WesterlyMagazine

‘Graphology Motes’ by John Kinsella

John Kinsella’s most recent works include the three volumes of his collected poems, The Ascension of Sheep, Harsh Hakea and Spirals (UWAP, 2022/23/24) and the short story collection Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024).

A note from the editor

The page constraints of print publishing are one of the constant hindrances of editing a magazine like Westerly: we always, always want to publish more work than we have space for. This is especially so in the case of John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Motes’ and ‘Graphology Mills’, which will appear on this blog over the next week or so. To preface these works, John has provided a brief essay introducing this specific iteration of his project. In Issue 69.2 of Westerly, available here, you can see one part of the sequence collected below: the beautiful and gyring ‘Mote’, which shows, as John says, that ‘nothing is fixed, and nothing less so than a photograph’.

—Daniel Juckes, April 2025

Graphology Motes and Mills

‘Graphology Motes and Mills’ is a recent subset of my ‘lifework’ Graphology (begun in the mid ’90s). Working through a philosophy of an interactive poetics that involves handwriting, typography (manual typewriters and digital), photography, painting and drawing (especially coloured pencil drawing), short experimental film-making, sound-making and ‘concretion’ (installation-based writing), this work builds on even older photo-art-poetry sequential and cyclical work commenced in the early 1980s.

As with the book Shadings, these works create psychogeographic conversations between different topographies, ecotones and cultural zones. With regard to these works, I have been writing out of ‘Jam Tree Gully’ where we live in the Western Australian ‘wheatbelt’ on stolen Ballardong Noongar boodja, along the ‘borders’ of Whadjuk and Yued boodjas, and drew visual images from along the Gulgulgar Beeliar and its hinterlands down over the Scarp onto the coastal plain and along the banks of the Derbarl Yerrigan and also Djarlgarro Beeliar.

My primary concerns are necessarily (anti)colonialism and its ongoing markers (especially the edifices of mining and property), and damage and interruptions to environment (in ‘Mote’ the stick in the water becomes a symbol of agricultural and urban run-off polluting the river… the mote in its eye), ‘but’ there are also attendant ‘sense’ responses to immediacy that are then juxtaposed against these primary concerns. How can the image avoid the lies of representation?

What I mean by this is that we might too readily assume that a photo (‘undoctored’) tells implicit truths, might be true to an observation in a specific time and place and, as such, acts as a record, a document. But I contest this: I believe a photo risks only having ‘status’ as a photo, as artifice, when we take a ‘snap’, and we need to take every photo further than that. Really, this says more about how we use and relate to photos than the taking of photos themselves, but it is always something in the back of my mind. The photo holds so many (often) unacknowledged responsibilities, just as, say, an object such as a flour mill (a very particular marker of colonialism in these sequences) or a heat-exchange hot water system might. There is always cause and effect, and a copy of an original doesn’t make that copy less relevant, nor less implicated in the broader wrongs of its presence. [see: https://arena.org.au/anti-material-functions/]

By introducing written language, by interpreting light and form, one might at least attempt to reveal aspects of a place/shape that you experience in that moment and place, but are lost in the very idea of record. Some things a photo ‘represents’ might not be appropriate to reveal, but one might also critique one’s own process by investigating further what is photographed and what is written. I try to note and even instil tensions in my evocations of words and visual images, and there’s always a consciousness of the sounds and physical sensations (tactility) around the event of a photo. Literary allusions are a matter of familiarity or research, but photographic illusions are very often about sensibility in viewing. I do and don’t mean a Bergeresque ‘ways of seeing’, but/and I certainly mean the social and cultural implications of not only experiencing but making, and making in the sense of the ‘creator’ (who never is… it’s always of the many), as well as the way a person experiencing the texts makes their own meaning through associative familiarity or compensation for a lack of familiarity (the uncanny).

