Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley
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But who, we?
– Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’
Readers seeking solace are advised to turn back now. In its many eccentricities – born, I think, of a refusal to settle into a familiar style or genre – this book is not concerned to charm its way into readers' hearts, but rather to find out who might have the mettle to bear witness to it. As Kinsella puts it in the ‘Preface to Paradiso’ from his magnum opus to date, Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography, all he requires of readers is the resolve ‘to look’, the will to bear witness … if there is such a thing. ‘One doesn't have to be a believer to experience the full effects’, he says. ‘The willingness to look carries a certain material and spiritual recompense’ (161).
Because so much of what John writes about here is of the order of ‘personal’ testimony, ‘personal’ experience and opinion, we (if there is such a thing as ‘we’) are asked to take it on faith. He writes, then, not as a scholar or a forensic scientist, who might be said to trade in facts that others can corroborate, but as a poet, even when he's writing prose, even when he's seemingly at his most declarative. It is not for us to ‘corroborate’ this testimony (how could we, since none of us is John Kinsella?), if to corroborate something is to validate it according to an ideal of disinterested knowledge. It is not for us to ‘validate’ what John says in these pages: how could we, since we didn't write them?
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