A poetry of events also has to be generative — offer other possibilities, other ways of seeing. It is not enough to be settler-legacy anti-colonial and work in wish-fulfilling decolonising modes. There is a need to nuance levels of protest to be able to address injustices within injustice, and not hide behind binaries of right and wrong, good and bad.

I have never come across an event or situation that is outside or beyond critique. The question forms around who can make a critique (and it’s accepted that where and how one is ‘from’ makes a vital and vast difference … a respect for whose story is told in what way from where and when), but also how a critique is made that takes all factors outside the “self” and accordant “personality” into account.

Some poems are best left unwritten. Many more demand to be written. And what is carried forward from responses to events across decades becomes a political act in itself — “choice” is event.

*

A few months ago, the final volume of my collected poems trilogy appeared — Spirals (2014-2023, UWAP) now joins Harsh Hakea (2005-2014, UWAP) and The Ascension of Sheep (1980-2005, UWAP). These are large volumes, but this is not a “complete poems”.  The basic principle behind collation was to represent different modes of writing at different times, along with a representation of different books in as “thorough” a way as possible. This was caveated through negotiations of page count, permissions and the narrative within each volume that naturally arose with juxtaposing different materials. I was really interested in following threads of thematic and prosodic overlap that arose, and letting them become their own focal points. As various people have noted over the decades, and which I have written about, my practice is all interconnected and in many ways is intended to function as a form of rhizome.

My various anti-aesthetic thematic concerns as focalised through particular works — be they visual art, music, “nature”, animals, anti-industrialism, anti-war, ethical conundrums and so on — are all part of the broader thematics traced across the collected, as are the tensions between form and open-form, linguistic play and discursive expression, lyric vs anti-lyric. These anti-binaries underpin my prosodic/’stylistic’ correlatives, and form the ultimate purpose in making this an “entire work”: to show that any event can be recovered and made relevant as a political event in the present. A poem will eventually lose its activist event ‘purpose’ as its ‘moment’ passes, but it can be recovered, recontextualised, and brought back to act anew, and hopefully with commitment. I mostly write in-situ for a specific “cause”, and accept the degradation in intended meaning that comes with time (and also the accrual and digression of meaning as context and language shifts) — but acts of recovery can take place and the poem be given new “event” context and purpose.

On a personal level, I am in no position to virtue-signal, and, yes, I have lived parts of my life inside scare quotes. I have also witnessed some truly horrific events and have tried to find ways of writing them without become blithe or glib. My younger notebooks are full of poems trying to deal with seeing things I wish I hadn’t seen, but knowing they had to form the basis of a politics and an ethics. You hope to develop skills to deal with such complexities, and to be able to turn them into poetic interventions (ideally, to help prevent such things), but often they evade intent. The ambiguities of poetry insist on change and transformation so something new might arise out of the wastes (the “ashes”).

*

I was in Germany when the last nuclear reactor was shut down. It was a time of celebration, and the poem reproduced below was part of those celebrations.

I do not write many overtly “celebratory” political poems, but when I do, they also work as critique. This was prior to the absurd announcement of a nuclear energy future by the Australian Coalition, should it come to power, but concurrent with the equally absurd nuclear militarism of the current government’s AUKUS pact, especially its nuclear submarine “vision” it took over from the Morrison Government with gusto.

The cradle-to-grave thinking of nuclear apologists has been deep set in Australia for decades, and it’s something I’ve addressed and critiqued in poem after poem. With Drew Milne I edited the book Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android (Routledge, 2021) in an effort to concentrate thinking around the endgame that is the nuclear gambit, and recently I published the anti-colonial, anti-nuclear verse novel Cellnight (Transit Lounge, 2023).

The collected poems are in conversation with many other actions-events, and the poem “Final Nuclear Power Plant Shutdowns in Germany: a heuristic for celebration” is a projection into a nuclear-free future as well as an articulation of the reality of the ongoing threat to humanity and the biosphere.

I first protested nuclear weapons in the mid ’80s, and the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is intense and direct. There is no just and safe nuclear power, and its commercialisation is a form of extreme abuse on a total/entire biospheric scale. Indigenous lands are poisoned and threatened with the extraction of radioactive ore, there’s the legacy of the British (and Australian) “testing” between 1952 and 1963, and the theft reaches levels that should never be exposed — never mind assailed and assaulted. The poem was written about 100 km from the event of the last reactor shutdown in Germany in April 2023 and is one of the last few poems of the third volume:

Final Nuclear Power Plant Shutdowns in Germany: a heuristic for celebration

Energy consumption as fait accompli is the big stick
those who would control us wield… Use less!

