Kelwyn Sole was born in Johannesburg in 1951
and has lived in Windhoek, London and Kanye. He is a professor in the English
department of the University of Cape Town. He has published six collections of
poetry, the most recent of which, Absent
Tongues, was published by Hands-On Books, Cape Town. His work has appeared
in many poetry anthologies and literary journals, including Green Dragon.
DH: Your first collection, The
Blood of Our Silence, was published by Ravan Press in 1987. It was a very
different time politically. I read that back then independent
publishers like Ravan had had their phones tapped, mail opened and were
subject to police raids. How did you
feel about writing back then, compared to now?
KS: I thought, at the time, that liberation
would neither mean the end of the need for a critical politics vis-à-vis Government, nor the end of critical
utterances from writers. I believed writers should maintain their independence
at the same time as they joined in the struggle against apartheid. So I don’t
feel the themes in my poetry have hugely changed; or at least the stance I
adopt in relation to political questions and politicians.
At the same time, of course there was danger. The
phone-tapping and interception of mail you mention; I experienced both of these.
In the early days the technology was such that they still had to physically
install the bug within the phone – I became pretty good at finding these. I got
death threats in Namibia when I was an activist, and there was police
harassment of me from time to time in the 1980s, which were nasty times
generally. But my harassment was not about my writing, and was insignificant compared to what some
people went through. Mind you, a lot of the actual history of that period is
being lost, in the face of the cleaned-up Governmental versions of those years we’re
being fed now ... for instance, who these days remembers the Yeoville Debating
Society, set up as a left critique of JODAC? This alternative history is
important: it would allow many people to understand the present better.
Two of your earlier collections, Love
that is Night and Mirror and Water
Gazing show various approaches to poetic form, ranging from fairly
traditional four-line stanzas to a more free-form approach, which is what you
use most often. It reminds me of the experiments of US poets such as Robert
Creeley and Robert Duncan, but also the British poet Lee Harwood.
The first person whose poetics influenced me
was Charles Olson, when I was an undergraduate; and that has remained a source,
to some extent, for my poetry since. I think the other members of the Black
Mountain School were less influential – I read Creeley at the time, but it’s
only now, through an American friend, that I’ve rediscovered him, and
understood his gentle, light, occasionally humorous touch. I’ve never liked
Duncan much, although I did take to Ed Dorn. In addition, many of the young
poets I knew in Jo’burg were into the Beat Poets; and we all read Kerouac. I
still remember his injunction, “you can’t fall down a mountain.” Oh yes you
can, Jack.
In retrospect, I was also heavily influenced in
the beginning, especially in phrasing and spacing, not only by Olson but by the
poets influenced by WC Williams – such as Snyder, Denise Levertov, a couple of
others. I also read quite a deal of Black Power poetry for a while, especially
Amiri Baraka. But it was Williams’ mixture of poetic and prosaic language that really
appealed to me, in terms of what I was trying to do.
As an undergraduate I was in addition taken by
Chris Okigbo’s and Tchicaya U Tam’si’s poetry. Looking back now, it was
probably more as regards Okigbo’s style than his content; although I am still
in awe of U Tam’si. I remember being less drawn to South African poetry,
especially the white poets. I had extreme views then, and believed they had
left me a legacy I should try to obliterate, rather than build on. I probably
should have been more receptive to some of them – Patrick Cullinan, for example,
was a fine poet. Mind you, I was an undergraduate still when Mtshali’s and
Serote’s first volumes were published, which shook things up considerably. Black Consciousness had a big effect on me,
in ways which it would take too long to describe here. It was the subject of my
doctoral thesis; I then became friends with Chris van Wyk as well, whose poetry
– along with Mafika Gwala’s – I much admired.
