The careful indeterminacy of that background and the general sentiment of the line somehow justified the enforced idleness which lay ahead of me: a seven hour flight, followed by a three hour layover, another three hour flight, and finally a two hour train from Lisbon north to Coimbra.

Next morning in the central dining room of Frankfurt International (where I seem to have been breakfasting since I was twenty) I listened to Janácek on my Discman, while reading an article about Bach in the English version of the Frankfurt Zeitung that comes bundled with the Herald Tribune. I sipped my Dortmund, and enjoyed - after the general antisepsis of America - a truly international bouquet comprised of at least three different (that I could identify) state monopolized tobacco products. My wurst and sauerkraut would arrive presently. I love to eat alone and read, and I had purposely saved Remnick’s "Into The Clear" to read over my favorite meal of the day, breakfast, in one of my favorite airports in Europe, Frankfurt.

At one point in his article Remnick draws Roth out on the subject of readers, specifically the dwindling supply of serious ones: "Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced." His conclusion nicely damns us all. "Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared."

*

Following my own habit of mind, I came upon www.richmondreview.co.uk (The Richmond Review) via one its featured authors, the novelist and essayist Tim Parks, whose work in The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books has been a challenging consolation over the last two years. In a recent essay on Leopardi ( http://www.nybooks.com ) Parks is not only excellent on the life of the poet, and on the cultural history of Italy, but his insight into the manner in which art is born of disaffection is profound.

With its cobalt blue and gold frame The Richmond Review looks more like a package of Rothmans than a zine.

The Richmond Review, the editors inform us on their "Who We Are" page, is "the UK's first literary magazine to be published exclusively on the World Wide Web". It was established in 1995, half a decade ago, which in web-years makes it middle aged, say fifty. Indeed, a fifties-something sobriety (or is it simply Englishness?) marks everything about RR, from its graphical cast to its eloquently modest number of monthly selections. (I’ve come to admire lit-zines that steer away from the muddle of inclusiveness, and strive to resurrect that sense of discrimination that characterized the small magazines of the earlier half of the last century). At RR editorial restraint is matched by the sheer quality of writers like Tim Parks, John Kinsella and the formidable James Wood.

Compared to the down under day-glow of Jacket (C.R. 1) RR’s presentation is distinctly anti-Edwardian. With its cobalt blue and gold frame it looks more like a package of Rothmans than a zine. On the day that I first came across it, leading selections included "Five Poems by John Kinsella"; "The Punch Lives" an article by Susan Shapiro from the VLS about literary nastiness; and a review of Charles Fernybough’s The Auctioneer, by James Wood. I thought, this is exactly what a lit-zine should do, give us the best poets and fictionalists, a look at (and instant access to) the best of what other zines are publishing, and book reviewers of discrimination who are impelling that irritated art into the new century. Richmond Review sets these options off in three easily navigable columns, and keeps an excellent library of their own features just behind the arras.

If it was Tim Parks who drew me to the Review, John Kinsella was the surprise of the day. My habit of mind had already failed to notice Kinsella, or his work, on two separate occasions. The first was when he was in attendance at the Encontros Internacionais de Poesia at the Faculty of Letters in Coimbra, where I have toiled away as a lecturer in English for the last fourteen years, and the second was when I reviewed The Cortland Review in Cyber Rambler 4, where he must have gotten buried beneath the prevailing weather of the site. Compliments then to the RR for keeping out of the way of its own good works!

*

Our initial impression of John Kinsella’s poetry must come from its densely textured music. However, scratching the surface a bit, even in this short selection of five poems, convinces us that he is engaged with the world more directly and politically than the majority of his contemporaries. Dig a little deeper and you become aware that issues are at stake: big awkward issues! Should we eat meat? Why do we pollute? Which gods do we implicate with our money? What is the nature of power? If it is often the case that what impels a poet ideologically is of less consequence finally than the resulting music, Kinsella’s politics exert a more essential pressure on the taut poetic surfaces that they sponsor. There is a tense symbiosis between the political rage which urges his poems toward directness, and his classical word sense. By "classical" I mean there is less abstraction per stress, per line, per poem than there is in poets writing in what we have come to identify as a post-modernist mode. Kinsella simply sidesteps the gratuitous with more efficiency than most.

