27 Dec 2011 04:46:56
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," wrote Shelley in 1821. Now poet John Kinsella, who withdrew from the TS Eliot prize last week over its sponsorship by an investment firm, has laid out his own poetic manifesto, explaining why he believes that a poem "is an active, not a contemplative, entity" which "should channel disobedience".
Describing himself as an anarchist and a pacifist (and a vegan), Kinsella describes in the New Statesman how he practises "'linguistic disobedience' in the hope of bringing about positive social, ethical and political change". The term, he says, means "pushing language to work both in unexpected ways and outside the expected poetic modes of the officially sanctioned", by "speaking out of turn, by disrupting syntax and 'meaning', and by offering comparisons between disparate things".
Disruption is exactly what the Australian poet caused last week when he announced that he was following his fellow poet Alice Oswald in pulling his collection Armour out of the prestigious British poetry award, the TS Eliot prize, because its new sponsor Aurum Fund Management "does not sit with my personal politics and ethics". He is an anti-capitalist, he said, and "hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism".
Kinsella has written about land degradation and intrusive farming in Australia, about the displacement of indigenous people, he says in the New Statesman; he has written protest poetry, highlighting animal rights issues and supporting anti-nuclear campaigns and most recently campaigning against the death penalty. He has even stopped bulldozers knocking down bush land for a development by reading out poems. "Poems can express 'extreme feelings' and still work against violence; this is what most appeals to me about the medium," Kinsella writes. "I try not to write poems of propaganda (though I have written 'rants'!), but ones whose subject matter and language will draw the reader into considering 'issues' without being instructed what to think. Readers are a poem's creators in so many ways, and use the signs as they will. But employing language in unexpected and 'disobedient' ways can jar readers into different modes of consideration, to reflect not only on the themes but on what poetry actually means."
His words echo those of Shelley, written almost two centuries ago in his essay A Defence of Poetry, that "the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry". They also recollect TS Eliot's assertion that "few things that can happen to a nation are more important than the invention of a new form of verse".
But Kinsella points not to Shelley but to Wordsworth, and the great Romantic poet's reflection in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads that poetry "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility". Kinsella disagrees.
"While admiring and understanding him, I've tried to create my poems in situ, outside tranquillity, in the location of the damage that's being done (by land-clearers, rally organisers, the military, miners etc). A poem is an active, not a contemplative, entity for me, and the writing process not merely a retrospective consideration," he writes. "I often call on childhood experience of being on the farm, or staying in mining towns with my father, but never intending nostalgia. Memory belongs to the 'now', and the poet has a responsibility to link the two, to bring positive change and confront the damages done."
