Abstract

Life writing is ubiquitous in John Kinsella’s vast oeuvre. Kinsella’s employment of the diversity of modes collected under the rubric of “life writing” is underpinned by a “poetics of dirt.” Such a poetics is visible in the central role that material dirt (as both pollution and terrain) plays in Kinsella’s work, as well as the more general concept of impurity, as seen in Kinsella’s poetic trafficking in ideas concerning transgression, liminality, hybridity, and danger. In Purity and Danger (1966), the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined dirt as “matter out of place.” In the poem “Dirt” (from Kinsella’s 2014 collection Sack), dirt remains understandable as matter out of place, but it also becomes radically mobile, its material and symbolic weight subject to unexpected transformations. The eponymous dirt in Kinsella’s poem is being carted from one place to another by the poet’s near neighbour for “purposes unknown.” This “shitload of dirt,” dumped onto the dirt of the valley’s floor, makes its way into the disturbingly porous bodies – both human and non-human – around it. It is “something you sense in arteries” and “the haze / that lights and encompasses us all.” This poem can be taken as a metonym for Kinsella’s entire literary oeuvre. Employing his “poetics of dirt,” Kinsella attends to the dispossessed dirt of a post/colonial nation; the dirt of contemporary farming practices; the dirt of official and vernacular languages; and the dirt of personal secrets. This essay argues that Kinsella’s “poetics of dirt” cannot be disambiguated from his activist poetics, and the profoundly auto/biographical nature of his writing. Attending to postcolonial theory and life-writing studies, this essay analyses how Kinsella thematises dirt as central to both life writing (in prose and poetry) and a life of writing. In doing so, it considers dirt as something not simply “out of place,” but – in a postcolonial, post-sacred, and late-capitalist world – endlessly mobile, unstable, and transformative, moving between material and discursive realities in newly complex ways. By attending to dirt (both as matter and as pollutant) within the context of his various auto/biographical projects, Kinsella conspicuously draws attention to the relationship between the human and the material, profoundly questioning – in a way akin to a “new materialist” perspective – the consequences of a human-centred ontology. At its most radical, the “poetics of dirt” found in Kinsella’s life writing posits a world in which human subjectivity is not the only agental force in the material world.

摘要

在约翰·金塞拉（John Kinsella）的作品中，生活写作无处不在。Kinsella运用“生活写作”标题下收集的多种模式，以“污垢诗学”为基础。这种诗学在金斯拉作品中的物质污垢（包括污染和地形）以及更一般的杂质概念中起着核心作用，可见于金斯拉的诗性贩运中关于越界，合法性，杂种和杂种的观念。危险。在《纯净与危险》（Purity and Danger，1966）中，人类学家玛丽·道格拉斯（Mary Douglas）将泥土定义为“异物”。在诗歌“污垢”中（来自Kinsella 2014年的收藏Sack），尽管污物即使摆放到位也仍然可以理解，但它也可以从根本上移动，其材料和象征性的重量会发生意想不到的变化。金瑟拉诗歌中的同名土被诗人的近邻从一个地方运到另一个地方，目的是“目的不明”。这种“尘土残渣”倾倒在山谷地板的尘土上，然后进入周围令人不安的多孔物体中，无论是人类还是非人类。它是“您在动脉中感觉到的东西”和“阴霾/点燃并包围着我们所有人”。这首诗可以看作是金塞拉整个文学作品的代名词。金塞拉运用他的“污垢诗学”，研究了一个后殖民国家的被剥夺的污垢。当代耕作方式的污垢；官方语言和白话语言的污垢；和私人机密的污垢。本文认为，金塞拉的“污垢诗学”不能与他的激进主义诗学及其著作的深刻的自传/传记性质相区别。通过研究后殖民理论和生活写作研究，本文分析了金塞拉如何对污垢进行主题化处理，将污垢作为生活写作（散文和诗歌）和写作生活的核心。在这样做时，它认为污垢不仅是“不合时宜”的事物，而且在后殖民，后神圣和后资本主义的世界中，是无限移动的，不稳定的和变革性的，在新近复杂的物质现实和话语现实之间移动方法。通过在他的各种汽车/传记项目中研究灰尘（物质和污染物），金塞拉（Kinsella）显着地引起人们对人类与物质之间关系的关注，类似于“新唯物主义”的观点，以人为中心的本体论的后果引起了深刻的质疑。从最根本的角度来看，金塞拉的生平著作中发现的“污垢诗学”提出了一个世界，在这个世界中，人的主观性并不是物质世界中唯一的推动力。