Like the political Heaney, Kinsella’s agendas seem spiraled genetically into the musical code.

But it is the music which, as it should, first excites. It is carved as much out of poetic tradition as the Australian outback. Kinsella’s literary antecedents seem to be everywhere, but are grounded in the English pastoral tradition. His diction - in the raspy clutter of bush and paddock. One might almost be reminded of Seamus Heaney, but Kinsella’s poems are cast on a larger and more rugged scale, their sky is more open, their landscapes less tamed, and their politics far less concentrated. Yet like the political Heaney, Kinsella’s agendas seem spiraled genetically into the musical code. He is that rare poet of the Left who has sidestepped the dominant postmodern nihilisms, whose poems are still about things, and who, in fact, proposes a revalidation of the power of poetry’s utile and worldly side. One feels a kinship with Clare, although a more knowing Clare, and with Wordsworth in his "Resolution and Independence" in which the transforming potential of landscape - both spiritual and political - become the principle source of lyric figuration.

"Firebox", one of the five poems published currently at The Richmond Review, is to my mind a minor masterpiece. The author himself (in the wonderfully intense interview with Michael Bradshaw that accompanies the selection of poems) refers to it as "a radical pastoral". It is certainly Frost whose spirit underlines the poem’s matte lyricism. It reads like something between "Mending Wall" and "Home Burial", the latter for its austere portrait of domestic drama, the former for its hell bent attempt to draw dialogue, like fire, out of the "other". "Firebox" begins with that great formula of all disgruntled Romantics: anger contemplated in tranquility.

It angered him that she would call it a "firebox" -
"It’s a woodbox" he'd say, filling it with offcuts
 from old railway sleepers
 and fence posts, storm-felled trees
and once brilliant stands of blackbutt. He continued
to complain after she’d gone inside - "a woodbox!"
 again and again - each
piece perfectly stacked, the box as full as it could be

The exquisitely calibrated flatness of this music, the dead-pan delineation of the hurt male placed outside articulation, his angers and frustrations masterfully inflected through his harping on the names of things: these aural and thematic motifs echo Frost. Indeed, the following lines from "Home Burial" would almost seem to flow right out of Kinsella’s first stanza.

A man must partly give up being a man
With women-folk. We could have some arrangement
By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you’re a-mind to name.

Frost's themes will be picked up and elaborated upon in the rest of the poem. But they are all there incipiently in this first stanza: the pacing; the monotonic lines; the way the stanzaic structure is designed to encase the dialogue (which causes the prosaic immediacies of the drama to burst against the containing poetic); man and wife reduced to thrusting pronouns; and most of all the abrupt almost callous entry into the knit of the argument: "It angered him that she would call it a 'firebox'". Likewise are the central themes of the poem: male isolation in the misnomered world of women; male recourse to the physical world, to life and order, to obsessional repetition; the female to the spiritual, the mythical and to death. Frost’s major themes are replayed in Kinsella’s tight parable of male brutality. Somewhere Vermont, is replaced by Somewhere Outback. The child’s grave by the firebox. The only difference is that Kinsella’s disgruntled male gets away with murder, literally.

If, as Kinsella says in his interview with Bradshaw, this is a "radical pastoral", or "anti-pastoral" poem, it is so in the way that finally Randall Jarrell was to point out that Frost’s best poems were. "Besides the Frost that everyone knows there is one whom no one even talks about". Jarrell went on in his now notorious essay, "The Other Frost", to declare that the attitude expressed by this poetry "at its most extreme, makes pessimism seem a hopeful evasion; they begin with a flat and terrible reproduction of the evil in the world and end by saying: It’s so; and there’s nothing you can do about it"

The poem’s heterodoxy - its radicalism, in the author’s words - is in the fact that neither the workshop-trained poet, nor the poet of deconstruction would likely manage it.

