The Anthropocene Lyric

An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place

Tom Bristow

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137364753
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book takes the work of three contemporary poets John Burnside, John Kinsella and Alice Oswald to reveal how an environmental poetics of place is of significant relevance for the Anthropocene: a geological marker asking us to think radically of the human as one part of the more-than-human world.

1

Jam Tree Gully

Abstract: I argue that emphases on personal, felt experiences in John Kinsella’s Jam Tree Gully enact the simultaneous writing of habitat and pained husbandry in the WA landscape; it is a strategy that delimits the ethical grounds from which we can think of our limited pacts with others. This entails observing Kinsella’s relationship between ideas and things, referents in the landscape scene of domesticity and community, before gesturing towards a renewed sense of empathy and pragmatism for the Anthropocene.

Keywords: empathy; habitat; husbandry; John Kinsella; pragmatism

Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0004.

Pastoral in the specific case of Australia is twofold – a construct to recreate European, specifically English, rural power structures, the reconfiguring of ‘home’ in an alien landscape. Such landscape-usage comes out of a politics of oppression and degradation of indigeneity. A new pastoral must come out of this that re-examines what constitutes the rural space and how that is mediated. (Kinsella and Stewart, 2003, p. 12)

The internationally renowned ecological poet, John Kinsella, polarises the academic community and his public. His work is a political project fusing ethics and poetics, drawing reader and critic into heated debates and the emotional terrains of environmental crisis. His works are unrelenting in their pursuit for an honest literary witness of landscape in the aftermath of colonial practices and in the context of neo-colonial policies. To enter into the intellectual terrain of Kinsella’s world, more anarchic than recalcitrant, is to make a commitment to confronting the complexities of writing in our age, simultaneously critiquing and reaching out to the community at large.

Jam Tree Gully is the first volume in a trilogy that records the difficulties of ethically settling a piece of land in the fragile bioregion of Western Australia, part of the Southwest Australian savannah ecoregion.¹ The conflict between urban attitudes and bush culture, distilled into the incommensurable values of environmentalism and agrarian development, provides a suitable political backdrop and aesthetic foreground to Kinsella’s exploration of pastoral. The collection invokes a diaristic precision of attention to the micro, but with equal interests in global cultural contexts and an individuated perceiving consciousness, it is warped by a particular paranoia: that of repeating past (European) human practices – literary and agricultural – and of the present impact of our words and deeds in the context of habitats modified by climate change, invasion ecologies and blindness to indigenous cultures.

Kinsella meditates on the question of how to be involved in all that is around us while allowing the world its own expression. The collection’s merit lies in its emphasis on witnessing the location, which is inscribed through an ethical distance and an emotional modality ‘in situ’. Planetary and local simultaneously, much like the geographic location; the volume is a site for all these questions and paradoxes to play out.

Affective geography: a preface

The physical location ‘Jam Tree Gully’ is not immediately present in the collection. Humans taking leave of the city, crossing its borders into an elsewhere, delimit the location of concern in space. As with classical pastoral, home does not begin to exist without a rupture to one’s conception of settlement, without journeying and movement. The dwelling place comes into being through the arrival of a family withdrawing from urban surroundings and purposively and delicately integrating themselves into an environment that comes into view before them, slowly. Wind blows through the valley at night; fire lights the day, the figures are set in vibrant, flickering chiaroscuro. A moody and at times paranoiac pen and ink landscape unhurriedly coloured by an emergent poetics of identity eventually develops into a series of short lyrics delimited by a sustained poetic voice of the observing surveyor of the land.

