Legibility
Description
This Pivot book provides a wide-ranging and diverse commentary on issues of legibility (and illegibility) around poetry, antifascist pacifist activism, environmentalism and the language of protest. A timely meditation from poet John Kinsella, the book focuses on participation in protest, demonstration and intervention on behalf of human rights activism, and writing and acting peacefully but persistently against tyranny. The book also examines how we make records and what we do with them, how we might use poetry to act or enact and/or to discuss such necessities and events. A book about community, human and animal rights and the way poetry can be used as a peaceful and decisive means of intervention in moment of public social and environmental crisis. Ultimately, it is a poetics against fascism with a focus on the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains.
Reviews / Votes
"One of the most compelling aspects of the essays is indeed their unapologetic subjectivity. Kinsella is a 'super-subject' and his unashamedly political stance is refreshing ... . Indeed, the essays most grounded in Kinsella's lived experience provide a firmer scaffolding from which to wage his dialectics. ... Kinsella makes a compelling case for language being both the site of oppression and for resisting that oppression." (Verity Oswin, TEXT - Australasian Association of Writing Programs, Vol. 28 (1), April, 2024)
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Person
John Kinsella is the author of over sixty books, including the poetry titles Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (2016) and Insomnia (2019; 2020), and the critical works Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (2007), Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (2010), Polysituatedness (2017) and Temporariness (with Russell West-Pavlov, 2018). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK, and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Australia.