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J A C K E T # 5 |
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this material is copyright © John Kinsella and Jacket magazine 1998 The URL address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/05/kins.html please read the copyright notice and see the links at the foot of the page back to Jacket # 5 contents page back to Jacket's homepage |
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John Kinsella : THREE POEMS Influences That profound machine unturns the lathed leftocracy like personality, a comparison sang froid anagrams of bitterness & disappointment, once best friends parrying, dispensing the jabs, failing to recognise they've been hit & are hitting themselves; or quorums that didn't quite come off, or branch-stacking failing to give the campaign the glow they'd like; & as influence is about shape cosmetics mask the covert body: from him I take & am taken by her, but refuse to acknowledge it in a public place. The journo's congratulations fail to worry your conscience & so you are caught. Yes, I stay here out of allegiance, but also gratitude, & pleasure. Inwards: the weather Thorn-dulled in the sheen wellenbereich, reif in the hoar blanc ptica across the border infinitive paziti recontrer du mauvais temps heavygoing de la turbulence which isn't the sense nublado in Coimbra, if it would construct itself as such: low chuva, in the or under: chove a câbatros, I'll take a break on that like a worker come home with the educated speaking English late into the night/ ce sera partie remise/ per tormenta brewed, I thank you in Barcelona, un torrente de injurias in heavy weather as summer refuses The Bermuda Triangle Pat Rafter, saviour of Australian tennis, maintains a comfortable existence on Bermuda; the flight of balls determined by the weather which island-culture makes more tropical than it should - the concentration of emptiness and expectation like nationalism postponed and sent offshore - the Queen's English an experimental turn of phrase on the front doorstep of liberty, the fraternal vanishings of flight on flight of the right stuff, as if Play- Station IS living, as if a package holiday has you hungering after the wealth of the pyramids, concentrated to an echoing point of ambiguity, like the limitations of radar, and re-runs of The Day The Earth Stood Still - remaining black and white as childhood - making an ocean of the river, the bright ship whispering through the ever widening hole in the ozone layer. | |
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The Australian-born poet John Kinsella lives and teaches in Cambridge, England. You can read other poems by John Kinsella in Jacket # 2 and Jacket # 3. | |
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