Rhetorical fractures: poems, photos, power stations, gardens, glasshouses, ghosts and the essay

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See ‘Photo Essay: Harrow, Ramp, Chevrolet, and Kangaroo’ (The Ascension of Sheep, Volume 1 of Collected Poems by John Kinsella, UWAP, 2022; p. 244).

2 The term ‘conversation’ is used in this photo-poem-essay in a variety of ways depending on context, but the core variable relates to both a communal sense of ‘presentation’ (or ‘putting the argument out there’), and what might, at one level, be termed ‘internal monologue’, but probably tends to a number of simultaneous overlapping internal monologues produced by the fractured self. So, ‘I’ am the ‘unifying force’ behind the creative-‘production’ of these materials, but that I in itself is contestable as a unified self. In the same way, ‘conversation’ might suggest both reception and direction, and further indicate some kind of external party or parties outside (even) the fractured self. None of us create in a vacuum, and our creative-thinking lives our bound to at least the ghosts of citations and references, and I acknowledge this, but sometimes the co-ordination of disparate materials carries with it the inevitability of ‘being’, of struggling with external perceptions of an ‘authentic self’ to be held accountable and approachable for the production of such materials. For me, as an anarchist (pacifist), then the sense of community (and consensus with digression) is vital, and the reason I publish is to introduce texts into the agora (Kinsella: Polysituatedness, Manchester University Press, 2017) for broader ‘discussion’. I have always felt that with my poems, room is created between lines, words and even morphemes, for interaction by readers, and the same applies to this telescopic, interactive text. There is room to gather, discuss, refute, reject and hopefully even ‘welcome’. And this is happening with and maybe against the temporality of the creative moments in the fractured self that made the text in the first place. The parts speak to a whole and the whole speaks to the parts, and nothing is static. In fact, I doubt there is a whole. I don't doubt there are conversations, and even specifically ‘the conversation’. Determiners direct us, but don't need to be exclusionary, especially in this undoing of grammar/syntax.

3 See https://apothecaryarchive.com/publishing-from-5-islands-press/nixv7twexnh6wj98agke5j9c0ryt5o.

4 See https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/john-kinsella-graphologies-685.

5 See ‘On Textures of Ambiguity’ in Beyond Ambiguity: Tracing Literary Sites of Activism (John Kinsella, Manchester University Press, 2021, p. 191).

6 https://rabbitpoetry.com/ (ed. Jessica Wilkinson).

7 see, for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28176008/#:~:text=The%20German%20poet%20H%C3%B6lderlin%2C%20assumed,administered%20by%20his%20physician%20Autenrieth.

8 see Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (John Kinsella, MUP, 2007).