It's couplets at dawn as literati seek poetic justice over memoir of youth

John Kinsella

SYDNEY - Torrid tales of wild, drug-fuelled parties. Darkly menacing emails couched in verse. Restraining orders taken out against old friends. Threats to sue for defamation.

Australia's poetry world is at war, and the vitriol is flying.

A kiss-and-tell memoir by an internationally renowned poet, John Kinsella, has enraged two of his peers, who he claims were his partners in crime during a debauched youth.

Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence, both highly respected, award-winning poets, were horrified to read Kinsella's lurid accounts of communal drug-taking sessions and pornography watching.

They have accused him of betraying their friendship, and of fabricating some of his stories.

The pair counterattacked in the way they knew best: with words.

They fired off emails, brimming with metaphors and allusions to blood and gore. According to Adamson, they were intended to be funny, and a parody of Kinsella's own style. He did not take them that way.

Kinsella, the author of 30 volumes of poetry, and a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, said he was "distressed and appalled".

Some of the several dozen emails amounted to "death threats", he said.

At the weekend he failed to appear at one of Australia's main literary festivals, in Byron Bay, northern New South Wales.

He was supposed to be promoting his book, Fast, Loose Beginnings - A Memoir Of Intoxications, but changed his mind after Adamson and Lawrence pledged to disrupt his readings.

Instead he went to court in Perth and obtained two restraining orders.

The festival audience was told he could not attend because he feared for his safety.

"I expected critical response to the book, and through normal channels - not personal threats," he said.

The emails, which began arriving in mid-July, appeared to contain more than a hint of menace. One, penned by Lawrence, ran: "It is a death-clicking beetle/ Can you hear it at work inside the fast-tracking of your emails/ Inside the cold enamel of your smile?/ Keep your enemies close at hand/ The shroud has no pockets."

In another, Lawrence wrote: "The dark humour is a meniscus. Deep Regret is the name of an ocean they've found, 5 miles under the ice at Antarctica. You're about to enter it. Are you ready?"

Adamson this week ridiculed the idea that he had threatened Kinsella with physical violence.

"He is 40 and 6 foot 2 [1.89m], I am 63 and 5 foot 8 [1.77m]," he said. "I don't punch people.

"The book is full of lies, and it's hideously written."

- INDEPENDENT