Tag: John Kinsella

Uses of Knowledge/Data/Detail in Writing and Reading

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by John Kinsella I’ve always loved ‘data’, though I am sceptical of how it is sourced and utilised. This re-engineered novel I’ve been talking about over recent weeks, Morpheus, is a book stuffed with data, yet aims to be a challenge to the ‘empirical’; the data of ‘learning’ — from school, the first year or two of university, private reading and even (scientific) researching. While writing Morpheus, I was studying and occasionally working in my own home lab, complete with Mettler balance, Bunsen burners, titration equipment and micro ground-jointed organic glassware, including Liebig condensers and even a Friedrichs condenser, and…

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I’ll tell you a story

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by John Kinsella I possess two items from my childhood. Both are books. Somehow I have held on to these through the upheavals of my life, including having twice sold vast collections of books to support my various needs (and long-past addictions) twenty and more years ago. When I did my last big ‘sell-off’ in the early nineties, I managed to hang on to my early J. H. Prynne Poems and a few signed collections of poetry as well, but that’s about it. I occasionally run into people who remark that they own books containing dedications from writers to me.…

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The Eternal Work-in-Progress

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by John Kinsella, Writing Morpheus in my late teens went hand-in-hand with a fascination on my part 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, The Cantos. I have a strong scepticism of Pound these days, but he convinced me, along with Olson’s Maximus Poems and Zukofsky’s ‘A’, that anything we write is inevitably part of what…

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Rereading

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John Kinsella At the age of fifty, I am rereading books I first read when I was in my mid-to-late teens. These are the books I was reading when I wrote my novel Morpheus which, after thirty years and various acts of reconstruction to cover the lacunae of  lost chunks of manuscript, is about to be published. Reading was the most essential referent in the creation of this 400-page ‘text’, and, in going through copy-edits and then proofs, I thought it would be a self-enlightening process to revisit the works that ‘informed’ my late-teenage writing process. Of course, there were…

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April blogger – John Kinsella!

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Thank you, Peter Minter, for your wonderful posts last month. This month, our blogger is John Kinsella. His bio is below: John Kinsella’s many volumes of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011), Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012) and The Jaguar’s Dream (Alma/Herla, 2012). His recent book of stories is In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012). His novel Morpheus will be published in a couple of months by BlazeVox. He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. He is poetry editor for Island magazine.

South Countries: John Kinsella, J.S. Harry

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It is cold, deepest cold, the lake frozen as far as the eye can see, which is not so far because there is also mist, low and heavy, a twilight mist, swept, as if it came from an endless plain, a vast tundra, by an icy blast, constantly changing, constantly the same. And semi-darkness. Hardly a soul in sight, if you can call them souls, although there is perhaps nothing else that they can be called. The sense of them, rather than the presence, a track worn by footsteps across a ridge of ice, mud mixed into it, making the…

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Long Paddock for Southerly 70.1: Golden Tongues

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Southerly 70.1 is available to purchase here. This link will take you to our old GumRoad storefront (an external site). Remaining issues will be moved to our own site, here, soon. TRANSLATION FEATURE JORGE PALMA (Uruguay) Five Poems, trans. Peter Boyle  PABLO DE ROKHA (Chile) from Circle, trans. Stuart Cooke JULES SUPERVEILLE (France) Forest, The Secret Sea, trans. John Kinsella MILA KAČIČ (Slovenia) Three poems, trans. Bert Pribac and David Brooks VRASIDAS KARALIS On Translating Cavafy’s Peculiar Greek: the Aesthetics of Ungrammatical Sentences* FICTION Tarek Dale, Belief’s Threnody POETRY Ken Bolton, Kirkman Guide to the Bars of Europe Peter Boyle,…

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Long Paddock for Southerly 69.1: Animal

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Where dwells the animal in Australian thought? The vast majority of that thought goes not to consideration of the species barrier, or to matters of animal cruelty and animal rights, but to the marketing of animal products. Yet certain Australians have been at the forefront of animal rights issues in recent times – Peter Singer, J. M Coetzee, David Malouf, A. D. Hope, J. S. Harry and others. This issue includes stimulating contributions from Dominic Hyde on Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood, major figures in the critique of anthrocentrism; Helen Tiffin on Peter Goldsworthy; and essays by Yvonne Smith on…

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Long Paddock for Southerly 68.3: Double Exposures

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Southerly 68.3 is available to purchase here (Digital Edition). This link will take you to our old GumRoad storefront (an external site). Remaining issues will be moved to our own site, here, soon. ESSAYS Andrew Game, Crossing Intercultural Boundaries: The Reception of Paul Wenz in Australia and France John Hawke, Post-Symbolism: James McAuley and A. D. Hope John Kinsella, A Neurotic Reading of C. J. Brennan’s “The Wanderer” Tracy Ryan, “The living hyphen”: France and Australia in two novels by Marion May Campbell David Wells, A. D. Hope and the Poetics of Acmeism REVIEWS Craig Billingham, of Michael Brennan, Unanimous…

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