John Kinsella: Wheatbelt Poet (Part 2)

Rare Air with Meri Fatin

“When I say I’ve been sober for 21 years, I mean entirely sober. I stopped smoking, I stopped drinking, I stopped drugs I stopped everything. I haven’t had a cup of tea. I stopped every single stimulant and thing that could in any way alter my behaviour. I am that kind of person. I’m an all or nothing person. I was ALL. I was a polyglot user of anything I could get hold of, in any amount I could and then I stopped.”

In the second part of this conversation with poet, vegan, anarchist and pacifist John Kinsella he speaks of personal redemption and his daily efforts towards the ‘secular ascension’ noted in his work by American literary critic and Yale academic Harold Bloom.

Sincere thanks to John Kinsella for agreeing to this interview.

"We are poised before...what I prophesy will be a major art." Harold Bloom, on John Kinsella’s Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems Published July 2005