I did read and like Lee Harwood, and have
recently gone back to him to look at his long poem ‘Long Black Veil’, in terms
of a book-length sequence I am writing. But if there was a British influence on
me early on, it was most clearly from an anthology called Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain that
Penguin put out in 1969. How times, and Penguin, have changed! Weird
as it may seem, I’ve also found John Milton’s ability to make a line of poetry refer
both backwards and forwards a tremendous model that frees one up: I try and do
this quite a lot.
More recently, other poets have been important
to me. My first book was heavily influenced by Philip Levine, after Jeremy
Cronin had given me a cassette tape of him reading. And, always, Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
In the 1990s I took him around Cape Town for a day, and was reduced to
dribbling fandom. He was great. I’ve recently rediscovered Neruda’s poems about
birds and the sea, which, rather than being effusive and vague (which is how I
viewed him before) are exact in their knowledge and staggering in their effect.
I believe the best poetry has music running
through it; you need an ear to be a poet. As Baraka says, “Poetry is speech
musick’d.” A lot of South African poetry
is bad, in my opinion, because the poet concerned has no ear. In response, some
of the poets of my generation tended to try and break up traditional English
poetic metre and find new forms. Several of us were, and are, into hard jazz –
Berold, Ari Sitas, myself, and more recently Seitlhamo Motsapi and Alan Finlay –
you can see it in the experimentation that goes on, with breath phrasing and so
on.
Your collection Land Dreaming was
all prose poems, some of them closer to short fiction that actual poems. What
made you want to focus on prose poems during this time? In an interview in New Contrast, you mentioned by
influenced by René Char.
I bought a Selected Char when I was quite
young, but only read it many years later, and was blown away – and then I immediately
knew I wanted to start a project containing prose poems. Before that I had
little interest, past tormenting one of my undergraduate poetry tutors by
asking “But what about prose poetry?” every time she tried to make a general
point. If you know Char, his poetry is regularly set in landscapes but recreates
these landscapes with a highly metaphorical, almost surreal, quality; and often
cuts through, or off, narrative. Char has an intensity, a compression, an
ability to come at subject matter from an oblique angle, that to my mind is the
essence of prose poetry as a form.
Having said this, if you look through my
collection you’ll see that not all the poems conform to what Char does.‘Staff’,
written first, does, for example; but there are also a lot of narrative poems; these
days they would be called ‘flash fiction’ I suppose. There are also dialogues,
demented monologues, parodies of various kinds of discourse, especially
official and media discourse and so on. It’s a mixed bag.
In writing Land
Dreaming I conceived of the idea of using
individual poems to create a wider mosaic of poems, partly personal and partly
socio-political, within a space – in this case Southern Africa. There
was a model I found for this too, despite its very different subject matter:
Jacques Réda’s The Ruins of Paris.
I’ve travelled widely through South Africa, and a large majority of the poems
relate to places I have visited, and I’m trying to be pretty exact, although
occasionally I borrowed stories from friends. I wanted to socialise and
politicise the landscapes I came up with: they’re full of people talking,
thinking, occasionally fighting; but mainly desiring and dreaming, despite at
times dire circumstances and lives. Thus, Land
Dreaming. There are also people in some
poems, however, who are pretty delusional about their reality. This is another
version of the title.
In your new collection, Absent
Tongues, we continue to read the familiar themes in your work – a sense of
the everyday activity of work and home, as well as surrounding landscapes, but
also, of course, a strong awareness of the socioeconomic and political
environment in which we live.
About ten years ago I published an article in
the British academic journal new
formations which argued that the ordinary – the everyday – was suffused
with political and economic determinants, especially so in this stage of late
capitalism. All our personal and leisure activities are being drawn
further into the ambit of finance and commerce: sport is only the most obvious
of these. This has always been my view of the everyday – one in concert with
Henry Lefebvre’s theory, I suppose. I hope that my poems reflect this.