Just as Jarrell needed to dislodge Frost from his own, at times, self-created Longfellowianism, Kinsella might be tugged out of the Derridian niche American language poets - and perhaps the poet himself - have liked to put him in. The point is that Kinsella is doing nothing new in "Firebox", nothing that Frost didn’t do, or Hardy before him, or Wordsworth. In fact he is doing something quite old. The poem’s heterodoxy - its radicalism, in the author’s words - is in the fact that neither the workshop-trained poet, nor the poet of deconstruction would likely manage it. William Empson spoke of "the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple." This "poison pastoral" does just that, locating the complexity in so-called ordinary lives. Likewise, the simplicity of the narrative itself belies the complexity of the extended figuration of "firebox" and "snake". The whole of the poem is saturated with the flat resiliency of evil. A keen eye and an insight into character fuse in a language grounded in a composure and knowledge beyond mere control or technique.

He
sees a snake - a dugite -
In his mind’s eye - it’s coiled and burning at the core
Of the woodpile. He unpacks the stack with thick gloves
And pinches it firmly
Behind the head - like on television. He sees

It in the woodbox which is half full. He sees
It inside and watches it slither down into the puzzle.

Lyn Hejinian has referred to Kinsella’s two bodies of work, one narrative and meditative, the other experimental. "Untitled", also from the RR selection, would seem to present a third mode, that of a directly engaged poetry which questions the presumptions of the right as well as of the left, and which formulates an ethics which Hejinian herself, and most "Language Poets" (perhaps with the exclusion of Bob Perleman) would perhaps imply, but never articulate so forcefully.

 "Untitled"
 The Work Which Established Hirst's Reputation In The British Art World
 Is Entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone
 Living (Pl.324), It Consists Of A Dead Tiger Shark Floating In A Tank Of
 Preservative Fluid. The Shark Has Been Balanced And Weighted So That It
 Floats In The Middle Of Its Tank, Just As Though It Were Floating In Its
 Natural Element. (Artoday, Edward Lucie-Smith, Phaidon, 1995) or The Use
 of The Word "Its"
 Its tank is as
 an emerald and chilled sea,
 drenched in protean light,
 its gut filled with the leaden boots
 of a lost solo circumnavigator,
 tropical conjuring
 of the Other,
 in this Albion, this island state
 as rare as uniqueness
 or that perfect steak,
 that attracted language-wise
 and even geographically
 Joseph Conrad,
 and islanders such as myself
 who know that sharks
 can't afford to miss a beat -
 drowning a threat to the machine that drives
 their jaws, like art
 and patronage
 and representation: not the life-mechanism
 but the weighting of a non-expanding universe;
 hey, Damien, maybe
 you've backed the wrong shark?
 "It" the elemental nature, O
 composited artist
 of the dead, as if it belongs
 to its own patch of turf,
 the flesh advertised
 (Saatchi Collection)
 like a tiger consuming villagers
 and being shot
 out of "necessity", its skin
 elemental in its stately spread,
 trophy with unique
 life-giving properties,
 a comfort to the living,
 O enfant terrible,
 provocateur,
 bête noire
 ad infinitum, fluid

The radicalism of "Untitled" - a poem which addresses a work by Damien Hirst - is of a different, more explicit type than that which Hejinian has in mind. The long note (contextualizing the poem) imposingly set between its title and its body, acts as a barrier, or rather an entrance gate to the poem. The note is divided into two subtitles, the second indicating that the poem itself will analyze the first subtitle, which reads, in the language of art-crit, like a caption to Hirst’s infamous shark. This rather extra-poetic wager to establish a priori the poem’s point of view goes against inherited notions of the lyric poem’s inbuilt discretion. Topicality is foisted upon us, and that foisting is part of the poem’s essential trope. Kinsella doesn’t mince words. In his interview he says: "As a vegan, I think Hirst’s art stinks."

