"I LOOKED OUT AND NATURE WAS GONE": language, lyric, and alterity in john kinsella's graphology poems 1995–2015. Issue 5 (3rd September 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Disney, Dan
• Is Part Of: Angelaki. Volume 23:Issue 5(2018)
• Page Start: 48
• Page End: 59
• Publication Date: 2018-09-03
• Subjects: lyric poetry -- ethics -- the radical pastoral -- sovereignty -- Agamben; Literature -- Criticism and interpretation -- Periodicals; Philosophy -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals; 100
• DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2018.1513198
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0969-725X

Abstract

Abstract: In the nearly 800 pages that comprise the three volumes of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015 (Five Islands P, 2016), John Kinsella demonstrates an exemplary moral anger registering iterations of colonial "omni-speak" as unethical (1: 93). This paper reads Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (Stanford UP, 1998) by way of apprehending the rhetorical substrata underpinning discourses of Australia as not just determining a sovereign colonial space; in a place where "history is absurdity […] history is overlay" ( Graphology Poems 1: 158), Kinsella shows how indigenous and non-colonial others are consistently cast as extra-juridical and merely sub-human. These Graphology Poems not only anathemise and hex historical falsehoods of nation: Kinsella dares sound out the bullshit, and his iconoclastic language games refuse outright to acquiesce to the epistemically violent nullifications of antipodean identity.