Neckarwestheim II nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — froh!
Isar II nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — froh!
Emsland nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — froh!
It is raining today, but we probably won’t need to take iodine.
Under forests, roots say, No nuclear doesn’t foment coal mines.’

Neckarwestheim II nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — glücklich!
Isar II nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — glücklich!
Emsland nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — glücklich!
From a beech tree, a blue jay makes a universal declaration.
‘One small step’ needs to be reclaimed. Recalibrate the slogans.

Neckarwestheim II nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — hooray!
Isar II nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — hooray!
Emsland nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — hooray!
From the UK nuclear lobby we hear the specious tra-la-la of consumption:[1]
‘…environmentally damaging, economically  illiterate and deeply  irresponsible’. Say again?

Neckarwestheim II nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — hooray!
Isar II nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — enfin!
Emsland nuclear reactor
                shut down at midnight last night — endlich!
While French media trace the sadness of a nuclear town
in losing its raison d’être, we say, dance to Nena’s ’99 Luftballons’.

*

The poem projects into a future of total international shutdown, and a subtext of (pacifist) resistance inevitably contests the desire for nuclearisation in and of the colonial construct we call ‘Australia’.

With regard to compilation of this collected poems, each volume had its own challenges — ranging from issues of retrieval and recovery of early work, through to permissions issues (especially pertaining to what percentage of a book could be used) for later works. I have to say that my various publishers were supportive and gave me a fair bit of leeway, so though I inevitably have different views on copyright and textuality, they all accommodated the spirit of the collected.

One of the reasons I place “event” poems online (especially on our blog, Mutually Said), or share them direct via email or even as printouts, is because I believe that an activist poetry must have immediacy. A poem that is intended to “bring change”, or at least to prompt discussion, necessarily lives in its moment. I have never been interested in a curatorially decorative future for a poem, and even when I edit anthologies of “historic” poems, I do so with the present very much in mind. A poem can live “forever” of course, and its “political” relevance fluctuate, sometimes becoming more pertinent in the present than it may have been in its various pasts, but this says more about the nature of audience and curation than it does about a poet’s “activist” intents when writing a piece.

A poem can work well as a tool of change in its moment, then can be reassessed in “other lights” through the processes of history and dialogue, and then become anathema. A poem’s meaning can shift from the intent of the poet due to the changes in reading and reception, the inevitable shifts in language/expression. A poem is not a fixed “quantity”, and we can’t expect it to be. Further, a poem, for me, should have its own existence outside the “personality” and “qualities” of the poet — obviously it can only be an extension (to differing degrees depending on the approach) of the self, but it might also exist outside the self, or maybe (re)position the self, as an intervention toward or within the event.

An effective activist poem works in the conditions of its moment and presentation: if it stops bulldozers, it doesn’t matter “who” it’s by or whether the politics outside that specific event/issue are “acceptable” to others working to stop the same wrong. Where it does matter is when a creative intervention takes on the personality of the activist, and their “character” comes under scrutiny so as to be used as leverage by the perpetrators of the wrong. All things can be twisted to suit. This is how such a diabolical saying as “all is fair in love and war” can work as a joke with serious undertones. Events follow events — and consequences cascade — but in the pressure of the moment, the poem has to act there and then, regardless.

One of the stranger things about a collected poems, especially when many of the poems were perceived as being “activist” (even if this seems a stretch to those outside the making of the poem) at time of writing, is the overidentification of a poet’s life with a body of work. Individual activisms (as conveyed through individual poems, sequences, even books) are gathered under the rubric of a life’s work and that life is located in the human “demographics” as a personality, as identity. Well, out of all this, I can say that I do not feel these volumes are about “me” or require “me” in any way whatsoever. How do I align an alcoholic-addict self with an almost thirty-years-sober self? How do I align earlier personal chaos with (at least) later steady intent to see commitments through, to meet obligations in all ways possible? Do I need to? Maybe some readers will expect a collected to do just this, but my concerns are with the effectiveness of recovering poems to work in the here and now.