There are many precedents for this kind of deliberateness. 18th Century satire thrives on biting directness as much as it does on ludic topicality. Since then poetry not written in English, especially that which has been written under the pall of oppression, has been oft employed as a weapon of political conviction, and as a means of criticism. However, from the Romantics our tradition has seen a rise - as, generally, traditional religion weakens - in the religious aestheticization of poetry, and the consequential attenuation of that notion of poetry as écriture that drove the likes of Pope and Dryden. This "spiritualizing" of poetry reaches its apotheosis in Wallace Stevens who was quite open about his conception of poetry as a substitute for religion, a supreme fiction. Since the Romantic period English speaking readers, of poetry written in English, have always wondered if baldly political poetry doesn’t somehow beg the question. Is it easier for us to stomach foreign poets of engagement like Neruda, or Vallejo, Nazim Hikmet, or Vladimir Mayakovsky, simply because we are protected from their brash topicalities by the mollifying effects of translation? Why should we require of poets writing in English to work harder at that age old separation of art and politics anyway?

There is no doubt that John Kinsella lets politics seep into his poetry, and poetry back into his politics. The short audience he grants the Richmond Review overflows with the need to get things said that could only be registered obliquely in even the most transparent lyric. But there are indications of modesty merely in the fact that such a good poet would sport himself so vigorously in the vulnerable forms of interview and web list. His argument with Hirst is essentially that the poète maudit of conceptual art can’t have his cake and eat it too. But his charge that there is no ethical content in Hirst’s art is misdirected. Conceptual art, like political art, needs an ethical rudder to steer with. It’s content is moral rather than, strictly speaking, aesthetical. Without the steering device of "the issue", it becomes - and much of it is - pointless. Hirst’s ethics may be outmoded, but they still remark on our fraught relationship with the animal world. A cow in a bath of formaldehyde comments so obviously on questions of vivisection as to beggar Kinsella’s thesis on the spot.

Conceptual art, like political art, needs an ethical rudder to steer with. Without the steering device of "the issue", it becomes - and much of it is - pointless.

More interestingly, Kinsella’s gripe with Damien Hirst signals a new type of left-wing thinker. (One is unsure whether the old left/right dichotomy still applies.) This thinker, be he or she artist, intellectual or activist, is evolving away from philosophical materialism, and lines of critique which run from Hegel and Marx through French "Deconstruction", and all the way to Durham, North Carolina, erstwhile redoubt of Stanley Fish. Indeed, Fish’s work, more than, say, Fredric Jameson’s (which preserves a tone of Marxian orthodoxy) has fueled Deconstruction’s American denouement. In fact, why this irrepressibly French discours - embodied variously in the mandarin trilogy of Foucault, Barthes and Derrida - should have ended up as the Academic version of corporate English remains the million dollar question. It’s as though Fish had come along to complete the fourth drama of the tetralogy with the required satire. As Terry Eagleton points out in a recent article in The London Review of Books on Fish’s latest, The Trouble with Principle, it "is one of the minor symptoms of mental decline of the United States that Stanley Fish is thought to be on the left. What Fish has in fact done is to hijack an apparently radical epistemology for tamely conservative ends." Eagleton himself embarks in his latest work, The Idea of Culture, on a thoroughgoing reevaluation of the evolving uses of culture. And what he has to say - while vigorously outlining the fragmentizing descent into theory on the part of the academic left - suitably foregrounds the work of John Kinsella.

"In the face of this cultural efflorescence, one sober fact needs to be recalled. The primary problems which we confront in the new millennium - war, famine, poverty, disease, debt, drugs, environmental pollution, the displacement of peoples - are not especially "cultural" at all. They are not primarily questions of value, symbolism, language, tradition, belonging or identity, least of all the arts. Cultural theorists qua cultural theorists have precious little to contribute to their resolution. In the new millennium, astonishingly, humankind faces pretty much the kinds of material problems it always has, with a few novel ones like debt, drugs and nuclear armaments thrown in for good measure."
(The Idea of Culture, p.135, Blackwell Publishers.)

