The Daily Kit: acknowledging Australia Council funding for my project ATARAXIA over the last three years

fragments of the project summary and report...

Project Summary

ATARAXIA

garden and heavens

The project consists of three books. These are:

a field guide to Australian clouds

a book of pictures

ataraxia

Ataraxia is the state of equanimity and tranquility at which various classical Greek philosophies

aimed. Ataraxia is associated with the garden and the idea of human purposes harmonized with nature. (Indeed, the school of Epicurus, in Athens, was called The Garden).

Hope, gratitude and patience are the three Epicurean virtues one might cultivate in a garden we take to be our school. Temporally expressed, these are: hope for the future, gratitude for the past, patience in the present moment. The gardener, the painter, the poet - each, in my view cultivates an attitude of care towards work which is unending (and so unlike the existence of the gardener, the painter, the poet).

The planned work draws together many philosophical traditions, (particularly Daoist and Epicurean) to posit the garden as philosophical destination for a poetic adventure focussed on the sky (as atmosphere and as symbolic entity) and the role of humans in what remains of 'nature' under 'the heavens'.

The project is, in equal parts, about the world (as planet, as inhabited space), about place-in-particular as habitation (the idea of bringing about a garden where one lives) and about the process of art as enabling this way of dwelling.

The work can be thought of, overall, as a philosophical poem, where the verbal and visual image are in dialogue. The work is not intended to be doctrinal, or to present doxa of any kind, but it structures acts of poetry around the idea of ataraxia as expression and result of care for the world, for the process of art and for the practice of dwelling in a place which can be becoming a garden.

Between heaven (sky above) and earth (the all-to-do of the garden), I situate the human activity of abstraction, realized in/as the ambiguous body of the idea given substance - indeterminately as word or as image. Artmaking in such a place entails the scratch and the flow of signs that might be meaning, that might be motivated or arbitrary (intentional or accidental). The core of this project is focus on the making of art as means to the evanescence of ataraxia. The garden is where we are with the sky, with the poem and with the picture coming into being.

Together, these three books encourage attention to presence through the contemplation of the sky and through the work of being in the garden (regardless of purpose or purposelessness). Relevance to the reader is in the present urgency of our realising the idea of a garden.

Destination for an adventure-in-mind, the garden is not a place of arrival; it is more of a journey on the spot - where we need to be and what we need to do.

The work in toto foreshadows and establishes a background for a fictional east-west philosophical journey to the Garden of Epicurus in a novel to be titled Time of the Mind.

a field guide to Australian clouds

The first book - a field guide to Australian clouds - opens the project with an upward glance at what many philosophical and religious traditions have considered 'the heavens'.

This book brings together

- the poet's direct personal observations of the sky and atmospheric phenomena

- scientific investigation of climate, weather and varied meteorological phenomena

- reflection on arts and sciences of observation (the idea of a field guide)

- symbolic (and philosophic/theological) significance of atmospheric phenomena, and particularly clouds

- anthropomorphic reading of what is seen/understood (to be) in the sky

- speculation about national pretensions pertaining to phenomena as distant as stars in the night sky (for instance in flags) - hence 'Australian' clouds

We see many things when we look to - and into - the sky. The sky is a particular test for mysteries of anthropomorphism. Each culture calls its constellations from ancient knowledge of the world and from deep ignorance of what is beyond Earth's atmosphere. Clouds viewed are not of, but transcendent of, places-in-particular. They are transcendent of themselves. No respecters of lines humans draw on a map, clouds lead us to observe the one-ness of the world. Always on the way, (however strange) no cloud is a stranger.

Awareness of what is happening to our world and its atmosphere is not merely scientific. It has important rhetorical and symbolic aspects, and urgently requires a dedicated cosmopolitan poetics. There is now, undeniably, a politics of the sky on Planet Earth. There is therefore an urgent need for sky poetics. This book is a personal beginning at that.

Simply encouraging fellow humans to look up and to consider the sky, is in our present circumstances, both an aesthetic imperative and an important political act.

To look up in the going-gone of daylit clouds is to wonder, to engage the unknown. It is likely from this act that philosophy arises. Is heaven a distorting mirror? What meaning relationship is there between own own activity and that which takes place above us? Religion comes to us out of thin air, out of the blue. Seeing dragonflies and birds, fearing hubris, someone once thought angels.

