Page Text: Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist
A blog shared between poets John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan: vegan, anarchist, pacifist and feminist.
Sunday, April 10, 2022
Campaign to Save Trees on the Northam-Pithara Road
Tracy (not in the pictures, of course, but as committed as any of us!) and I are not long back from time spent out at the site of Mains Roads' destruction of salmon gums and other trees on the Northam-Pithara Road about 10-12ks outside Northam heading north, on Ballardong Noongar boodja. Tracy took photos and videoed me speaking against the damage and reading my 'Sammies' poem originally written to help support efforts by many to stop Main Roads' destruction of ancient trees (we're talking up to 400 years old) along the York-Quairading Road a few years back (gathered in the collection I co-wrote with Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green, False Claims of Colonial Thieves ). You can see that poem here .
Main Roads have an ongoing campaign of roadside (and beyond roadside) habitat destruction that is remorseless and gathering pace. Road widening, road realignment, remaking to suit increasing truck traffic and exploitation of country... with only the bare minimum effort applied to ecological concerns. Good people are out there campaigning constantly to stop this catastrophe, and sometimes they have small successes, but it's hard to be everywhere. The philosophy of utility and development needs shifting on a fundamental level. The destruction of these trees is the destruction of heritage and history, it is the deletion of vital elements of the sacred. It's an ongoing disaster on a massive scale (consider the fate of bush along the Toodyay-Perth road, along the Great Eastern Highway near Wooroloo etc). It's a deeply ingrained systemic problem.
I am delighted that campaigners who spent time on site through the week succeeded in saving trees — or at least to have them tagged as being saved (in my experience, sadly, this doesn't necessarily mean they will be saved in the long run, so extra vigilance is required and the road design plan has to change). I fear, looking at the markings and pattern of road-widening (and sadly from much experience), that whatever they have tagged in the short term as to be left will in fact be removed unless it's changed at the planning level. I celebrate the communal work of the on-site protesters who at least had the workers listening to them. Good on them all — it's how and where change is really made. At the face of things. I arrived days after this, but documented nonetheless and worked on site on a new poem of peaceful but determined resistance.
I stood between two sammies (salmon gums) close to the road and the poem located itself.
As it also located itself in the chopped down two/three-hundred-year-old trees further down the road... one with the word 'owl' painted on its corpse.
Here is the on-site poem:
O Sammies Sammies — Ancient Trees on Northam-Pithara Road
deep reach, earth to sky,
and location location
deep reach, earth to sky,
part of the elemental sacred,
essential to health of country,
cut to the quick, deleted.
deep reach, earth to sky;
owl markers, cockatoo compass,
hold out against the onslaught.
deep reach, earth to sky;
O sammies sammies
deep reach earth to sky,
deep reach earth to sky.
Tracy and I both have new poetry books out. Tracy's Rose Interior is out with Giramondo and the first volume of my collected poems, The Ascension of Sheep: Poems 1980-2005, is out with UWAP .
As Tracy says of Rose Interior, 'Interiors suggest exteriors', and the poems seem to me to pulse with inner and outer perception, creating a flow between states of being. It's fascinating for me to have experienced the 'externals' of many of the poems, but to have processed them internally in very different ways. No matter how well you know each other, and despite such close proximity a lot of the time, poems come from very different places, and the figurative is the result of such interior processing. It's quite exciting for me to encounter things I think I 'know' in such different configurations, events that seem quantifiable in time and space, in such different narratives. And this isn't just to do with 'place' or even 'experience', but also how we read the world around us and why we read it in such ways. I love the dialogues with language that are such a part of Tracy's work — how a misheard 'sound' can bring a cascade of alternative meanings, how a hedgerow in West Cork is like a text in itself, how a moment of encounter in nature can evoke an array of discordant memories making things uncanny. And there is a fascinating 'sequence' of homeschooling poems that speak before and during the pandemic, that both disorientate and reify.
My Collected Poems is coming out over three years in three volumes with University of Western Australia Press. I am grateful to Tony Hughes-D'Aeth for his generous, intense and contextualising introduction to the first volume, The Ascension of Sheep. This volume includes my (anti-)pastoral trilogy, The Silo, The Hunt and The New Arcadia, along with my other collections, chapbooks, pamphlets, unpublished collections (that were intended for publication but, say, a publisher closed down etc.), and some material retrieved from archives, covering the period 1980-2005. I am particularly pleased to be able to include poems that were intended as part of The Silo but were cut at the last moment. I discuss some of this briefly here .
