John Kinsella's most recent book Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is an incredibly ambitious and meticulous rewriting of that great epic poem of the Middle Ages, Dante's The Divine Comedy. Our guest poetry editor for Epic, Ali Alizadeh, interviewed Kinsella recently, via email. Their discussion ranged from traditional notions of the epic form, and Kinsella's relationship with it, to ecological manifestoes and collaborative projects, and the concept of 'pushing against form'.
Ali Alizadeh: Your most recent book Divine Comedy, as its title suggests, is a complete rewrite of The Divine Comedy. Yet you've called yours a ‘distraction' on Dante's epic. Could you speak to that?
John Kinsella: Dante's Divine Comedy has been a long obsession for me. I came across it as a child, but only in a generic kind of way. I read Penguin editions of Inferno and Purgatory in my late teens and then reread Inferno (Ciardi translation) while living in a commune situation, and with a major drug and alcohol problem, in my early twenties. I mention the conditions of reading here because they were relevant to the way a personal mythology overlaid literary tropes for me – not an uncommon process for readers of Dante to impose. The Inferno started appearing in undeclared snippets in poems I was writing at the time – but in abstract and distant ways. But mostly, in pieces of artwork I was doing at the time (though long since abandoned, artwork was an integral part of my early poetry creativity). Those drawings and paintings are still in an archive somewhere. I hadn't seen Doré's images then (possibly a frame here or there, but certainly not in their entirety) but having since become saturated in Doré (I had the plates stuck up round the room while I was working on ‘my' Comedy), I would now find it impossible to work on anything visual without some subtext of reference to those amazing works.
When I came to writing my autobiographical work Auto in the late 90s, I drew on Dante's La Vita Nuova (‘And the sonnet was this…', for example: that is, exploring the links between poetry and prose regarding personal explication), and started to think about the entire Comedy. I reread Paradise around then. I had also read Paradise on Happy Valley Farm in the early 90s – the Sayers translation I'd picked up cheap in a secondhand bookstore somewhere. I was in a bad way then and suffering a lot of blackouts, so I read Paradise against the backdrop of the great Dryandra Forest and personal decay. But I re-read it in Cambridge in the late 90s.
For a long time, I have written cycles and movements of poems using pre-established models to highlight disjunctions in the way language, location, and attendant spatialities function. For example, by using Beethoven's Sixth Symphony as the template for The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony, I attempted, on the most basic level, to show the disjunction between European Romanticism and the introduction of European farming methods into Australia and their disastrous consequences in terms of country/land. Most of my work has an ecological basis, and in reconsidering pastoral motifs, especially in the way they do or don't transfer from place to place, I attempt to highlight how broader systems of discourse inevitably break down and damage the local. Local knows what works locally, in essence. Or, at least, has more of a chance.
In around 2003, I began to think of issues of the local and the broader local and the non-local in the context of Dante's Comedy. I was working on a book of poetry entitled The New Arcadia around then; that book was templated on Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia, and was very much in dialogue with his work. I was thinking of how far away from an original model one might go while retaining certain structural and linguistic elements of that original. When it came to considering a ‘take' (some critics have called it a ‘riff') on The Divine Comedy, I felt that I didn't want to create a dialogue, I didn't want to use it simply as a ‘model', bur rather wanted to take on the fundamental notions of what we consider to be ‘good' or ‘bad' in any given place at any given time and to set up a way of comparing personal response to place with historic and cultural tropes. I wanted to ‘distract' readers from their knowledge of the original texts but encourage them to reinvest their interpretations in the place and time of their reading. My work was to be an ‘up-close' work, an intense examination of five-and-a-half acres across three years (a year, roughly, for each of the canticles), but contextualising it in the greater world, and the discourse of location that surrounds all ‘places'. The distractions are what's happening outside the place you live in, as much as the distractions that happen daily where you live (seeing a bungarra or a rare bird, or even watching the familiar patterns of songbirds played out each day).
I like the idea of epics being about the micro – an accumulation of detail, of the ‘small', against the larger backdrop. Sometime in 1997 I wrote in a poem:
What use if we can't
note some of Dante
in his epic diva comics,
climb down a few rungs
of his sorry internal workings,
extricate around the footnotes
like revivals, enthusiastic
resurrections
of the roman à clef?
