Anne M Carson - Protest is a creative act

Carson LE P&W June 2026

Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026

Protest is a creative act, poems by Anne M Carson.

Protest is a creative act

after Jemima Wyman Haze 20, 2024
Hand-cut digital photographs of smoke sorted by colour and then chronologically

At first the hung fabric seems to be outsized shower curtains or draped room dividers. Hanging floor-to-ceiling, two giant pieces, gossamer-thin. People passing cause them to billow and blouse. Hued in muted rainbow tones – abstract, almost floral.

Cut up photographs of smoke from hundreds of world-wide protests collaged into a dynamic roseate pattern. It swells and swirls like a mushroom cloud, like a geyser already burst. Photo-fragments of fumes from stacks of burning tyres (acrid, throat-tearing), smoke bombs (viscous), incendiary vehicles, the choking ‘green’ smoke from piles of manure and hay- bales, from flares, Molotov cocktails, tear gas. In that photographic melange, amongst all the poisonous lung and windpipe wrecking smoke – one whisp of the healing herbal smoke of sage.

Each citizen action is named, located, dated – farmers, (with and without tractors), students, environmentalists, anti-environmentalists, animal rights activists, people pro-squatting, pro-Monarchist, anti-Government, demanding justice for Palestine, for Israeli hostages, for farmer’s rights, the end of femicide, against the granting of amnesty for Catalan protesters, for and against abortion and euthanasia, against the resumption of bullfighting, against the EU Green deal, against tariff-free trade with Ukraine. The billowed smoke from the actions of right-wing activists inseparable now from the protest smoke of left-wing activists.

All the particulates absorbed now into the lungs of the protesters, bystanders, emergency services personnel, the put-upon somewhat forgiving air, and the respiring body politic. What remains is the battered and burnt beauty of human action – imprint in the fabric of the world.

Protest is a creative act, an exhibition at Museum of Australian Photography 2025

The Rev skates

after Reverend Robert Walker (1755 – 1808) Skating on Duddingston Loch

by Henry Raeburn – National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, online collection

The weather is stormy at the far end of the Loch today, clouds

heavily freighted although up towards heaven they thin

and a blurred blue pool leaks through. Sheets of rain

(or are they brushstrokes) pelt down. Mist hangs off the crags

and the ground is moody with brooding and melancholy.

A faint mushroom light illuminates a patch above the valley.

But weather is clear where the Rev takes his exercise

on the ice. Untroubled by inclemency (he is made of sterner stuff)

the air around him seems to know this and part for him.

Not even a rain-jacket or hood to keep possible precipitation at bay

just his frockcoat dress hat and a nicely ruffled cravat at his throat –

gear of choice for skating gents at the tail end of the 1700s.

The Rev bends an exact forty-five degrees off perpendicular, erect

(though cantered), adopting travelling mode. He makes it look easy

keeping his angle just so, his balance and his arms crossed

at his chest but it’s not easy (which is why he likes it). He likes

to pit himself against a worthy foe and keep his composure

his rectitude, his eye keen on the goal. He makes a neat parcel

of a man – nothing gangly or awkward to muddy his presence

in the world. His faith is an impenetrable aura, confidence gathered

in. He has inscribed circular patterns in the ice – a member

of the first figure-skating club in the world, he loves practicing

finds it calming – the regularity of the moves, the rhythm of glide

unweigh, glide again, the cold air, his solitude in a wild landscape.

There’s some soul-quirk that he can find the Almighty as present

here, figure skating alone in the Scottish Highlands as at his Kirk’s

altar leading his congregation in prayer and Presbyterian praise.

Anne M Carson is an Australian poet, essayist and creative writing teacher living on unceded Bunurong Country, whose poetry is published widely and acknowledged in awards including the Society of Women Writers NSW (2024). Her fifth poetry collection, George Sand (and Me): a poetic biography is forthcoming, and in 2027, Liquid Amber Press will publish her collection Originary. Her PhD received an Outstanding Dissertation Prize (2024).

Anne M Carson – Protest is a creative act

Protest is a creative act

The Rev skates

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