The sky is full of bones and beards, continents, strange creatures morphing into stranger ones. Perhaps art (especially abstract art) has been invented as a reaction to the frustration of these pictures that, though beautiful, will not be still, will not be there when we blink and look again.

Despite all this folkloric flourish, what we see and know of the heavens is loaded with objective reality. Clouds at night are negative space, where stars are not (although they are). The night sky, we now know, is a picture of distance - so a picture of time. It is where we are in the close edge of what we cannot ever completely see. Peering further and further into the well of time, humans begin to see how small and far they are in the cosmos.

In our epoch, beginning to be called the anthropocene, for the first time humans have come to have major impacts on our planet's sky. As a species we are capable of a consciousness and growing detailed understanding of these effects.

Our relationship as a species, with the sky, is, in our time, suddenly, probably irrevocably, altered. We now know, for instance, that many things seen in the sky are not really there. As you read this the number of humans airborne (i.e. in the sky) - somewhere between half a million and a million - is roughly equivalent to the human population of the planet ten thousand years ago, at the time when agriculture began, perhaps the time of the first prototypes of gardens. None of our nations or organised religions or political entities then existed. What we think of as 'human history' was yet to happen. Yet it is reasonable to speculate that humans of that time were more fascinated with and focussed on understanding the sky than your typical air traveller or religious believer today. Humans then must also have had a greater personal interest in the experiments that led to the tending of gardens. It is also worth noting that the number of deaths due to air pollution worldwide is annually ten times what the human population of the world was ten thousand years ago.

A God's-eye view has allowed the conception of activity on our planet as sub specie aeternitas. The view from the heavens I envisage is more about a human effort at understanding what a bird or an insect sees, about global and universal concerns associated with how the weather is with us where we are, wherever we are.

How can clouds be Australian? Australians (indigenous and later arrivals) do have distinct ways of reading the weather and seeing the sky. While there are types of cloud and their classification will be used as an aspect of the book's structure, culturally specific and subjective readings of cloud will be more important in the development of this work.

Accompanying the poems, in this book paintings capture on canvas moments analogous to cloud flow, and processes of art mirroring what is observed in the sky.

The prolegomenon for this book won the local award in the Newcastle Poetry Prize last year (2017), and its twelve parts were published in the prize anthology. This aspect of the overall project is long foreshadowed in much previous work, for instance in my 2010 poem and exhibition Time with the Sky.

a book of pictures

The second book - and focus of exhibition - is the visual core of the project, the place/pivot in the project where the pictures (and focus on pictures) come to outweigh accompanying words.

This book is about the visual image and is made of images and words about them. Its making depends on an equal relationship between word and image, so that words must not be merely captions for pictures, so that pictures are not merely illustrations of an idea.

This book is the reflexive core of the work. Here poems about pictures are in conversation with poems about the making of pictures and poems. The separation of visual from verbal art blurs where text enters the image frame or stands equally on the wall with it.

This exhibition/book brings together

- ekphrastic poems about paintings-in-particular (these involve research about contexts of creation, about artists, art movements, paintings in particular and particular painting techniques)

- the author's own pictures (mixed media on canvas and various boards)

- poems and poem fragments (e.g. aphorisms) about the process of art making and its relation to poetry, community and the environment

The sky-oriented and garden-oriented explorations of the first and third books pivot here in work about the work, where the breath of the poetic word, likewise the making of an image, is found to be like the making of a cloud, like the making of a garden. The page, the sky, the land, the canvas - each in its own time and mind-frame provide a creative space analogous to the others, where the maker scratches at a surface never quite blank, and often primes to begin again, never quite concealing all traces of the world made here before. There is an archaeology to knowing how the painting, likewise the garden, likewise the poem, came to be as it is with us now.

Dominating, and finding analogy, in the activity of the artist/poet/gardener are two contrasting techniques. I name them scratch and flow - the making of marks and the allowing of pigments to spread, seep, edge, make tidelines, mix and separate. In the action of scratch and flow on surfaces - whether screen, sky, canvas, page or the territory of a garden - we find signs that might be meaning, that might be motivated or arbitrary (intentional or accidental). We likewise find analogies between the artist's work and the material-of-nature with which the artist works.