(Graphology, Canto 7)
So the idea of the larger work departing from Dante's idea of the epic was finding its feet for me, and also the disturbance with the ‘entertainment' aspects of the big allegory. This is a question of reading, canon, and presentation, more than of Dante's specific intentions as writer. A cosmic performance, sure, but a cosmos in which we separate our own ecological impacts from what we read. Implication becomes moral and purely ‘human': it is not.
Furthermore, however epic a single writer wishes to be, s/he is writing the self. Interpolation comes in the form of anecdote and participation (through family largely, in the case of my Comedy), but as author I am still mediating. I am always flummoxed when critics point out, regarding the anti- or counter- pastoral I inhabit, that evidence of the anti is already well established in, say, Virgil (say from Eclogue VI), because they're missing the point of what I feel is the issue behind pastorality: that recognition of intrusion and decay of ‘country' or ‘rural' values is neither here nor there. What I see as the point of contention, apart from exploitation of people for profit, is the abuse of the land (especially in good husbandry and neat, ordered terraces), the damaging of ‘bushland' (in all its forms), and the agricultural use of animals for human profit. So my base model isn't the social issues of pastoral, but issues of ecological exploitation no matter how ‘rural'-authentic it dresses itself up as.
That's not to separate social concerns from ecological outcomes (not at all) – and I am not questioning need (which is going to over-ride everything, of course), but I am questioning the literary discourse around this. There is no idyll and never was an idyll. There was, and is, however, a literary idyll that even builds in commentary (and correction) of the rural. That's very tied into my motives for distracting the original and looking at what ‘is' in a very specific place, warts and all. But not just warts and all for the sake of it. Inferno and Paradise walk the same lines for me.
AA: One of the most fascinating aspects of your epic is what strikes me as a mischievous reorganisation of the sequence of Dante's narrative. Instead of replicating the Florentine's journey from Inferno to Purgatory and then to Paradise, your poem starts in Purgatory, takes the reader to Paradise, before concluding in Inferno. Could you explain your thinking behind this structure?
JK: I simply don't believe one can separate these states, not even allegorically. Purgatorio is the most inclusive ‘category', and that's why we start there. Paradise is a delusion and the idea of being rewarded for goodness repels me. It's only goodness if you expect no return: even spiritual after-life pay-off. And Inferno, well, that's what we're working hard to turn our Purgatorio into. That's where it's all ending up. Ironically, the apparently free choice of those who damage the biosphere impedes the free choice of those who work to avoid this. Of course, there are degrees: even those who try hardest are usually inflicting some degree of wilful damage even when they believe they are doing otherwise. It's when one knows (that annoying thought or guilt pushed aside) and keeps doing a damage because it's easier to pretend it's not a damage, that really concerns me.
AA: In your revision of Canto VIII of Inferno, you have replaced the wrathful and lost souls drowning in the river Styx in Dante's poem with ski boaters and evocations of early Irish settlers in Western Australia. Could you speak about this and other interventions of contemporary society and history in your Divine Comedy?
JK: On one level it's a logical shift in the components or referents in an allegorical structure. To contemporise or make familiar to a readership is an easy ‘device'. But I hope it's more than just that: it's a genuine belief that text and place are intimately connected: that is, where a text is created and what it refers to are in a symbiotic relationship (sometimes constructive, often destructive). The wrong and right of a given socio-political situation are given to interpretation and point of view (in Dante's sense, maybe which family you belonged to!), but in the end there are basic wrongs and rights that overwhelm personal point of view. These ‘universals' allow us to read texts from all periods and empathise and reject a given scenario or react towards the plight of a group or individual. I am very interested in the idea of empathy and in my interpolations and re-allegorising of Dante's use of stories and even personal associations, I am dialogically interacting: giving ‘my side' of the story. I distract from this through my inability, as much as anything else, to empathise completely with his worldview or position on any given issue. Some feel one should worship great writers; I don't. I can admire and even be in awe, but my experience and often my politics are different. I don't have to agree but I feel I do have to dialogue, and extract and distract my own co-ordinates. As said, it's the local that interests me, backdropped against all human social interaction, or as much as I can textually access. The micro against the macro. The ski boaters and the Irish settlers (caught in their irony of escaping persecution and often persecuting local peoples in turn), are facts and stories, are allegory and ‘history' from where I am writing.