In a cycle such as ‘Ghost Vessels’, a sense of time shifting with the river is constructed through the shifts in narrative—from this photo/text to that photo/text, but also in the narrative itself. Who is imposing the reading of ‘ghost’ on what is essentially predictable, quotidian, even mundane? Other people are maybe looking at what is being photographed at that very moment and having very different thoughts (or even similar thoughts) regarding what is roughly the same framing.

Roughly—that’s it, isn’t it. It’s never the same though we might share culpabilities and responsibilities for the macro-issues around our presence, an object’s presence, and the circumstances surrounding the conditions of the moment. All such issues are, of course, verbally in play at the moment I compile a work, and I try to reflect this in the shifts in address, the pull between rhetoric and lyric that underpins the poems. Comments, observations and ‘feelings’ of words that won’t be constrained. In trying to intertwine all my practice, it’s inevitable that my other poetry concerns will flow in and out of the texts (and images). The other main focus of my work in recent years (and much further back) has been metamorphosis: change and stasis are in constant dialogue.

I have had the good fortune to work with some very fine artist-photographers over the years, and I always think of their diverse but inevitably crisp, dense, ‘moody’, sensitised and highly articulate image making. I have discussed working with them in various articles and books, but I have rarely mentioned that learning to conduct the whole photographic process at school was a big part of it. The photos I most enjoyed were those that were failures in the dark room, as much as failures of illumination, shutter speed choice and so on. Darkroom failures reminded me of black and white painting or charcoal drawing. I am interested in low-grade off-key interrupted images. I am interested in their degradation because I find the process of looking and ‘recording’ intrusive (of both animate and inanimate ‘subjects’) and often at odds with the ‘subject matter’. The ironies cannot be resolved but they can be critiqued, and their interpretation critiqued further.

For many years I stopped making photo images for vegan reasons, until we found one brand of film and its developing that was vegan. Then came digital photography and the ethical issues around its machinery (as there are ethical issues around any machinery). I try to diverge (not in these sequences/cycles) by using a pinhole approach then drawing the image I don’t actually capture, and many other bizarreries of approach. Point is: nothing is fixed, and nothing less so than a photograph. And I feel the same about words… they dissolve into new words and new ways of expression. We know of the ‘loan word’, but there are also created and gifted words along with the stolen. We negotiate language usage. We have to. And these sequences are intended to be active negotiations on various lexical and sensory levels.

I have tried to articulate these issues at length in a manifesto ‘Rhetorical fractures: poems, photos, power stations, gardens, glasshouses, ghosts and the essay’, found here, but ultimately feel the sequences/cycles generate their own form of conversation. Or, at least, I hope they do.

—John Kinsella, April 2025

Graphology Motes

Flash Burn

Retinal arc to loss
 to compensate
 for staying indoors

 while falling
 is incremental glaze.
Someone is collecting

from pools of dysphoria,
someone is salting
 distress. This labour

 of ripples, system
 of indents and float.
Red is the legacy

and red the capture.
 Lore of walking
 on water realistic
as a hole to fall through.

Flash burn is reflective—
tissue undescribed
 in medicine. This

 is what I unfold
from, cumulative
as lymph, and all

those interactions
 rendered as practicums
 in broader pictorials,
lesser syzygies.

Seamstress is plangent
in one-sided moon,
 the half we lock

 horns with, lining
up the horizon.
Impressions made

before eyes give way
 to thermoforming,
 this most personal

of anecdotes set against
 the truest sites of protest…
 with less Insta moments
and more collocations.

The wrap of metamorphosis
 or application of skin;            
 as rain complements

 an arc of solar bubbles!
 It’s too easy to say shadows
when the sun has rescinded

a hole from your retina,
 which can’t happen, won’t            
 happen, locked under

 the planetarium’s arc.
 When reflections
of lost birds are no longer

recognised, the tune
 of a pied butcherbird
 will pitch and fork, frogs
discrete undercover.

