John Kinsella has been working on his series of Graphology Poems for almost thirty years, and published the first of these in the mid-1990s. Concerned with issues of orthography, handwriting, typing, modes of discussing and conveying experience, and with issues of perception and modes of writing, there has also been concurrently, mainly in journal-form, an accruing catalogue of visual commentary, illustration, scribbles, sketches, colour codings, and drawing-poems. This book represents work from a recent series of ‘drawing-poems’ composed in a continuous sweep often interlinked with journal-writing. The book also juxtaposes an earlier unpublished sequence of Graphology poems written some years ago that served as the incipient ‘form’ for the kaleidoscopic drawing-poems series in this book. Fascinated by kaleidoscopes as a child, the poems and poem-drawings swirl, fragment, rearrange and circulate around each other, bringing events onto the page. Deeply concerned with the well-being of the natural environment as well as human rights and justice issues, these pieces work as interventions, discussions, and exchanges between the real world and imagined ones. Resisting the colonising ‘qualities’ of Western art, they investigate the possibilities of working against representative ‘dimensionality’, and consider the one dimensional, two dimensional and ‘undimensional’ aspects of representation. The attempt is to create an illuminated book influenced by William Blake, wherein the poem and drawing are inseparable as forms of written text.

About the author:

John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015 (Picador, 2016), Open Door (UWAP, 2018),  Insomnia (WW Norton, 2020) and Supervivid Depastoralism (Vagabond, 2021). University of Western Australian Press will be publishing his Collected Poems 1980-2021 in three volumes, with the first volume being released in early 2022. His volumes of stories include In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015) and Pushing Back (Transit Lounge, 2021). His recent novels include Lucida Intervalla (Dalkey Archive, 2019) and Hollow Earth (Transit Lounge, 2019). His volumes of criticism include Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). His new memoir is Displaced: a rural life (Transit Lounge, 2020). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor at Curtin University. He lives in the wheatbelt with his family on Ballardong Noongar Boodja.