AA: Also in your revision of Canto VIII of Inferno, in place of Dante's fallen angels you present us with a striking image of blue-tongue lizards, who, in ‘Their armoured bodies / appear and retreat. They blink and extrude / their tongues as warning, drinking eviscerated air.' Could you speak to the place of nature and ecology in your Divine Comedy?
JK: My work is an ecological manifesto on one level, and really a set of observations on another. The two obviously share ground. I have always been fascinated by what makes the image, and what constitutes the figurative. I've been equally fascinated by empirical data, how one ‘factually' records what one observes, and lists. The nexus points between these components are where my Divine Comedy operates. Maybe that's what poetry is anyway, but for me it's a conscious process. I deplore ‘nature writing' because often, in it there's a certain satisfaction in the efficacy of ‘nature' that I can't share (humans are of ‘nature', after all; and the binary of humans versus nature seems absurd to me), and also the moment one ‘nature-writes', one separates out of the very bio one is seeking to evoke. Actions speak louder than words – sure, but words can also be actions. I prefer agitrop to a nice picture of nature (which is always subjective). On one level, the work requests a ‘getting one's house' in order; on another it questions the need for the ‘house' to exist at all (to work out of the prefix ‘eco', from oikos). The irony of the book, so set in one five-and-a-half-acre area, is that this world is massive, and within that space, systems establish and break down, and the greater actions of the planet are performed. Certain birds move as territorial groups, bobtails reappear each year after their winter sleep, pairs of eagles circle over head year after year. But the land is being damaged and breaks down from external intrusion (as well as internal pressures): the communications masts like the legs of Satan, or the poisonous spraydrift from neighbouring properties, war in another part of the world. Local doesn't mean denial. In fact, it becomes a lens for the broader ills, not an escape. There is no escape, no possible eremitism. Each day I spent writing this work, I'd go out onto the block with my notebook, observing and recording. I'd observe the same features day after day, watching for minute changes. Those small shifts I was capable of observing fostered a slippage in the concrete details that anchor an image. Even the known became susceptible. I countered with more fact, more detail. I fed the poem science and data. There's kind of a history of post-Poundian imagism at work in this book.
AA: Divine Comedy is of course not the first time you've rewritten a canonical poet's epic in the form of an epic of your own. In 2005, for example, you published The New Arcadia, which was based on Philip Sydney's Old Arcadia. Could you speak about your interest in the very ancient, and some might say ‘conservative', form of the epic poem?
I started my first ‘epic' when I was seventeen. It was a retelling in poems of the Samson story. I think that's in an archive somewhere as well – I haven't seen it in twenty years. Once again, it took an original (Biblical) story and wandered with it – it was to do with my own issues of masculinity (and the failure of this in many ways), and crisis of a faith I didn't know if I had or did not have. But what took it out of the reflective and ‘insular' lyrical personal (it is an error, I believe, purely to equate the lyric and the self – the lyrical I is also a general social I, especially given songs of the self are all potentially songs of public/group utterance and sharing), was that I tried to build a social and cultural inter-narrative: the story of where I came from, if you like. Samson was obviously a heroic vector, but ‘I' in the poem (transposed self onto the figure of Samson) was very anti-heroic and liable to fail at a moment when a hero would succeed. I have been very interested in this notion of hero all my life (Prince Planet was my favourite child hero, along with Gigantor), and a couple of years ago wrote a long poem entitled ‘Hero' that deals, in part with Akhmatova and the hero motif, and Cid:
3. Cid 89 Oranges of Valencia, that our Cid planted The doubters are checking the trees, they have picked the fruit. This story tasted by Our Cid. 98 Near the base of the Hill, the range and river, they reach the property where the farmer cultivates. A text was sent by the CEO and president desiring an opening to spring festivities for Our Cid of oranges now the gift of olives.
