IDEAS PASS IN a blur as words spill from John Kinsella. By the time you understand the contradictions between his small-town life and intellectual ambitions, hear his views on literature or discuss the role of US critic Harold Bloom in selecting the poems for his latest collection, Kinsella has galloped on to working with Blixa Bargeld, former guitarist for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
'I like taking genres into other genres,' he says over coffee in Fremantle, Western Australia. 'I just don't like being blocked. I upset some people, but that goes with the territory. You've got to cop that.'
Kinsella, 40, refuses to sit still. He claims to survive on two hours' sleep a day, spending nights writing to some of the 3,000 scientists, philosophers and artists around the world who are part of a network he developed as a teenager in nearby Geraldton. Many of those on his mailing list became friends when they were contacted for information by a 17-year-old Kinsella on the phenomenon of chemiluminescence (the release of energy in the form of light during a chemical reaction). 'What was nice was the naivety,' Kinsella says of his teens. 'I don't have that now. It was a real quandary for me. I wanted to be in contact with the environment that I loved so much, but I also wanted to be talking about deconstruction with Jacques Derrida.'
Kinsella says he contacted Derrida, the postmodern father of deconstruction, when he was 16. Such correspondence allowed him to skip over Australia's literary establishment and become an international poet. His career is split between being a Churchill fellow at Cambridge University, a professor of creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio, and professor of landscape and literature at West Australia's Edith Cowan University. He is also poetry editor for London's Observer newspaper, a role he uses to foster young talent and scythe lesser lights to the point where, he says, he has received death threats.
His few spare days are spent in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of York. Kinsella started testing his borders in 1983, at the age of 20, with the release of a small collection called The Frozen Sea. After a decade battling alcohol and drug addiction, he forged an international reputation with The Silo in 1994. Along with works of fiction, drama, a libretto and his autobiography, Auto, Kinsella's name appears in 26 poetry collections. 'Poetry isn't just an end result to me. It's an ongoing dialogue,' he says.
'It's a way of talking to people that's different to the straightforward linear way.'
But he is surprisingly short of words when speaking about the involvement of Bloom in Peripheral Light and its publication by Norton. 'It's just surreal to me,' says Kinsella, who recalls scouring the Norton anthology as a child.