Ekphrastic poems in this book are gathered from gallery notes from but many countries (and especially from the last two Venice Biennales [2015 and 2017], from the Art Gallery of NSW, The Prado in Madrid, many major and minor galleries and art museums in Europe and Australia and South America). There will be set of poems about the process of painting to accompany my own mixed-media paintings, drawing and collage works on board and paper.

This image-and-word work continues and expands on similar efforts in past exhibitions and publications, especially Pictures of Nothing at All (2014), Next Stop is the Stars (2015) and Up Through Branches (2017). This work continues and expands ekphrastic efforts in past publications, for instance those dealing with works in galleries in Oslo and Bergen, in my volume of poems Poor Man's Coat (currently in press with UWAP).

ataraxia

The third (final) book in the project constitutes a poetic philosophy of the garden, the aim of which is ataraxia - a contemplative calm, associated with care for where one is. This is a set of poems in and about the garden, structured around diurnal and seasonal patterns as they apply where the poet/artist is: a book of seasons and a book of hours. Reflexive play here involves the relationship between the garden and the process of art, the nesting of art in garden, garden as art, the page as picture as plan. The absence evoked in the text itself is the garden built around the poem, around the process of art making. But the poem itself is made everywhere in the garden. Rain dots the page, the sun dries tides of paint, of ink.

The garden emerges rhizomatically, as place in particular, grown from under the plan exceeding the territory it maps. In the garden one falls under the spell of the place opening onto the infinite, the evidence of which is always simply to look up, to where the circle covers the square. We gaze up into the moment gone. Time in the garden is time with the sky. This is where to vanish. The process of vanishing requires patience of us.

However ideal we imagine it, every garden is from somewhere. If we love such a place, there is a duty to know what can be known of how the place comes to us, comes into our possession. What can we know of what was before us, of what comes before the garden we know? Is it better to think of the garden possessing us? Is stewardship a mutual encounter? This is the place where peace can be made.

This book focusses attention on the garden-in-particular inhabited by the poet. Research for the work involves understanding the relationship between country (in the indigenous sense) and the idea of garden; it involves a historicized understanding of how gardens are and can be in the place we call Australia (under the clouds of the field guide). Permaculture, no-dig gardening, weeding the bush, icons like the Yates Garden Guide all have a place in understanding the meaning of gardens in this particular context.

Because of the necessity of care, there is no simply being in the garden; there is no absorption in the moment, no transcendent calm of having arrived. The garden is the all-to-do; a process of becoming and coming to be with - a process of treaty making. The garden is work, of nature (its own for instance), never to be finished.

I write a last will and testament as the closing poem of the book. Neither will that ever be completed. All works a draft until we're gone. We hope the garden will survive us but intentions disperse into time we cannot know.

In this book, along with the poems, drawings/paintings express on paper or canvas the work of garden making/mulching: a dis/integration of word, thought, image, map, plan.

Biographical Note:

Christopher (Kit) Kelen (客遠文) is a well known Australian poet, scholar and visual artist, and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he taught Creative Writing and Literature for many years.

Kit Kelen's poetry has been published and broadcast widely since the seventies, and he has won a number of prestigious awards over the years, including an ABA/ABC Bicentennial Prize in 1988; and in 1992 an Anne Elder award for his first volume of poems The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees. He has also won Westerly's Patricia Hackett Prize and placed second in Island's Gwen Harwood Prize. In 2012, his poem 'Time with the Sky' was runner up in the Newcastle Poetry Prize, an award for which he has been frequently shortlisted. In 2017, Kit was shortlisted twice for the Montreal Poetry Prize and, for the second time, won the Local Award in the Newcastle Poetry Prize.

Volumes of Kit Kelen’s poetry have been published in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Indonesian and Filipino. The most recent of Kelen's dozen English language poetry books are China Years – New and Selected Poems (2012, ASM/Flying Islands) and Scavenger’s Season (2014, Puncher and Wattmann). He also has a mini-selected poems in the form of A Pocket Kit. His next collection of poetry, Poor Man’s Coat – Hardanger Poems is being published by University of Western Australia Press in 2018.