The issues Kinsella takes up in his poetry are very similar to the ones which Eagleton concludes will neither be resolved in the theory barns, nor by "the arts". What is new about Kinsella’s work is not only - as Harold Bloom loudly proclaims - its "astonishing fecundity and splendor", but the way it codifies a shift in our thinking generally. Kinsella has managed to dovetail broader social concerns with an acute and ambitious sense of the aesthetic. This new radicalism is founded on a deft blending of linguistic experiment with a return to a feeling for the communicative powers of poetry and its capacity to affect the social body.

Kinsella’s willingness to take on the question of poetry’s irrelevance is all too apparent. In his discussion with Bradshaw he seems to address Eagleton’s rather Audenesque reluctance to include "the arts" in a solution. In the interview he directly contradicts Auden´s by now sacrosanct reckoning that the aesthetic is essentially autonomous, and that genuine art is sublimely useless, that, in sum, "poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/ In the valley of its saying". Kinsella’s retort to this is that "it does still make things happen - both on the fugitive and the direct levels." By this I take Kinsella to mean that poetry is capable of influencing its readers in Arnoldian fashion, in the sense that culture moralizes generally to produce better citizens; its effects are not direct but "fugitive"; they somehow get in through the back door. More of a challenge to our still prevailing "new critical" notion that the aesthetic is sublimely useless and therefore absolutely necessary is Kinsella’s idea that art can have a "direct" influence, that it can mobilize us to do things, that poetry can be an exalted means to a crucial end.

The context of Kinsella’s wager for the utile aesthetic must be seen against a tradition of "l’art pour l’art" , Benjamin Constant’s 1804 expression from his Journal intime, which was derived from Kant’s view of art as "purposiveness without purpose" and which became the battle cry for 19th Century French Aestheticism. The tradition in English runs from Oscar Wilde to John Ashbery, and finds its later day theoreticians in the new critics. In 1938, a year before Auden’s famous lines were penned, the twenty-five year old Delmore Schwartz would declare in a letter to Allen Tate that it seemed to him "that one must begin by taking as incontrovertible and inescapable and absolutely necessary Eliot’s remark in the Dante essay that there is no such thing as literature or poetry, both disappear, if for a moment we permit ourselves to judge a poem in terms of the validity of its beliefs (qua beliefs)." The imperatives of youth aside, Schwartz is simply restating what would become untouchable orthodoxy for three generations of poets to follow. Eliot in his essay on Dante is of course a degree more subtle. What is remarkable about Eliot’s pronouncements, which predate Scwhartz’s letter by a decade, is their degree of hedging. His stress is on not the validity of beliefs but the reader’s capacity to suspend both belief and disbelief. "What is necessary to appreciate the poetry of the Purgatorio is not belief, but suspension of belief." This is perhaps refined in a previous statement: "You are not called upon to believe what Dante believed, for your belief will not give you a groat’s worth more of understanding and appreciation; but you are called upon more and more to understand it. If you read poetry as poetry, you will 'believe' in Dante’s theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of his journey; that is you suspend both belief and disbelief."

If so much of Eliot’s poetic was grounded in the "willing suspension of disbelief" why is it that it is has taken critics and readers so long to produce an alternative response which might derive from the quieter plea to "more and more understand it" - that is, to see that the suspension of disbelief is separated by the merest shade from the willing provision of belief, something akin to Keats' negative capability raised to a systematic sympathy, to a level of "understanding" in Eliot’s words. Eliot’s own "Quartets" require such a response if we are to get beyond characteristic dismissals of the poem and of his late career in general. Helen Vendler’s early 1970’s conclusion that the poetry got "feebler and feebler through the tracts of the Quartets" and that Eliot’s "career tailed off more disastrously than any other in living memory, with only sporadic lines reminding a reader of what Eliot once had been" seems impatient and dated. It has, at any rate, little to do with my own attachment to "the roses" that had "the look of flowers that are looked at" or to the "bedded axle-tree" and even, as the belief of reading takes hold, to "the still point of the turning world."