Ghost Vessels

Flou… French past-tenses disturb the river
as much as English-language blurring. That’s
 a ghost rendering of vague proportions

as I think of all the boats that have sailed
 past me inland, sails limp in high winds.
Then there’s that twin-masted ghost ship

 my brother painted as photo—pressed
between pages of Finnegans Wake            
 and all those exhibits of vernacular.

Making out detail from what is hauled
 from down below onto anti-slip decks,
forcing the aquatic to breathe air

and less refracted moonlight. A jetty
for boarding but not for unloading
 is a version of piracy cormorants

 launch from. Sails will not dry
to their essence, even when slightly            
 above the meniscus—sepia air

is pulverulent. Ribs bare to Roaring Forties,
splayed in an estuarial ‘hideaway’,
 or up above the sandbar; interstices

unhinged in what is taken back.
 Transferred. Moonshocked. Painted
as it bobs where few will see clearly

that it’s entirely still, a Mal de
 debarquement as we leave
an equilibrium we demand            
 more than expect.

I return to search if my doubts
 will surface again, the stillest waters
 turbulent with folds of activities
that shuffle enclosures of light.

Boat to carry away the familiar
 shift in wind’s direction,
shape of hull and depth of keel
 in a shallow ablative.

The metal of phantom’s levers
the cultural co-ordinates of style;
 the evidence of openness
 and collusion of gathering.

Anaesthetic to reminiscence.
To moor a recurrent dream image.
 What clings to an aged hull
 as an argosy to nowhere,

 where here is so aching
 with those accretions of rip-offs.
To be laden with mis-readings,
traces of ectoplasmic sealant. Rust.

CODA

How we might board
 the nightly appearance
 on localised waters—
crabs’ lives wrecked

by cable ties measured
 precisely as threat;
suppositions of mesmerism,
birdcalls from emptying tracts.

Mote

Prologue as reminder
 of cloudcrash
causing so much stress

in counterpoint—properties
 of contamination
with mote driven

to estuary, to ocean.
 All this auto-
biography

floating towards            
 risk of accrual
or crucial past-

time nuclei;
 breaking surface-
tension midriver.

And here, extracted by floaters
 laid out as buoyancy,
believing they might improve

the river’s health, its depth
 of imagery. Every mirror-
work habit, every involution

of medium and storm residue.
 Sun colourings flexing
outside a speculative storyline,

washed deep in the spark.
 A new style of hubris,
a monochromatic rondo.

Weeks later, re-enacted
 memories
never full formulated.

Teals and coots plying
 the channels,
ignited by inevitability.

Don’t take the flood of blue
 as a sign of demission,
of casual conversation

around boats resigned
 as antifouling
paint. Dorsal vibrations.

Given form by the vapours,
 the blood-letting
of float-bladders,

breakdown of feathers.
 So fauvist, these interlopers,
so keen to decorate.

Twin modes of hypnosis,
 but not a dualism. In one eye
we dream black and white,

in the other something
 called ‘colour’
which is supervividly

disruptive. Mass floater
 rebellion.
Bas relief of organophosphates.

Compass needle wild
 on axion
is how I came to gather

before bodily collapse
 drove me back
to the source; more

inorganic expressions
 of micro-
organism

bewilderment,
 apexless
canopy, deflation.

Scratching allusions
 to Rimbaud’s
watercraft. Dry docks.

Decodings begin here
 without disruption
in so many stories.

Ink seepage
 from brownfield sites
greened over

into monochromatic
 promises, swift
as agrichemicals.

Every lapsed horizon,
 every meditation
to forget sequalae:

how to arrange
 images
from distressed

input, glorious
 needles
of pressure-gauges.

Let’s drift
 over
the sad bream.

Ripple attenuation
 focuses drift
and sweep;

yard arm
 needle valve
scriptum;

photometer,
 colourimeter,
nephelometer;

float and fly thru
 turbidity
of pareidolia.