The most recent of Kelen’s ten solo painting exhibitions were Next Stop is the Stars (Rui Cunha Foundation Gallery, Macao) in 2015; in 2016, Dotze Pinturas (Estudio Nomada, Barcelona); and in 2017, Kelen’s exhibition up through branches – por árvores acima – held at the SNBA (National Society of Fine Arts) Gallery in Lisbon.

For the last decade Kelen has been facilitating the translation of Chinese poetry into English and of Australian poets into Chinese, projects which have so far produced a dozen large scale bilingual anthologies. These projects involved bringing poets and translators to Australia (notably to Bundanon, the University of Western Australia, and Kelen's Australian home) to workshop with poets being translated. They have likewise involved hosting poets for workshops and meetings in Macao, and elsewhere in China. Apart from parallel-text anthologies Kelen has notably co-translated two volumes with the late Hong Kong poet Leung Ping Kwan (Ya Si), and four with Macao poet Yao Jing Ming (Yao Feng).

As an editor and anthologist more generally, Kit Kelen has published the work of hundreds of poets from around the world, but especially from China and Australia.

In 2008, he co-edited with Agnes Vong the first English-language anthology of Macao poetry, containing the work of more than 120 Macao poets, some writing in English, many translated from Chinese and Portuguese. In 2009, his critical volume City of Poets - Exploring Macao Poetry Today appeared to accompany the 2008 anthology.

In Australia, A Slow Combusting Hymn (co-edited with Jean Kent, in 2014) collected the work of more than sixty Newcastle/Hunter-region associated poets. Writing to the Wire (co-edited with Dan Disney and published by UWAP in 2016) brought Australians poets and poets in Australian immigration detention together in a sustained meditation on the question of ethos and the meaning of nation in the case of Australia.

Nation and nationalism have been an abiding interest in Kit Kelen's own poetry and in his literary research. With Björn Sundmark, Kelen has edited two major international collections on Children’s Literature – The Nation in Children’s Literature and Where Children Rule (both with Routledge). He is currently working on a monograph (under contract with Routledge) about poetry, children and anthropomorphism.

Kelen’s published research into national anthems dates back to the 1990s and he has written many articles on this subject. This work has culminated in the publication of two monographs – Anthem Quality – National Songs: A Theoretical Survey (2014, Intellect/University of Chicago Press) and (with A. Pavkovik) Anthems and the Making of Nation States – Identity and Nationalism in the Balkans (2016, I.B.Tauris).

Kit Kelen has also published a more general monograph on poetics: Poetry, Consciousness and Community (2009, Rodopi)

Kit Kelen is Series Editor for ASM/Flying Islands books and, in this role, has cultivated a pocket poets series, publishing writers in various languages from around the world, but especially from Australia and China. Kelen is also Literary Editor for Postcolonial Text.

Since 2016, Kelen has co-ordinated Project 366 – an international on-line community of practice, involving poets and visual artists in daily postings of draft work. As a participant in this project (originally intended to run only for the duration 2016) Kit has now posted a new draft poem to the blog every day for more than 800 days. from prominent poets such as yourself,

A new on-line collaboration among poets and artists A Conversation in Poetry has recently commenced (in 2018). Participants in this project - including many of Australia's best known poets) respond in kind to each others' work, without any time limits.

Kit Kelen lives and works on a five acre block, in a valley between forests, in the Myall Lakes district of New South Wales. He writes and paints every day.

In 2017, Professor Kelen was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Malmö, in Sweden.

Without any recourse to representation or depiction the activity of art in a place-in-particular is necessarily reflexive because of the like action in which it participates. The sky flows over us and we find ourselves wondering - how long does a cloud last? Will it come to us? What will it be next? Earth is what settlers scratch at, where we define ourselves and our territory by the making of marks, by their erasure, by fresh inscription. The much longer human story, before settlement and with important continuities today, involves flows of humans - with seasons, with animal others, with what sustains a culture.

The work watched making itself offers a bridge from the view up into sky and clouds to the terrestrial view of the garden as becoming home. In this work, the history of all other pictures, and an openness to processes of picturing, brings the wordless image and the image cast by word into play.