To be in place, we learn, is to be in dialogue with the space one inhabits and to be sensitive to time past and time future. This is to be engaged in the fullest of senses; it is to be occupied. The poem’s eye in every line of this collection is occupied with its work, as if pastoral (literature and husbandry) are at one equal practices and yet inappropriate and perhaps even unethical. The genre is European in heritage; Jam Tree Gully’s expansive agricultural space is dry, dusty and deadly owing to the continuing clearing of native forests that began in the nineteenth century. The land and its conditions subsequently occupy stanzas within a confrontationally blunt politics of engagement. In one sense the land decolonises the (inherited) literary space by pressing upwards from the soil of Jam Tree Gully; from its inhabitants, flora and fauna, the properties of climate, and the relations between things. All these invite new ways of considering the question of location and common ground. This decolonised sense of ‘occupation’ is shot through with conflicted emotions as the politics of territorialisation and property ownership loom in every poem.²

* * *

I want to be sensitive to the gully’s cultural history and its particular capacities to afford a home to the Ryan and Kinsella family, which brings to light daily pragmatic challenges of settling their block of land under increasing ecological pressure. The location speaks explicitly of destroyed landscapes, the loss of sacred sites, toxic pastoral and climate change. The first section of this chapter argues that the emphasis on personal, felt experience in Jam Tree Gully enacts the making of habitat underscored with the song of environmental destruction coupled with a pained husbandry in the WA landscape. Subjects speak of their joy and terror as they contribute to the tales about the space, its buildings, the flora and fauna; they harness the sweeping views that drop into the gully and the breezes that carry mellifluent birdcalls and the estrangement of fire. In the next section that is attentive to global (international) and local (WA) relations, Kinsella’s mode of engagement with landscape is discussed in terms of ecology and emotion which combine into a vitalised geometry that fleshes out the experience of place.

I move on to argue that an emphasis on the properties and relations of things in discrete points in space (animals, birds, people, objects in the environment) betokens an affective geography that clarifies degrees of involvement with others in place. I use this as a platform to look at Kinsella’s relationship between ideas and things, referents in the landscape scene of domestic husbandry constituting a climate-sensitive autoethnography that stabilises an atmospheric sense of subjective place (Bristow, 2013).

The chapter closes with a renewed sense of empathy and pragmatism for the Anthropocene. I suggest that there is something more entrancing than local detail in Kinsella’s Anthropocene expression of a more-than-human world; location and craftwork register as one and the same, delimiting ethical grounds from which we can evaluate our limited pacts with others.³

Attributes and affects: minority geographies

Geography, conceived as a product of experience, is a qualitative construct that denotes location as a multivalent locus for the ways in which people feel and understand the places in which they live and act. Jam Tree Gully creates the space of experience in the same ways that attention to landscape permits the construct (‘land-scape’) to be viewed from the bottom–up: a position that is sensitive to minute formations: insects, nests, footholds, cloud formations, cracks in the infrastructure; sensitive to unstable and mixed emotions alongside chinks in language speaking out from hidden crevices and from the margins. There is an epic gravitas even down to the most discrete detail in Jam Tree Gully; it fixes one’s attention on every last inflection, enjambment, half rhyme and title. There is a world in each grain of dust, each beat of the line, every intake of breath and each bead of sweat.

The world of the jam tree

Aunt Kay’s face got red in the light from jamwood logs. The wood smelled like raspberry jam when it lay on the hearth, and like toast when it was burning (Stow, 2009, p. 56)

Jam trees, Acacia acuminata, are named for their smell, reminiscent of berries when burning. The non-human other, a genus of shrubs, defines the sensory location for Jam Tree Gully. They, not human history, are its central characteristic. And yet the descriptive name taken from a property of something only evident under certain conditions (the emission of the smell of raspberries under heat) metonymically invokes climate change and, by extension, human practice. Furthermore, this topnym is a potential symbol of things to come: the ever-present threat of fire in the dry landscape, which is an absolute pressure within the wheatbelt. In Jam Tree Gully, Kinsella’s focus on nature suggests human presence.