More of a challenge is Kinsella’s idea that art can have a "direct" influence, that it can mobilize us to do things.

In a secular age politics is a continuation of religion by other means. Kinsella is dead serious when he says that "as a vegan" he thinks Hirst’s art STINKS. Can we properly call such forthrightness religious, even if it rings with the categorical imperatives of religious belief? What was it that Thomas Merton said about the great communist poet César Vallejo? - that he was "the greatest catholic poet since Dante - by catholic, I mean universal." This is not the place to sort out the conundrum which leads from religion to the Arnoldian faith in culture, and thereupon to the religiously aggressive defense of that faith in the letters of Delmore Schwartz. Eliot was already a deeply Anglican poet by the time Delmore was defending poetry against the incursion of "beliefs (qua beliefs)". Kinsella, the deeply political poet, is perhaps closer to the later religious Eliot than he is to early Auden, and Schwartz. Poems like the haunting and politically challenging "Of" (Poems 1980-1994, Bloodaxe, p231), a kind of epode of vegan pieties, do as much to invalidate Auden’s dictum as anything I have seen in a long while.

OF

Of emulsifiers and preservatives
extracted from boiled-down animal,
of houses with walls of horse hair
and thongs of leather to restrain
the tortured awning,
of feet covered in dead cow,
kangaroo, crocodile -
the business of pig-skin briefcases,
of those whose guilt lies in fish,
of those sucking the nectars
of sacred beasts,
of the differences between clean and dirty flesh,
of those who seek truth in the burnt offering,
of ‘perfect and upright’ Job, slaughterer
who sought to appease over and over,
of Julius Civilus with a Dead Cock
arrogantly accepting what is
over and over, back and forth, to and fro.

Kinsella is both a pure joy to read, and well on his way to confounding our inherited proscriptions that poetry can be as highly realized aesthetically, as it is profoundly modern and pertinent ethically. But will readers - what readers there are and who still read poetry - know this? And if they see something different in Kinsella, something like a lesson, a poetry which is not only fine to read, but which has real things to say about a world in trouble, will they - who have been trained in the more expensive rarefactions of much of twentieth century poetry - allow it to change their lives?

*

Philip Roth - to return to where we started: over breakfast in Frankfurt, or with Koethe’s strangeness in ordinary moments at Logan airport - Philip Roth assumes that it is all over. "Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared," he says. And so, by implication, he assumes that John Kinsella has come too late; that the marvelous selection of authors on line at the Richmond Review will be "hit" but not read; that the background against which Koethe would place his ordinary moments is gone; that "some great shift [has] occurred - been going on for a while" How much of what Roth says is the literary posturing of the aging writer, and how much the bitter pill serious writers and readers must swallow daily?

As I attempted to doctor the almost immediate indigestion my breakfast of wurst and sauerkraut provoked in me with a second bottle of Dortmund, I paused from my reading and looked around. It was easy to see that no one else in the dining room was presently engaged in the svelte clarities of David Remnick’s prose; nor were they considering a habit of mind that had already disappeared; and there looked to be precious few vegans among the lot of them.

Martin Walter Earl

Martin Earl lives with his wife Luísa in Coimbra, a small city about two hundred kilometers north of Lisbon. He was raised in Duxbury Massachusetts and lived in New York City during the early eighties before moving to Paris in 1984. In 1986 he left Paris to live in Portugal, and has been there ever since. His book, Stundenglas, was published in 1992 in East Berlin by Edition Maldoror. His poems have been published in magazines in America and the U.K. Some of these include Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Metre and PN Review. His work has been translated into French, German, Portugese, and Swedish.