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- Herausgeber: Arc Publications
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Serie: Arc International Poets Series
- Sprache: Englisch
The Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella, whose previous accolades include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, and three-times winner of the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry. Kinsella describes himself as a 'vegan anarchist pacifist', and The Wound was inspired by his anger towards the destruction being wrought on the West Australian coastal bushland by the controversial proposed construction of the Roe 8 Highway Extension, which environmentalists protested would endanger the area's wildlife, the biodiversity of which is equal to that of the whole of England. In this collection Kinsella mixes mythology with modernity, as this collection includes two books of poems, the first inspired by the character of Mad King Sweeney from Irish epic Buile Shuibhne, and the second comprised of works 'interacting' with poems written by German Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin.
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The Wound
Published by Arc Publications
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road,
Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk
Copyright © John Kinsella, 2018
Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2018
Design by Tony Ward
Printed by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
978 1910345 97 9 (pbk)
978 1910345 98 6 (hbk)
978 1910345 99 3 (ebk)
Acknowledgements
Some of these poems have previously been published in Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Meanjin, Mutually Said (a blog John Kinsella shares with Tracy Ryan), Overland, Salzburg Review, Stop the War Coalition website, The Wolf and York Community Matters Newspaper.
Special thanks to Andrée Gerland and to the Literary Cultures of the Global South programme, University of Tübingen, Germany, where the author was in residence for some months during 2016. Special thanks too to all at Arc Publications – James Byrne, Jean Boase-Beier, Tony Ward and Angela Jarman. The author has had a special interaction with Arc for over two decades, and appreciates the rigorous attention they have always given his work as well as the personal support he has received from them. Further thanks to Curtin University and Churchill College, Cambridge University.
Cover image: © Stephen Kinsella, 2018, by kind permission of the artist.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
Editor for Arc’s International Poets series
James Byrne
TheWound
JOHN KINSELLA
Poems after Buile Suibhne
and Friedrich Hölderlin
2018
For Tracy, Tim, the ‘Save Beeliar Wetlands’ protesters, Andrée, and James Quinton
Contents
Introduction
BOOK ONE – AFTER SWEENEY
Sweeney Prototype (Outdoors, West Cork)
Sweeney the Vegan
Sweeney’s Lament
Sweeney’s Remedy for Bathos
Graphology Chronotype 3: Sweeney
Sweeney Deplores Nationalism in the Hazy Days of Summer
Sweeney in the Hawthorn Tree Confused by Hiberno-Australian-English
Sweeney Suffers at the Paws of the Otter
Sweeney’s Flight of Exile
A Charred Sweeney Arises, Brainwashed by the State, to Imprint Himself on the Locals Taking up Their Racist Desires
Is it Hubris with which Sweeney Awaits the Approach of a Double Front?
Sweeney – ‘Little Birdie Flying High’ – Shits on a Gathering of Crypto-Fascists but Means Nothing Aggressive by It
The Tenets or Tenants of Sweeney
Sweeney – Bird Brain Dissembler
Sweeney the Thesaurus Bird
Sweeney Encounters a Russian Adventurer in the Avon Valley
Sweeney Deplores the Rise of the Fascists
Sweeney Tries to Warn Locals of the Danger of a Radioactive Waste Dump
Sweeney Goes to Sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ but No Sound Issues Forth
Sweeney Contemplates a Display of Force by the Police State
Sweeney Inside the Wound, the Graveyard, the Deathzone
Sweeney the Barn Owl Opens His Eyes Wide in Broad Daylight
Sweeney’s Last Will and Testament
Sweeney Witnesses the Attack on the Coolbellup Bush by the Forces of a Corrupt Police State
Having Given Up the Ghost, Sweeney Flies in with Seedlings to Help Stitch the Wound
Sweeney Dreams He’s Having a Nightmare of Clearing
INTERLUDE
The Old Professors Try to Knock Sweeney Off His Perch in the Hölderlinturm
BOOK TWO – AFTER HÖLDERLIN
After ‘Friedensfeier’
Flames after Hölderlin: Wenn über dem Weinberg
Barely Hölderlin’s ‘Vom Abgrund nemlich’
Subtexting ‘Der Spaziergang’
Searching ‘Der Spaziergang’
Winter: Artificial Lake Heading Towards Meltdown
Inverting ‘Geh unter, schöne Sonne’
Hölderlin’s ‘Abendphantasie’ and the Unwelcomings of Here
Reaching into ‘Des Morgens’
In lieblicher Bläue?
