticking up out of the water
like busted bones out of flesh.

A waterbird landed but didn't make
much of an impression - a damp squib
by comparison - though a couple
of old timers couldn't take their

eyes off it. Bloody voyeurs
somebody muttered, and the bird,
as if taking offence on their behalf,
lifted and vanished into the confident

glow of the poem, the crowd
encrypting itself into the scene's
diffident colouration, troughed
and crested like the hum of the current.

for John Forbes

A brown-shouldered kite’s plunge
mimics the deep hum of a high voltage
powerline in damp weather, its angular
flight pinpointing departure
on the dam’s curved wall. The science
we have learnt to mistrust
lurks smugly behind steel-plated doors,
our safety resting surreally
in its neo-classical charms,
while a bomber with a swollen stomach
approaches at low altitude
and you mutter under your breath
‘everyone that fucks up gets shot down’.

for John Ashbery

Interphase, cross-over, fringe exchange,
collusion or conversion, absorption or rejection,
counterpoint over peat beds and spreads
of chalk, or sandy perimeters that run with the wind
or collude with pads of concrete marked out
in fields of neglected sheep and decrepit horses,
the RSPCA rolling past daily, building up their case
against an eccentric who won’t leave the house
to look after her charges - contractors
moving closer and closer with a circular utterance
as if the Song of Solomon were pure pastoral,
as if resolution did not compare itself to a steel trap,
the mind of the songster busy as a bee on the outskirts
of redress, where summer sits in lush shade - gravitas
of fossil fuel hanging close about, issuing wreaths
to naked Fellows who might invade King’s College Chapel
to act out some drunken rite they call Sentimental
Gesture to a Great Tradition, a recasting of progress!
Might be a photo somewhere - honest, Theocritus!

Two poems by John Ashbery and five poems by John Kinsella, written in response to the poems of Ern Malley, appeared in the special Hoax issue of Jacket magazine, number 17, June 2002. John Kinsella’s Introduction and five poems are published below.

Introduction, by John Kinsella

The ‘Malley’ poems that come via John Ashbery and myself, in this selection, are part of a longer work-in-progress that will be released by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in book form. My texts derive from ‘starting points’ within Malley poems and / or the original texts that the deadly duo — McAuley and Stewart — ravaged for words / ideas, their own ‘starting points’. Various living authors are alluded to or sublimated.
      At the time of writing one or two of these, John Ashbery had faxed through to me a couple of his pieces — there may consequently be a sense of ‘response’ in one or two of my poems included here. There is most certainly a dialogue in all of the pieces with John Ashbery's ‘voice’. I also have a number of letters and emails from that inception period (a couple of years ago) to ‘deflect’ from John’s take on this discovery that Ern sought to speak through us. I am not sure why this happened, but maybe we’re both receptive to Ern-like poets struggling to be heard from across the great divide. I know I spend my time listening closely for such voices from limbo.
      John Ashbery has been working within his own time frame and space on these / ‘his’ texts. However, we did discuss via email the sense of Ern speaking ‘via’ us (I think this was John’s expression) — maybe a bit like Merrill’s ouija board approach! (my expression).

Aural Palette Yelp

Truncated, I switch a lock of grass
against the dominant posterior,
I twitch beneath a sun dark with smog
and pixels, I incite art-attacks in monument parks,
and make selection when squatters
turn their backs; understand this
my crepuscular love, as if I might
get your mood just right, these blowsy
gardens, transposed avenues. In tight pants —
stovepipes — you angle towards
my aural palette, and I hear your yelp,
cur-like, choked with crows and light.


cloven

Rigid inspector of my colossal yearnings:
winged building — my soul — set free
of its lamentable architecture,
withering sails or shells skipping
across the break. They leap here, and there,
and it’s just newsprint in the local paper,
all doused in the weedy depths your hair:
kri kri kri, where nobody will hear.
“That tawny desert,” the poet crooned,
encomiums of global geistig,
protean tears in personae: Villon
and Beatrice, “totalmente,” the Spaniard
says, thinking in Italian.


Dark Eclipse

It all started with uprightness,
this tendency to startle despite
a drift to the left: I waggle
in surplice schematics
criss-crossing the circuit boards
declaring diodes reborn,
come again in a silicon world.
Don’t you want me
for my Gary Cooper nose?

Ah, Lilies of the Valley
that draw me up
by the short and curlies, popeye muscles
Scipio once admired, before some ol’ bloke
retired. Spittle of Apollo, Maevius’s scriptic tune,
a bloodtest pushed through the maiden’s drawers.
I read him like a book on the smooth beach.
I betray not, the glory of unsettled usage,
the quatch-buttock. Suffer my command
in this, your period of duty — dressed up
in hose and flaunting imperial shoes.

Thrust in these damned wound-holes,
counteract my guest-host:
Ah, what’s chivalry come to? Stop start,
gone to wars: attacking Frederick the Great.
The regular exception of night surprise:
mall survey, that propitious ray,
proximity of fame and name.
I was here, looking for you,
wind-thrummelled and all at sea
in my heavily starched sailor suit.


Careerism gone mad verging on hubris

The heckles crowed on the beach
Sauntering about like haphazard amorists,
Stylish flotsam and jetsam, having
None of the perpetrators’ emotion.
Human condition, cymbals
And Golden Fleece service stations,
M’dear surfing those breakers,
The silly sirens, as bright as the zodiacs
Rushing in behind bright lights.
Whipping up projects like grains of sand,
Befuddling colloquial rhetoricians
And humdingers from Melbourne:
The brass, the polish, exhaust from hotdoggers.


loy polloi love song

Commodious hosiery, that I tie
my white lies by, that I graft
to the bee with its pollen-shedding
undergarments; ah, flower farm
and laced integer, that by quotidians
of ten I mark profit, industry
I faithfully subscribe as Valhalla,
the hidden signature, the miracle
of the hole in the wall,
the popular art of thrust and shell-holes,
not scattered to industry. I love,
love out of reservoirs of ruby
and cybernauts, superculture
hand-held like the (s)trumpet-
attested waves of quietness,
that I — in my lair — hold out
against, auxiliary hairs
festooning velocipedes,
gibbets, labial undertakings.

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