The poem plays with form a great deal. In this case, the caesura (and its relationship to the hemistiches). It's an epic to be sung; I wrote this with singing in mind, as I did my Samson poems. Probably the work most influential on my writing life has been Homer's Odyssey, with the Iliad running a close second (I have been particularly interested in issues of guest-host relationships and spiritual ‘pollution' in my own work). The Epic of Gilgamesh I rewrote in part for a musician friend. In my ‘Hero' poem, I also experimented with lines ‘as long as the Harbour Bridge'; the artist Ruark Lewis actually made some large canvases of words from the long lines. In the poem, they were intended to be reinvestments of the heroic line and couplet. The point I am making, to link it back to the Comedy, is that the epic for me has always been about form. The hero, the cultural narrative, and form. If there is a hero in my Comedy, it is, much the same as in Dante's, my Beatrice figure (also merged with the Virgil figure), Tracy, my partner. The guide isn't necessarily hero though, and the textual Tracy is inscribed with the vulnerabilities and hesitation the ‘I' is also transcribed with in the text In some ways, the sheepdog ‘Shep' is the most heroic, battling blindness and defining his territory through memory and fading senses. Politically, given the work is entirely anti-State, one would expect an anti-hero configuration, but that's not really the point. It's more an egalitarianism of status: ‘we' all share the hero status and the anti-hero reality. I consider the hero'/es' ‘honour' as ecologically dependent: honour is respect, honour is custodial. It's about sacrifice, but not of the living: rather, of the technologies one clings to, one fetishises. The epic possibly becomes the liberation of consciousness from the confinements of consumerism and the damages it brings.
AA: In your introduction to The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, you declare an interest in a poetry that is conservative in form but radical in content. Is your interest in the epic an aspect of this poetics, in which innovation and tradition have a symbiotic relationship?
JK: Yes, as above. My aim is to push against form, not to redefine it. I wish to redefine how we think about what is an aesthetic and what is agitprop. I reject aesthetics. Form has come about as aid to memory, as aid to visualisation, not necessarily as a vehicle for confinement and imprisonment. What is being said in the context of how it is being said is what matters. If you are trying (at least) to say something ‘radical', you must give a reader access at some level, some way of decoding what you are saying. I can't, for example, expect my readers to understand vegan ethics when they aren't vegans, but I can expect them to understand repetitions, refrains, anaphora, rhyme, rhetorical devices, alliteration and so on, even if they don't know the names for them. I am particularly interested in extended similes and epic, and they play their part in my work. Also metonymy is its various guises.
One of the challenges for readers of my Comedy is to construct a narrative for themselves as they move through scenes and vignettes – reflections of the original cantos are one point of reference in the journey/s (though there are a few twists to the sequencings and the introduction of ante, sub, and other ‘in-between' or subtextual layerings), but so are the personal interactions posited in the poem/s, plus the spatial, cultural, and ‘historical' backdrops they are configured through and against. Although this might seem a grim work in many ways, there are certainly many moments of the ‘I' as mock-hero, ironising the position of the self. It is rarely the family group (a kind of anti-comitatus) that is ironised. It is certainly ‘de-militarised' or de-hierarchised in the face of a world at war and in the context of a pacifist ethics.
AA: Are you planning any other book-length poems in the near future? I'm aware of your fascinating collaboration with Louis Armand, Synopticon.
That's interesting for me in the context of the epic. Its ‘epic' qualities, if it has any, are built by default, as Louis and I constantly rewrote our (and each other's) texts. The qualities likely arise from a resilience of language and meaning in the face of two poets trying to undo each other's intentionality (I think). The timeframe was epic as well, almost! Done over ten years, cumulatively, in fragments, and sometimes larger movements. It has a psychology, it has a linguistics, but it often has ‘competing' politics and certainly a struggle of aesthetics.
I am working on a book of poems based on Thoreau's Walden and set in our local space of Jam Tree Gully. Again, it's a very different work. Its heroes are kangaroos and a three-legged goat, along with all other animals and plants and soil types and rocks and so on, in a specific space.
And a big task for the next few years is the collaboration I am embarking on (I have taken a lot of notes – I often begin that way) of a ‘version' of Farid Ud-Din Attar's The Conference of the Birds. In part translation, entirely digressive, and done in collaboration, and with an eco-political dialogism, it could go anywhere! I hope so – I have always been keen re anywhere within the specific.
Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is published by WW Norton. John Kinsella blogs, together with Tracy Ryan, at poetsvegananarchistpacifist.blogspot.com.
