Fast, Loose Beginnings

by John Kinsella

"Fast, Loose Beginnings" is a racy anecdotal account of John Kinsella's meetings with the great and shambolic men and women of poetry. Since his late teens, Kinsella has been rubbing shoulders and working with a host of acclaimed poets. He weaves his impressions of them personally, with a lively and incisive commentary on their place within the broader literary culture. As both a highly respected poet and critic, he brings clarity and biting irreverence to his subject, making this encounter with literature vividly alive. Here, in good company, are Harold Bloom, John Ashbery, Peter Porter, Frieda Hughes, Les Murray, Wole Soyinka and Jacques Derrida.

Paperback

First published August 1, 2006

About the author

John Kinsella is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. The recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award, he has taught at Cambridge University and Kenyon College. He lives in Western Australia.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Kinsella became prominent as a poet and critic himself, but he felt star-struck at meeting his poet forebears in Europe, North America, and Australia over the 1980s, 1990s and early millennium. This brief memoir, somewhat light reading and finished in nearly in a single sitting, describes his meetings with remarkable men and women. As Kinsella was a bohemian and boozing young man, pursuing a downright Rimbaudian “systematic derangement of the senses”, and then a plain-shooting commentator on the modern literary world, he’s an engaging presence in the book himself.

I was originally drawn to this memoir because it must have what is the most substantial description of J.H. Prynne as a person; Prynne is infamously shy of the limelight, is rarely photographed or does interviews, and is known mainly through his extremely challenging modernist poetry. But there are plenty of other colourful depictions here, from George Steiner to Jacques Derrida, Charles Bernstein to Frieda Hughes. There’s even some gossip about poetry publishing houses and how prizes are awarded.

[Lee Kofman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir is structured interestingly, with each chapter being centred around one of literary influences of Kinsella – the likes of Derrida, Harold Bloom and more. I adored the few first chapters, particularly the one about Dorothy Hewett. The prose is screaming there with passion, recklessness, dazed thirst for the being-in-the-world. However as the book progresses and Kinsella grows older, the rich, intoxicating prose turns into a rather tedious, banal, self-righteous political rant. Once the topic changes from poetics to politics Kinsella loses his sense of humour and this is when, for me, the book really went downhill (including its end – a patchworked and unrelated to all else diary).