The symbolic world within the jam tree is a world that has heralded devastation since the first European pastoralists projected their fallible sense of space onto the location. The conditions that lie in the wake of colonialism and contemporary bush clearing (for farming, leisure and real estate) subtend the short-sighted and disconnected situational ethics of the dwellers in the domain. The tempo of Kinsella’s lyrical ‘I’ is deeply committed to moral fibre; his poetics is acutely aligned to the phenomenon of firestorms, owing to the microclimates of ill-conceived husbandry over time. The politics of custodianship in this light entails ‘being part of a mantra of witness and empowerment’ (Kinsella, 2010, p. 3). The collection directly answers the problem of those ‘glimpses of the incidental and discounted dimensions of imperialism’, as Tom Griffiths calls them, that we come across in our research into the history of land use in Australia (Griffiths, 1997). How might these glimpses take us back to the nature of economies, the arena of habitat, competition; do we need a sense of the countryside as ‘environment’ and the sense of nature as ‘ecology’ as provided by ecocriticism, here?⁴ And if so, can these refinements in literacy help us speak of bonds, connection, disconnection and loss; do they infer or embody emotion, place? These compelling questions colour the anarchical ethos of Kinsella’s project that elects broad surveying of the domain over narrow accountability.

Decolonised pastoral

The situated microknowledge that is Jam Tree Gully is linked to the question of the task of preserving what little life exists in the site without repeating the impact of colonial history through a practical husbandry. Kinsella’s interpretation of pastoral remarks upon the translation of spatial dynamics from its European forebears (control, order, cultural determinism) to the Australian context (destruction, dispossession, exclusion). The displacement and relocation of class conflict in the white imaginary – the settlement of WA – is further troubled by the presence of indigenous peoples in place of occupation and settlement. In this light, a new world pastoral of the bottom–up, decolonised by a minority mode can create fresh dialogue, as Kinsella notes: ‘an exchange, a discourse between differing voices and points of view within the landscape picture’ (Kinsella, 2008, pp. 131–132).

This imaginary extends to the landscape-scale view of Jam Tree Gully and to each precise and local event within the domestic dwelling space and its immediate environment – the neighbours and the community. Here questions of ownership, control and care vibrate, toxically. At times they reach fever pitch that knowingly comes close to cultural breakdown and personal fragmentation or schizophrenia. The line at times is very much aware of this cultural condition: ‘See, that’s it, there’s no/room for imagination when/things are so on edge, prospects so extreme’ (‘The Immolation of Imagination’ 14–17).

The pastoral’s microknowledge of biological phenomena (tree, flower, bird, algae on watertank) preserve the space of the speaker’s subjectivity. As with Oswald and Burnside, in Kinsella’s aesthetic we are invited into understanding how the poetry speaks of examples of subjectivity and how these examples can come into being, both in the world and in the space of the poem. Place writes up the human here; the poem reaches out to us. Such implicit readerly sensitivity in Jam Tree Gully often triggers the inclusive interpersonal pronoun ‘we’.

It’s a month since we’ve been here

and dandelions have confirmed a rampant

occupation: in lieu of us, as vanguard,

eyes to the eyes of our boots. (‘Higher Laws’ 1–4)

For all the emphasis on place, Jam Tree Gully is an exegesis of personhood. And yet events in the text are responses to spatial stimuli; they foreground referents and ecological contexts that herald a literary-material tropism. Kinsella’s referents are always-already active agents. In this poem, the non-native plant is equal to the human subject at least in terms of surveying the scene – but do they see eye-to-eye, one is expected to ask? Human hubris, thus derailed from overseer to displaced personhood sketched out horizontally not vertically, invokes a sense of freedom that comes from the unpacking of security (to be fixed in place) and embracing the various moments that reside in these spaces. This complex ground turns human subjects into objects for contemplation and reflection.

One of these turnings in the mind, the phenomenological moment entertaining and ruminating over the object in view, only comprehends images rather than securing the meaning of an image on the way to unifying or consolidating a pictorial array. Kinsella is grasping at things, encompassing objects within an open process that is held close by the poetic view of the domain. Here, the decolonised poetics of witness and acknowledgement works well with such open processes, for it does not have to register a secure and finished story. Always: the focus on what is and what inheres in things. Never: metanarrative, plot development, argument, a single determining event, inherited form. Here, the homogenous regional landscape is betrayed and the self is imagined in relational terms, not autonomous terms.

Location as focal point

I write poetry of ‘in situ’ and also ‘at a distance’, but ... this is a complex e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Jam Tree Gully
• 2  Gift Songs
• 3  A Sleepwalk on the Severn
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index