Oh, a word on covers... Tracy's was done/designed by Jenny Grigg and is part of her excellent general redesign of covers for the latest Giramondo poetry series. There are some stunning abstract covers and the promise of fascinating collections (it is such a consistently strong poetry list) by poets such as Adam Aitken, Claire Potter, a forthcoming Lionel Fogarty entitled Harvest Lingo (I am really excited about this), Andy Jackson, and Eunice Andrada. Find them here . And here's Tracy's cover:
My cover is part of a series in which the frame will change colour for each volume. The image is of 'Painting' by brilliant Karl Wiebke — see my piece on Karl here . I have written many poems on Karl's work over the decades, and have known him a long time, so I was excited to have this cover which includes words I painted over Karl's painting (as part of a collaboration we were planning over a quarter of a century ago... Karl has the second painting with my words, I think) from my poem 'Helen Frankenthaler's Interior Landscape, 1964' (p.135, Volume One) plus a couple of extra words for the occasion!
Anyway, I hope people find things in these books that interest them.
John Kinsella
A child in front of a tank
is a child in front of a tank;
a parent between a soldier
and a child is a parent
between a soldier
is weather against the skin;
bullets, shrapnel and flame
will burn any victim the same;
seeing the sky filled with drones
rather than birds is seeing
the sky filled with drones
rather than birds; the loss
of shelter and no longer
knowing what you’re
it is more than a learning curve;
the sun on the snow
the rain on the earth
the missiles and bombs,
the recoil of collapsing buildings;
a child in front of a tank
is a child in front of a tank.
Memories of Bill Grono (1934-2022)
Tracy Ryan: Bill was a great encourager of other writers, while shy of admitting that he himself could turn a very fine poem when he chose to. I owe more than one of my first publications, and my first job as an editor back in my 20s, to Bill. Even before that, like others of my age, I learned in school English classes from anthologies he had edited. His influence on readers and writers has been immense. I loved how when the pandemic began he started a kind of email circle for sharing favourite poems, with his usual tongue-in-cheek tone. I think of Bill as always warm, wryly laughing, always ready to share a witty story or an irony, but also as a serious storehouse of information about Western Australian literature and its history. Our family will miss him very much.
John Kinsella: I first met Bill in a non-literary setting, though he wouldn’t have remembered that. But from the time I started publishing, I ran into Bill constantly. Not so much in recent years after he moved to Margaret River, though I did see him at a couple of events down there. Bill was a generous but blunt critic. If he thought something was good, he said so; if not, well he said so as well, but always with a laugh attached that made you feel as if everything was okay really. And it usually was — he would never abandon a poet. He and I had many conversations about Dorothy Hewett and Mick (Randolph) Stow, two brilliant stars in his firmament of friends. He cared deeply about them both, and about their work, and gave much of himself to affirm their work.
I dedicated the online anthology of Western Australian writing I did for UWA library to him, and Tracy and I owed him a great debt of thanks for his ground-breaking anthology work when we came to edit the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry a few years ago. I remember a day seventeen years ago, Bill dropped off a sea-chest (no less) full of copies of old Swan River Colony newspaper poetry at York for me to use in any way that suited. He went out of his way to help if he could.
I have numerous personal stories of drinking with Bill back in my bad old days, but maybe I would retell them differently in my sober life. They weren’t just snappy stories full of literary-referenced self-irony; they were often empathetic and sometimes deeply personal. One very kind thing... one day, when I was at the bottom of my addiction barrel and living on my own in a flat near UWA in the early 90s, Bill turned up (having heard rumours I was a bad way) and spent the day with me (drinking, but that was the way it was back then) just to see I got through... and an act made a difference to survival. I am sure I was one of many. Bill and Janet came around to celebrate after Tracy and I got married, bringing a couple of bottles of wine, only to discover I was trying to stay on the wagon, and with the skill of one in tune with the ups and downs of life, Bill said something like, Well, I’ll take care of them!
I spent decades trying to get Bill to write more poems, but he said he’d done with that. I believed Bill about everything else, but not that. Even if he wasn’t writing them down, I am sure he was thinking them. Poetry was part of him and he was part of Western Australian poetry’s essence.
