Activist Poetics

Reviews / Votes

'John Kinsella delights in disturbance. (He) writes like an Australian storm at full blow.'
The Observer 'John Kinsella's Activist Poetics argues that poetry can act as a form of resistance to social and ethical ills, especially ecological damage and abuse, by provoking responses. The book is not so much of a manifesto as an apologia, an attempt to show the ways in which he has seen and written about the injustices and disturbances in that area. His approach to issues such as immigration, refugees, animal rights, zoos, forest preservation, land erosion, telecommunication masts, and so on, is applicable elsewhere and that is what makes his 'linguistic disobedience', energetic involvement and ability to look, bear witness and become involved, so striking.'

Tears in the Fence 'Despite the utopian leftism that pervades Activist Poetics, it is fair to say that the book succeeds more as a stirring work of literary criticism than as a defense of revolutionary politics. [Kinsella] writes powerfully about the ability of poetry to "motivate investigation," provoke "a suggestive disturbance," and provide "forms of affirmation and resistance."'
Los Angeles Review of Books 'A literary work's originality can be measured by the difficulty we have in characterising it. This work is especially difficult to characterise. While Activist Poetics has been published by a university press, it avoids the usual procedures of a scholarly work: it is intensely subjective; sometimes prolix, sometimes casual in tone; and it can be funny... While Activist Poetics may be 'unscholarly' in the traditional sense, not least because it is written from a position of 'interest', it is far from anti-intellectual. Indeed, the book has an extraordinary intellectual breadth, with subjects ranging from animal rights and GM crops, to literary theory and local history.'
David McCooey, Australian Book Review