So, rather than a life’s work, a life of work is a better expression. A life of particular concerns that necessarily draw the messiness of a lived life into their ambit. Separable? Yes … and no. In their activist moment they exist as one form, then outside that as another? Well, I’ve never believed in the cult of pure poetry, or a higher calling, or the ‘Mallarméan vision’— but I’ve also tried to create a rhizome, something flowing across all those incidents and events, all those changes in how I live and how I’ve affected others. So, yes, the “big work”, but one that is really an array of event fragments brought into sets.

In the end, each volume says something about a period of time that is a set of events, and the volumes together offer a different set — but not a conceptually larger set than a single moment of trying to save a tree or an animal, trying to oppose war or human rights violations, trying to behave better than I have previously (and there’s been a lot of searching for ways of doing that across my life!) or aspire to a less communally and environmentally impacting way of life.

I kept all of this in mind when collating the three volumes, and hoped with each of them to create something relevant to the present, something that speaks across changes of perception (in “public” and maybe even “private” senses), across shifts in cultures of publishing and presentation, across different “geographising” (which I oppose), and across the restrictive readings of “national identity”.

I am of no nation. I respect and try to work towards First Nations positionality in all things, but I am not directly part of it. I am of various communities, and am proud to be so, but I am not a marker of any community. I am an animal rights activist who advocates for animals (and a vegan mode of living), but I can only speak from an anthropocentric position, of course. I am an environmentalist who learns most by forgetting my learning and “being” whilst resisting in every peaceful way I can the violence against environment. Where Indigenous knowledge is offered, I try to learn from it, grow through it. I try to understand habitats in more effective and just ways. I am a pacifist. And I am an anarchist who has no belief in the controls of the state, corporations, the military. I believe in communal consensus-based living that respects Indigenous country and knowledge.

All of this has to “live” in the collected without it becoming a retrospective or record of past personal or public events. All of it has to be of now. Recovery of texts becomes a resituating of poems in a search for immediacy and immediate political relevance. In many ways, my essay-book Legibility: an anti-fascist poetics (Palgrave, 2022) is “about” these issues and discusses them in more detail.

*

Apropos of all this, I offer in closing a poem that wasn’t included in volume one, though it was part of some archival notebooks from which a couple of poems that fitted with earlier published sequences were “recovered”. I don”t regret not including this, as my “orchard poems” of 1989 are represented by a number of others that came from books such as Eschatologies (1992), but coming across it again recently I was back in the moment/s of philosophical engagement with the old Dalmatian orchardist who refused to sell-up as suburbs surrounded the groves of fruit trees he tended (which involved its own complexities!).

The ’orchardist’ poems were activist events for me at the time — discussions about human damage (which the orchardist passionately lamented), about the contradictions of fruit and toxic spray (which he used liberally), about age and youth, and about the degradations of greed (the developers truly were closing in). My personal/self-background detail was painful… I was alcoholic and struggling to maintain stability and responsibility, and a source of chaos in my family-community structures. The personal is relevant, of course, but the ‘event’ of resistance to capitalist exploitation, the entangled issue of colonialism and its subsets (of which the orchard was one and my presence another) meant the poems would have likely been written (if in a very different form) even if I had been living under different circumstances.  And that’s the point I am trying to make.

“Green Eyes” is not a poem with any particular claim to inclusion in the collected poems, but it is a silent/absent/tangential part of them. I would write it very differently now (certainly lineate it differently, and probably compact further — or write it as a long-line narrative, or maybe as paratactic variations), but it was of its moment, and it was an event within a broader immanent event. This is part of an attempted recovery to make relevant as political act.

Green Eyes

an ‘orchard poem’ recovered from a notebook (1989)

An orchard in one
of the last suburbs

between highway
& hills;

I had asked for work —
‘lots of work no money’;

he remembers us
& always acknowledges

though slightly;
yesterday we greeted

him emerging
from the oranges

& he asked if I was
working hard at pushing

the pram — I laughed
as only one could

when asked in such
a condescending fashion —

& he held up pieces of fruit —
‘Do you know what

these are?’ Figs,
we replied;

‘Green eyes — here,
have some… most people

wouldn’t know
what they were

even if they were growing
under their noses.’

[1] “Tom Greatrex, chief executive of the UK’s Nuclear Industry Association, said the phaseout would worsen carbon emissions and ‘for a country supposedly renowned for its logical and evidence-driven approach is environmentally damaging, economically illiterate and deeply irresponsible’”.

Image: The Neckarwestheim power plant in 2009 (Flickr)