WA Poets Inc Wingbeat by Tim Kinsella

The poems in this book were written between 2016 and 2023. Though I don’t consider it ‘a book of bird poems’ exactly, Wingbeat seems an apt title given birds are mentioned so frequently, and since my journey of writing poetry began through a fixation on them.

I was surrounded by poetry from a very young age, but it was discovering classical Chinese poetry in translation (especially the work of Meng Haoran, Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu) in my early teens that really inspired me to get serious about writing my own poems. It led to my being more in tune with the world around me, particularly nature and specifically birds, because of their presence in that poetry.

I developed my own ideas through observation, and would go to places specifically to see birds, from Booragoon Lake to various locations along the Avon River in the wheatbelt, and at my home in ‘Jam Tree Gully’. On a journey across Australia, I kept a bird journal, noting down every species I saw. The poems in the first section of this book, Quartz Corvid, were conceived around the time I was going through this phase of recording sightings. Phases never totally go away for me though, so I would end up revisiting my observations years later in the poem ‘Journal Entries’.

Many different locations and landscapes have influenced my writing, from parts of Australia to regions in Europe such as Switzerland, Germany and Ireland. The third section of this book, The Rainbow Tree, is probably the widest-ranging geographically. I felt the need to write about places I really liked but only visited briefly so as to keep some sort of memory of them. But I also needed to write about places I less enjoyed spending time in because poetry can really encourage you to appreciate the best in a more difficult environment.

Classical Chinese poetry is not the only kind that has inspired me, and poetry is not the only artform that resonates with me. Music (any kind from classical to death metal) has also been a huge part of my life and it’s a medium that overlaps with poetry in a multitude of ways. Lyrics can work as poems, and to me the process of writing a poem is not unlike the process of composing a piece of music.

Additionally, paintings and art exhibitions have worked as great lenses through which to explore some of my own thoughts and feelings; many poems in this book are ekphrastic, referencing painters such as Howard Taylor and Paul Klee. Photographs can be just as stimulating. The second section of this book, Plumage, was a collaboration between myself and my grandmother Wendy Kinsella, whose excellent photographs of Western Australian birds inspired me to write a sequence of short poems in response.

Where I’m at in my life currently though, there’s no medium I get more out of than cinema. I particularly value the films of David Lynch, for instance. More than any other filmmaker I’ve encountered, Lynch understands the beauty of abstraction and ambiguity; his refusal to explain the ‘meaning’ of his work is admirable. His movies, which are tapestries of dreams and nightmares that explore both the good and evil in the world, have had a profound effect on me and have definitely changed the way I write poetry and approach all forms of art.

Tim Kinsella