TEACHERS of creative writing will have noticed lately, in a tired way, that an increasing number of would-be writers see no reason why they should bother to read or understand any of the literary traditions they hope to join. For teachers who don't know what to do with student stubbornness of this strange kind, here's some advice: make them read John Kinsella's America (...and The New Arcadia, published by Norton).
These two long poems may bring them a little closer to understanding what it means to be a writer, for both are deeply embedded in the traditions of poetry.
In both these book-length poems, Kinsella has used the literary heritage of poetry as the cornerstone of what he's doing. It's impossible to miss the density, sometimes to saturation, of American writer presence in America ...
America... is haunted by American poets: their beliefs, rhythms, tone. Behind some of these poems you can hear not only the voice of Allen Ginsberg but also the voice of Walt Whitman behind that. Shards of North American history and culture - high, popular and sub - come flying at you like flung fragments of a broken mirror: Nike, Captain Ahab, Johnny Cash, Marianne Moore and the Marx Brothers.
"Why then," asks Peter Porter in an introduction as carefully wrought as the poems he's introducing, "should a lover of America, as John Kinsella obviously is, direct a finely annotated and sculpted tirade against the country he has been living in, on or off, for half a decade?" As one may expect from a "vegan anarchist pacifist of 16 years", much of Kinsella's poem expresses violent repulsion at the values and products and people of the contemporary US.
At the same time, it's clear Kinsella knows and loves the place and embraces much about it that he finds good, not least the history of its music. The result is that some of these poems are violently conflicted to the point, sometimes, of a kind of controlled near-incoherence in which words become objects standing in for, rather than creating, meaning. Elsewhere the words-as-objects technique is used to make meanings that are all too clear, such as the mesmerising, page-long list of Native American nations and tribes.
The small, tightly compressed and condensed units of this poem reflect the density and complexity of material (and other) culture in the US: a pastiche of text, artefact and cultural memory, layered on top of each other at three or four removes, as though you are reading a poem about an essay about a document that records and describes the scraps and chunks of Civil War ordinance, weaponry, equipment and uniforms still being dug up to this day. Kerryn Goldsworthy |