by John Kinsella
I have been thinking a lot about possible correlatives between becoming a vegan in the mid-1980s and the difficulty for woman artists to find creative role models in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But further, I am thinking of how any oppressive system determines the manner in which information is passed on, how it’s taught. Reading the Roxana Robertson biography of Georgia O’Keeffe ( Georgia O’Keeffe: A life, Bloomsbury, London, 2020 ) brings this particularly to mind, especially her citing of Gilbert and Gubar :
‘It was difficult for a woman at that time to become a painter: there was little precedent. In examining the difficulties women had in becoming writers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have pointed out the importance of the role of the predecessor. ‘That writers assimilate then consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of the predecessors is, of course, a central fact of literary history.’ The same can be said of painters.’ (p78)
So, I am interested in how one makes a radical departure from within the power structures one is embedded in and controlled by (especially schooling) when there are few precedents and predecessors for such a decision in one’s social milieu. This is an issue of role models (and Tracy has pointed me towards Albert Bandura’s social learning theory, which I will start working with, and also Dale Spender on foremothers ). Feminist identifying and dismantling of patriarchal controls seem deeply relevant and generative to me; as diverse as feminism necessarily is, this basic drive to act outside the oppression, to act with personal and collective volition, is a vital model. Where and where I can’t intersect with that with regard to veganism is something I will consider further, always acknowledging the work of Carol J. Adams .
In my case, being an ‘outsider’ from much culture when I was young predisposed me towards different thinking and different behaviour, as it does for anyone alienated by mainstream acculturation. But though I rejected many of the social models around me, I was necessarily influenced by them and had to interact and respond to them in everything I did. Even being alone had consequences for re-interfacing with what one had stepped out of. This predisposition to act differently from social norms is one of necessity and choice, but choice is very limited when there’s no one to talk with about what you’re feeling and thinking.
Yes, there were vegetarians, and they encouraged me to become a vegetarian in the first place, especially given my political beliefs around patriarchy and oppressive systems of control. Choose to be different and to be ethical, was the argument. A further predisposition was enhanced by having been in India and come across Jains, and having been impressed with their dignity and commitment of belief. But I wasn’t ‘even’ vegetarian then. I didn’t know any Jain personally, and had no model to base my actions on.
In some ways, back in Australia, being around vegetarians in the communal situation I lived in was very antithetical to veganism, because they saw no reason for veganism. Their attitude to veganism was not intended as an oppression, but as a role model their lacto-ovo vegetarianism was limiting for me. Yet that was mild compared to the abreaction of the rest of the community! Six months after becoming vegetarian I became vegan (along with two others who did not remain so) while living in a house on a dairy farm. Understanding more than I had the anti-life cycle of a dairy cow (despite life-long connections with farms), really led to a sudden and abrupt change, one made without models or precedents in any real sense, just from shock and being affronted. Maybe the ability to continue being a committed vegan in the early days was reinforced by having two others who were also vegan around me, but I am sure it ultimately made no difference — it was a decision made because I felt no choice.
But what I am interested in is how, with very little if any ‘guidance’, one is empowered to break away from social norms. Yes, being alienated on many levels before such a decision will make such a decision ‘easier’, but that’s not it, really. And though we act alone, it’s not just a decision of the self because if you commit your life to a difference stance, it’s going to be noticed in many obvious and also subtle ways. Your decision is going to affect others, even by implication, and they are going to react in many ways. In 80s and 90s the reactions were frequently oppressive and sometimes threatening. Now, less so; much less so. In fact, there are so many models that veganism is familiarised even in wheat and sheep farming areas of Western Australia. It may be considered inimical, but it’s an accepted reality. It may be mocked, but it is acknowledged.
When I became vegan, I found the meat-eating norm highly oppressive. I found it difficult to understand why people harassed me for being vegan when I was not making incursions into their lives, their eating, their customs. Why was my stance a threat to them? It’s difficult to express the extent of the passive and overt aggression that I (and we) experienced in those ‘early days’. It made one search for precedents and models where there had been none. And that’s how I came across the history of The Vegan Society and its co-founder Donald Watson ... founded in 1944 in Britain... in wartime Britain, which made me think a lot about animals and war, and then about pacifism in general.
The Vegan Society had nothing directly to do with my pacifism, but the fact that the society arose during the Second World War brought things into alignment for me. Veganism and pacifism seemed intrinsic to each other. Watson was a conscientious objector, though I didn’t know that when I first came across The Vegan Society. And though this was no role model, it was a comfort. Not discovering this ‘Western’ precedent within a colonial-capitalist matrix — from within the core of the colonial horror — would have made no difference to my continuing to be vegan, but it brought that sense of connectedness that helps sustain inner wellbeing: not reassurance, but less aloneness. And in this I have been very lucky with Tracy as a partner for twenty-eight years, and a family deeply understanding and connected with veganism. We are ongoing models to each other.
Anyway, these are incipient thoughts... notes towards a longer essay about systems of oppression and how we break out of them, with or without models. And if we lack overt models, how do we find traces of earlier resistance we might connect to, so as to sustain our mental wellbeing in a life of committed difference for an ethics we believe in?