Oedipus Speaks: after Hölderlin’s Sophocles’ Oedipus Second Act Scene One Opening Speech
Messenger: after the Fifth Speech of the Messenger, Act 1, Scene 3 of Hölderlin’s Sophocles’ Antigone
After Hölderlin’s ‘Der Winkel vont Hahrdt’
Fantasia on Hölderlin’s ‘Hälfte des Lebens’
Fantasia (2) on Hölderlin’s ‘Hälfte des Lebens’
Fantasia (3) on Hölderlin’s ‘Hälfte des Lebens’
Listening to Nirvana and Working With Andree Gerland’s ‘Literal’ Version of Hölderlin’s ‘Hälfte des Lebens’
After Hölderlin’s Pindar Extravaganza When He Was Supposedly Past It: ‘Das Unendliche’ (‘The Infinite’)
After Hölderlin’s Pindar Extravaganza When He Was Supposedly Past It: ‘Vom Delphin’
After Hölderlin’s Pindar Extravaganza When He Was Supposedly Past It: ‘Das Belebende’
After ‘Der Sommer’ – ‘Wenn dann vorbei’ des Frühlings Blüthe schwindet
Hymn of Beyond Hölderlin’s ‘Wie Meeresküsten…’?
We, Too – after Hölderlin’s ‘Wenn aus dem Himmel
Distance is How We (dis)Orientate: After ‘Wenn aus der Ferne…’
Biographical Note
Introduction
The Wound is two short books in conversation with each other, making a single but pluralistic response to the violence being enacted by humans on humans, and on the natural environment. The Wound is a conversation about peace out of the wounds we have inflicted on the planet in our rapacity and greed, our consumer obsessions.
The literal ‘wound’ refers to the horrendous gouge in unique coastal bushland in the Beeliar Wetlands and surroundings enacted by the Western Australian conservative Liberal Party-National Party former coalition government under leader Colin Barnett as part of the absurd Roe 8 Highway Extension project in Perth. Having caused much damage, the Barnett government was ousted from power in March 2017, resulting in a cessation of clearing and destruction, but the need for vigilance is a permanent thing. Other bushland at Golden Bay near Perth has been cleared, with BHP [the Anglo-Australian multinational mining, metals and petroleum company] making ready to destroy over 16,000 hectares of habitat to extend their mining operations in the Pilbara, Western Australia. The struggle for the environment is ongoing, and permanent. The assault by the Trump administration on ‘wilderness’, ‘monuments’ and coastal waters in the USA, the burning of furze and destruction of hedgerows in Ireland, and the struggle to preserve woodland in the UK, are part of a grim reality of global destruction.
To confront this reality, I have remagined Sweeney, the ‘mad king’ damned by St. Rónán, suffering as a bird but also bizarrely visionary in a world of warfare and vengeance, emerging out of the wound with visions, epiphanies, revelations, and insistences. The Sweeney poems are entirely my own poems but bounce off the original Irish (anti) epic poem, playing with cycles of motifs and plot mechanisms, with allusions to early Irish poetry in form and gesture. The text distantly followed was Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne), being the adventures of Subhne Geilt, a Middle Irish romance translated by J. G. O’Keeffe, the 1913 edition of which I read online. I also looked at the 1975 OUP printed edition in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
A number of the Sweeney poems appeared on the blog I keep with Tracy Ryan, Mutually Said, as part of a pacifist resistance against the rapacious assault on the Western Australian environment by government and industry during the Roe 8 debacle already mentioned, the ‘Cathedral Avenue’ roadside tree clearing wherein the Main Roads Department of Western Australia destroyed ancient old growth trees as part of road-widening – they could have reduced the speed limit for safety – and other ‘clearing’ of bushland and forest, especially in the Western Australian wheatbelt which now has less than four percent of its original vegetation. Many of these poems are written in support of protesters at the Beeliar Wetlands and on the York-Quairading Road, such as the wonderful Lindsay McNeill who resisted until the last tree was felled and after.
It should be said that I am not Sweeney – Sweeney is many-beaked and becomes many people and animals. He is a bestiary entire in himself, and a litmus paper testing the waters, airs, and soils of country, of conflict, of bigotry, of life, hope and redemption.
The primary text followed in the writing of the Hölderlin poems was the bilingual masterwork, Michael Hamburger’s Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments (trans. Michael Hamburger; 4th Edition, Anvil Press, 2004). I read and ‘interacted with’ David Constantine’s energetic translation, Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone (Bloodaxe Books, 2001). I also made use of a literal translation of ‘Half of Life’ by Andrée Gerland and acknowledge my long discussions on Hölderlin with Andrée in Tübingen, plus his gift of Friedrich Hölderlin: Hälfte des Lebens with an essay by Jochen Schmidt (Verlag der Buchhandlung Zimmermann, 2008). Other sources include Hölderlin material held in the Hölderlin Tower collection in Tübingen, plus the various German editions of his work that crossed my path (and were used more for ‘shape’ and ‘flow’ than literal translation purposes, a task which belongs to a ‘translator’ per se, rather than a poet deeply affected by the idea of the originals as much as the actual texts).
