<< Issue 33
John Kinsella
Beyond Owen Land’s 1970 Film ‘Remedial Reading Comprehension’
Building the auditorium again.
Lapse in sleep. I would ask an
audience to talk as performance
more than what to expect, what
to dream up: each and every
potential, each seat aligned to
encourage. ‘This Film Is About
You’, thanks, as recipient in mauve
evening and trees nervous, dogs
bark at jogger in lonely necks,
a grain of rice lodged unhusked
to dissolve for a supermarket
tree shelves running to product
squelch of about and articles
called superstition in linear
straitjacket of sleep anxiety —
ever for ever for ever as
repetition, teaches a left
right left right in English
appearance of expanding places
which Manifest Destiny latched
onto mistakes to reoccur as mistakes
like a surge from our mental capacitors,
complex Jehovah a risible explanation
thinking of the balance between sunset
and trees I alight on to make sentences
to parse vweet vweet vweet vweet
or akin in comprehensive moonlit
recirculation coming home breathless,
‘Not About Its Maker’ nonetheless
each step a letter, each foot off
the ground a silhouette a nimbus ladder.
John Kinsella’s recent books of poetry include Insomnia (Picador, 2019/Norton, 2020), Brimstone: a book of villanelles (Arc, 2020) and Aftering Delmore Schwartz’s A Season in Hell [Rimbaud] Translation (Equipage, 2021). Recent critical titles include Beyond Ambiguity: tracing literary sites of activism (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Legibility: an anti-fascist poetics (Palgrave, 2022).