Legibility: An Antifascist Poetics

by John Kinsella

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030857448
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Series:	Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	215
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

1. A Pacifist Antifa Poetics.- 2. Handwriting Protest.- 3. Marks.- 4. Privilege, Property, Opprobrium.- 5. Modes of Protest.- 6. Legibility of Journal Extracts January 2020 — followed by extracts from handwritten journal.- 7. Micro and Macro Aggressions and Social Contracts.- 8. Versions of Mallarmé.- 9. Against Competition/Against Winning... and Consequence Theory.- 10. Note in Journal Extracts 2017-2020 — followed by extracts from handwritten journals.- 11. Palestine and Israel.- 12. On Injustice. On peace. On Justice. On Peace....- 13. Pandemic/s.- 14. Choice and Whose Rights We Are Talking About? Cruelty and Animal Rights... Justice, Genetics and Consensus.- 15. Empathy, Not ‘Property’.- 16. ‘Conclusion’.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“John Kinsella’s Legibility presents an impassioned and ethical claim for the politics of art-making and the artistry of political action. Through an array of discursive forms—poetry, philosophical discourse, critical readings of literary texts, agitprop salvos and rants and visually enthralling reproductions of the author’s hand-written manuscripts—Kinsella articulates an anti-fascist poetics that by its very nature must be at once ‘legible’ and ‘illegible.’ This is poetics at its best: an extended, critical thinking through of contemporary complexities that seeks not resolution, but further creative expression and new socio-aesthetic affects as the author insists again and again on the necessary convergence of poetry and activism.” (Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain (2021))

Editorial Reviews

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)

From the Publisher