This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on 'praxis' book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism.

Temporariness is a scandal in our culture of monumentalism and its persistent search for permanence. Temporariness, the time of the ephemeral and the performative, the time of speech, the time of nature and its constant changesthese times have little cultural purchase. In this volume two practitioners and theoreticians of time, space and the word embrace the notion of temporarinessseeing in it a site for a renewal of ways of thinking about ourselves, our language, our society and our environment. This collage of fragmentary genres approaches the notion of mitigated presence to build an atlas of intersections attentive to our own temporariness as the site of aesthetic and ethical responsibility. This book is a scintillating meditation on the temporality of human lives and the contemporary possibilities of humanistic writing. John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov explore the conjunctions of memoir, theory, poetry, anecdotes, journal entries and other fragmentary forms in their conversations about the political realities of the world and the imperatives of human survival. They write across hemispheres, they interanimate the specific experience of place and history in Germany, Ireland, Western Australia, the Adriatic coast, Africa, New England. 't?mp(?)r?r?n?s is the chance collaboration of two writers and intellectuals that could never have come into existence before it did and that can never be repeated. Philip Mead, University of Melbourne

This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’: it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.

John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with—and often through—those creative works, Kinsella is also a prominent political activist. In this collection of essays, he explores anarchism, veganism, pacifism, and ecological poetics and makes a compelling argument for poetry as a vital form of resistance to a variety of social and ethical ills. Building on his own earlier notion of "linguistic disobedience," he analyzes his poetry and prose in the context of resistance. For Kinsella, all poetry is a call to action, and Activist Poetics reads like a lively manifesto for it to escape the aesthetic vacuum and enter the real world.

Shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal 2019 ‘A gentle whisper from the past Visits me in my dreams Or is it the future that I see ... ’ From well-known poets John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk-Green comes a tête-à-tête that is powerful, thought provoking, and challenges what we think we know about our country, colonisation, and how we understand our land. Striking conversations surrounding childhood, life, love, mining, death, respect, and diversity; imbued by silken Yamatji sensibility and sublimely responded to by the son of a foreman from South Champion Mine. This extraordinary publication weaves two differing points of view together as Papertalk-Green and Kinsella’s words traverse this land and reflect back to us all, our many identities and quiet voices.

An alternative view of the North West of England that delves into its stranger past. I Hate the Lake District offers a different vision of the rural environment from those found in much contemporary nature writing. Based on the author's trips around North West England, the book engages with nuclear power and nuclear war, slavery, imperialism, ghosts, love, God, cockroaches, and the sheer violence and contingency of “nature” itself—of which the human presence is merely a part. Each chapter starts with an account of a visit to a place in this remote part of England, the deep north, but digresses and wanders through multifarious themes and subjects. Among the sites Gere visits are the defunct nuclear power station at Sellafield, home of all British nuclear waste; Lake Coniston, where Donald Campbell died trying to break the water speed record; Hadrian's Wall, furthermost reach of the Roman Empire; the mysterious and deathly Morecambe Bay; sites of slavery in the North West; places where UFOs have been sighted, avant-garde artists created work, and Islamic terrorists trained; shantytowns where the navvies who built the railways lived with their families; and even the remains of Blobbyland in Morecambe. In I Hate the Lake District, Gere challenges the bourgeois pastoralism of popular nature writing and reveals the landscape of North West England as profoundly unnatural and strange.

This volume investigates Australian poetry's centrality to debates around colonialism, nationalism, diversity, embodiment, local-global relations, and the environment.