The numerous processes
 a needle undergoes
to become an interlocutor,

a binder, a stretcher
 of tales: drawn wire
stamped and milled,

annealed finished straightened,
 washed plated polished,
to eventually tarnish

into world, nickel-plated
 truisms
never kind to reflections.

Will someone who is wealthy,
 who is ‘rolling in it’,
see the samizdat

behind the discharge
 of ‘productivity’?
Lapse in micro-sensitivities.
Higher quality
 medical treatment
might mean seeing

more ‘clearly’
 those variations
in the pH

of macroinvertebrate
 afterlife,
the sputtered backs of mirrors,

compound interest
 of the vacuum.
Scintillas of poverty—

what’s viewed from the bank,
 what’s consumed
from laminae

which cannot evade
 attacks
from the surface.

Crumpled and tossed.
 Cloudmass:
density by volume. Tonality.

Riverfall

Wherein clarity being searched
a life opening out of anxiety,
 layer of river shifting to sky—

film or filament, photosensitive
as it has been prior to ‘invention’—
 glaze of lift rising to top out

a channel of wintering aquatics.
All those commencements,
 selective inquiries—gulls

and pelicans of heavier
mediums demi-loving the new dominion
 of half-light. Refraction.

I had to find a way to meet x-ray intersections.
 There is no such things as ‘uninhabited’.
When I rise or sink it will be at a tangent.

Turning light inside out as if yesterday—
 here is where I might have painted
a cormorant decorating with driftwood or rushes.

Under the skin it mellows
before replicating, building
 a temporary structure

as intense as the life
sustaining it. How far
 from a flush mouth

can a cuttlefish venture—
aragonite of cuttlebone
 a balloon that stays inflated

under the crow’s nest—
and can swallows find a way            
 out of Hansard?

Had to paint out old images
 and call work an undercoat,
nothing covering completely

though depth at certain points.
 Habitation and protection
from external elements—

rachis, barbs and hamuli
 making up an infrastructure
of telegraphic paragraphs.

How do you wrap your pinions
around a dorsal fin? Well, as such,            
 emboldened by test cases

and materials testing. Rising
on boiler hoist to inject            
 a frescoed ceiling. Absolute

belief in better concentration,
in all mirror images and facsimiles
 wading across lateral markings.

CODA

A week on the travelator around the sun
and light has had little chance to anneal
 what’s been undone. It cannot outrun

the rewriting of the rewriting and so on.
It’s not ad infinitum, it’s a busting of protocols.            
 Non-aligned blossom falls as a crow

drops a cleaned plastic food container
 onto a vehicle roof from the tree
we automatically connect with said blossom.

Kurosawa’s Dreams swirls where foxes
would roam if they could make it this
 far into the city. And I’m always

thinking Van Gogh when I enter
the sky without flying. Over thirty
 years since the screening, and it’s

more vivid than yesterday. River
 tempered to a steely grey, slicked
repetition stripped of motifs.

You Cannot Deny the Truth of What is There

Brooklyn Bridge
 is not much of a stretch
to inland gulls.

To what use are you
 going to put this tension?
Hand over hand,

climbing the apex
 of a white swan’s DNA,
unable to deny

the true verticals
 of swallows, aspirations
of herein, always.

This isn’t a silence
 with loss
of attendant senses—

corella neurons
 signal a contraction
of motor function.

Ergo, a neurology
 of tenancy—adapting
to pine festoons.

It can work separately
 from encounter—
this reconstruction

of an occasion
 and all such occasions
we will miss.

A childhood friend—heron!
 Can I co-opt you
into my sixth decade,

whatever is said
 about lifespans? Remember?
it enquires, as do I.

Never deny the handful
 of sand. Never.
Never block the path

of the serpent—
 ride high over the weir,
consider refractions,

moving with respect
 through the shadows,
across varying depths.

So tense now so little give
 in wingspan ratio
and immersive reflections

of drought and storm-
 trammelled affections;
but to cross against

the flow, to cross
 with the foot-traffic?
To follow in its wake.

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