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A Chronology of Poetic Activism I: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal (June to October, 2016)

26/6/2016

Home. A home. The home?

Wrote (typed on the manual typewriter) a poem on arrival and another today (regarding ‘proximity’).

Now thinking about polysituatedness and U Sam Oeur and Cambodia’s ‘itinerant poet(s)’. The itinerant moving within a ‘fixed range’—either (and/or) geographically, conceptually, changing, uncertain and paradoxically fixed, definable, cumulative. The poet hopes to cross these ‘terminological’ reference points. Poetry is outside semantics, syntax, and calibration. Thus form is always in play and flux—always ‘open’—though constantly reaching for points to affix to, depart from, enter. Form can be liberating, can define a freedom and itinerancy of poetic gesture.

A repulsive health-destroying, invasive NBN tower has been erected on a very nearby hill during our absence. Proximity of a destructive force/essence. How government controls and destroys environment (people, flora and fauna) while claiming necessity, beneficence and altruism. It is a crime.

24/7/2016

Was in Northam this afternoon which was relatively quiet after the over-excitement surrounding the Russian ‘adventurer’/balloonist arriving back from his circumnavigation of the globe.

Crossing the suspension bridge over the Avon with Tim, I was almost bowled over by a couple of teenagers running without looking up, fixated on their smartphones, their blank-faced parents (I would guess) behind them. I noticed them tapping their phones extra hard as if trying to create a visceral relationship with the machine, when I realised they were playing an augmented reality game, probably that full-blown capitalist product/business placement vehicle that inculcates violence into a membrane between place and screen, Pokémon Go. Place is replaced by a simulacrum of unliving life. Setting is ‘real’, and the ghostings are decoration. The violence is real. Then having succeeded, the kids waved their devices at ducks and waders as if they were enemies too. In-situ, a production of belonging, as ‘blind’ participation, as being in place and not conscious of it outside the capitalist constraints of the product itself, outside the leisure centre. The diminishing habitat of ibises and spoonbills, swans and black-winged stilts, as they vanish them (habitats and birds) from where they actually are, now only in focus on the screen in its fluidic ‘settings’—that is, they do not exist for the players outside the screen ‘setting’. Location as shifting movie-frames. The ‘parents’ seemed pleased their offspring who ‘looked as if’ they hadn’t been outside their bedrooms for years were ‘exercising’. Outdoors—making the outdoors like drone warfare.

That oddly conflicted and often contradictory movie director, Oliver Stone, has said (see AFP, 22^nd July, 2016), regarding Pokémon Go, that it is ‘a new level of invasion’ and ‘It’s what they call totalitarianism...’ and ‘They’re data-mining every person in this room for information as to what you’re buying, what it is you like, and above all, your behaviour!’

4/8/2016

The new olive tree saplings have been knocked about by the frosts over the last couple of weeks. Worked to resurrect them today.

Have been typing poems as I listen to Mahler symphonies—an interactive text-sound process I’ve long employed. The text segues and deflects, merges and diverges from the music. A process that opens the matrix of form—breaking into the line-length and stanza compartments and overall shape of the poem-on-the-page, the structural properties of the symphonic movements crosstalk and feed—Mahler’s idiosyncrasies liberate the text. Associations and juxtapositions form and then decay to reform and alter. I find it an exciting process.

These poems will join the additions to the Isolation/Openness (‘Open Door’) manuscript of Jam Tree Gully-based poems I was writing before we left for Ireland last year. Just starting to think now how I will structure the book as a whole—though, basically, it will follow the chronological order of composition because I think in terms of the overall book shape as I write the poems. This is, the poems write themselves into the other poems of the existing manuscript, and thus into the conceptual scaffolding of the book. The ‘Homes’ of isolation(ism) and open(ness) are constraints through the poems, wherever and whenever the individual poems digress. Each poem is ‘complete’ in itself, an up-close patch of the larger abstract canvas of poly(situated) place. I also have to start work on putting the Spiralling manuscript (2017d) together for the Newton Institute.

8/8/2016

Was my vegan 30^th anniversary last week! Thinking over vegan issues, I was looking over Val Plumwood’s writing on ‘vegan ontology’ and found it disturbing. Too much of the school of self-justification for her own non-vegan ways. I find the accusation of vegan dualism—of the vegan outside ecology and welcoming animals into the privilege of human subjectivity—offensive. Her every moment (as with all of us) was a human moment with all the privileges of that moment. The duality she critiqued was actually her own duality (deflected). It is a specious and speciesist argument that is essentially middle-class eco-self-comforting, self-justifying and a form of fetishisation of the so-called ‘hunter-gatherer’ (no one fits such a label!), from which she appropriates and transfigures to fit her own needs. A vegan can be a most effective and empathetic ecologist. And I say this as a respector of much of Plumwood’s ecological commitment outside her failure to understand ethical veganism. Don't get me wrong, I believe Plumwood is at the generative core of resistance to ecological damage in Australia, and her commitment was real and her legacy is a strong one, but on this issue I feel she needs challenging.

Did an interview with a couple of vegan animal rights activists from Utah this morning. I feel I was too placatory by way of compensating for their own apologies of/for violence to ‘stop’ violence—a position I can never agree with.

Cold front over last night—wind and rain. Listening to Oppen read—fantastic (especially the early poems). Also to Glass Symphonies 1 & 2—too much razzmatazz without enough irony.

9/8/2016 Census Day

I refuse! They are not getting hold of my personal details. I will write poems instead.

26/8/2016 Bold Hill Reserve

Elegy

Rain lashing car at Reabold Hill.

Front starting its coastal passover,

wind in tuarts. Car—horror device—

driven carefully, had earlier swerved

within its safe arc, slowing to avoid

two Carnaby’s cockatoos coming down

the Scarp before Red Hill toxic waste dump.

coming down to tune with drop in

air pressure. Down from a marri tree

the birds in front of the car, struggling

to realign, so imbued with empathy.

But there’s nowhere to go when

they’ve passed, and another drops

into the swerve, death-crunch

on windscreen, deflected in its

shower of feathers, its show

in the rear-view mirror thudding

silent to the asphalt and ridden over

by the car following. These cars,

and their drivers. And the bird

being so ‘rare’, this twist

in the tail, this character

in a narrative of denial,

the ravaged coastal plain

below. Where we are now.

JK