Feature poet

Feature Poet: John Kinsella

Graphology Kaleidoscope 2

I went to a country toy store yesterday to buy a kaleidoscope. The woman showed me a telescope and said, That’s what they use these days. To see the colours of the universe.

It’s not the same thing, really, I said. She also sold magnifying glasses and microscopes and science kits with the promise of crystal growth. We made do with fantasies

back in the ‘old days’, she implied. But look, she insisted, kaleidoscopes aren’t even listed on the computer. Gone from the inventory. I wondered if she’d typed in Collide-o-scope, but didn’t want to patronise her, to offend, or face up to my own failure to grip that creation’s beautiful shapes coaxed by our own hands have fallen out of favour.

This poem is taken from Saussure’s Kaleidoscope: Graphology Drawing-Poems, published in 2021 by Five Islands Press (an imprint of Apothecary Archive). For more information see apothecaryarchive.com John Kinsella has been working on his series of Graphology Poems for almost thirty years, and published the first of these in the mid1990s. Concerned with issues of orthography, handwriting, typing, modes of discussing and conveying experience, and with issues of perception and modes of writing, there has also been concurrently, mainly in journal-form, an accruing catalogue of visual commentary, illustration, scribbles, sketches, colour codings, and drawing-poems. This book represents work from a recent series of ‘drawing-poems’ composed in a continuous sweep often interlinked with journalwriting. .