Playing with the bits for the form:

The project consists of three books. These are:

a field guide to Australian clouds

a book of pictures

ataraxia

Ataraxia is the state of equanimity and tranquility at which various classical Greek philosophies

aimed. Ataraxia is associated with the garden and the idea of human purposes harmonized with nature. (Indeed, the school of Epicurus, in Athens, was called The Garden).

The project consists of three books. These are:

a field guide to Australian clouds

a book of pictures

ataraxia

It is about the world (as planet, as inhabited space), about place-in-particular as habitation (bringing about a garden where one lives) and about the process of art as enabling this way of dwelling.

Ataraxia is associated with the garden and the idea of human purposes harmonized with nature. It is the state of equanimity and tranquility at which various classical philosophies aimed. The gardener, the painter, the poet ─ each cultivates an attitude of care towards work which is unending.

The core of this project is focus on the making of art as means to ataraxia. The garden is where we are with the sky, with the poem and with the picture coming into being.

These books encourage attention to presence through the contemplation of the sky and through the work of being in the garden. Relevance to the reader is in the present urgency of our realising the idea of a garden.

Achievements

Kit Kelen's poet's/artist's website provides details of achievements in the areas of writing, translation, scholarship and visual arts - http://kitkelen.com/

Kit Kelen's career as a poet has been punctuated with prizes for writing and the publication of (well reviewed) books . He has regularly, since the seventies, published individual poems in important journals. Career development has progressed as well through minor works, collaborative projects and poetry translation.

Recent poetry and painting exhibitions at the Macao Museum of Art (China) and the Sociedade Nacional De Belas Artes (Lisbon, Portugal) have been highlights of his career as a visual artist.

For the last decade Kelen has been facilitating the translation of Chinese poetry into English and of Australian poets into Chinese, projects which have so far produced a dozen large scale bilingual anthologies. Kelen has notably co-translated two volumes with the late Hong Kong poet Leung Ping Kwan (Ya Si), and four with Macao poet Yao Jing Ming (Yao Feng).

Kit Kelen has also worked with poets and translators to co-translate and publish volumes of poetry from French, Norwegian and Indonesian. A 2012 volume, Notes for the Translators, collected the work of 142 Australian and New Zealand poets, together with advice from authors on how their particular works might be translated into any language. As an editor and anthologist more generally, Kit Kelen has published the work of hundreds of poets from around the world, but especially from China and Australia.

In Australia, Kelen has co-edited a number of locally/regionally based representative poetry anthologies. For instance A Slow Combusting Hymn (in 2014) collected the work of more than sixty Newcastle/Hunter-region associated poets.

Kelen’s published research on poetry and poetics includes the 2009 monograph Poetry, Consciousness and Community (Rodopi), and two volumes on national anthems, Anthem Quality – National Songs: A Theoretical Survey (2014, Intellect/University of Chicago Press) and (with A. Pavkovik) Anthems and the Making of Nation States – Identity and Nationalism in the Balkans (2016, I.B.Tauris).

The three books comprising the project are to be written simultaneously, allowing the inter-animation of themes and forms, in a coherent whole.

a field guide to Australian clouds

A Field Guide to Australian Clouds concerns what many philosophical and religious traditions have considered 'the heavens'.

To look up in the going-gone of daylit clouds is to wonder, to engage the unknown. It is likely from this act that philosophy and religion arise. Simply encouraging fellow humans to look up and to consider the sky, is in our present circumstances, both an aesthetic imperative and an important political act.

Accompanying the poems, in this book paintings capture on canvas moments analogous to cloud flow, and processes of art mirroring what is observed in the sky.

a book of pictures

The second book - and focus of exhibition - is the visual core of the project, the place/pivot in the project where the pictures (and focus on pictures) come to outweigh accompanying words.

Ekphrastic poems in this book are gathered from gallery notes from many countries (and especially from the last two Venice Biennales [2015 and 2017], from the Art Gallery of NSW, The Prado in Madrid, many major and minor galleries and art museums in Europe and Australia and South America). There will be set of poems about the process of painting to accompany my own mixed-media paintings, drawing and collage works on board and paper.

ataraxia

I write a last will and testament as the closing poem of the book. Neither will that ever be completed. All works a draft until we're gone.