Looking back on it, the themes through my six
books have remained remarkably similar, without too much intention. To some
extent this is to even the case, to be sure, in Land Dreaming. Yet there is one habitual aspect only marginally present
in my latest, Absent Tongues. In its
original form this manuscript was longer, but I pulled out quite a number of
poems. So it’s more in one voice: there’s less of the flat, demotic, slightly
mocking tone of voice I sometimes use, and no satires. In this case I thought
that a greater usage of my (as it were) ‘poetic’ voice would work better, and
give it more coherence. I’m hoping it
will give it a focus and strength to which readers will respond.
You work in academia. Do you feel that being involved with literature as a living, as you are, makes one necessarily a more skilled or more perceptive poet? Or can
it even make one inhibited? Some great poets have been involved in
professions that have had nothing to do with writing – Williams is an
obvious example.
I don’t think it will necessarily help one’s
poetry, but it could harm it. I tend to agree with Williams in Paterson on this issue: “We go on
living, we permit ourselves / to continue – but certainly / not for the
university, what they publish / severally or as a group: clerks / got out of
hand forgetting for the most part / to whom they are beholden.” But then I come
from a generation that got all misty-eyed about Snyder in his firewatch station
in a forest, who believed the older poets were stodgy and pompous, who
identified with that poem of Neruda’s that acclaims “the poets of our age - / with
light clothes and walking shoes.” There’s nothing more depressing than standing
in a university bookshop overseas, looking through scores of first volumes by
young poets fresh out of creative writing programmes, all more or less the
same. I have done a bit of supervision
but I have always avoided being in a classroom creative writing situation
except once, when I sat in on a class of Martín Espada’s in Amherst.
But perhaps I’m exaggerating – there are good
poets who can come out of this, as well as good teachers: for instance, there’s
a wonderful essay by Philip Levine, ‘Mine Own John Berryman’, describing the
difference between being taught by Lowell and Berryman. Come to think of it,
Sylvia Plath didn’t take to Lowell either... one of my favourite quotes about
how teachers can miss the uniqueness of a student can be found in her diary:
“How few of my superiors do I respect the opinions of anyhow? Lowell a case in
point. How few will see what I am working at, overcoming? How ironic that all
my work to overcome my easy poeticisms merely convinces them that I am rough,
anti-poetic, unpoetic.” Enough
said.
What is your view of
South African poetry at present? When I look back at the 1990s, there was a
tremendous energy in local poetry, and there was an interest in what we
were doing. The interest has waned considerably in the past 10 years and at the
same time I feel South African poetry has regressed.
I identified quite markedly with some of the
more formally experimental, yet still politically suffused poets who emerged in
the late 1980s and 1990s – partly because there were so many different styles,
voices, opinions. They remain a salutary presence. There was also a greater
degree of influence – perhaps it was similarity of intent - between black and
white poets, I think, than before or since. Some of the poets who started out
in that period are now well-known, such as Cronin, Ingrid de Kok and Lesego
Rampolokeng. There are others, though, whose true worth and importance have
still not been attended to. I’m thinking of Karen Press, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Joan
Metelerkamp, and quite a few others.
I, like you, don’t see quite this adventurous
spirit or excitement any more. However, I have recently had cause to look at
the South African poetry published in the last two or three years more closely,
and it’s not as dismal as I thought. There are a number of younger (relatively
speaking) poets who have established a consistent and unique voice, such as
Rustum Kozain and Vonani Bila. Gabeba Baderoon and Kobus Moolman are writing
with growing power; Kobus is, in my view, possibly the most compelling voice
exploring and experimenting with new ways of writing poetry at the moment. I
really enjoy watching Creamy Ewok Baggends and the Zimbabwean Comrade Fatso on
stage; it seems to me that Genna Gardini, Haidee Kruger and Khadija Heeger have
talent that will develop further; and I’ve always liked Kate Kilalea’s poetry –
it’s such a pity she’s moved to London.
There are a number of other interesting new
poets coming through, mostly those published by the independent publishers such
as Modjaji, Botsotso, Deep South and yourself. I have huge admiration for
publishers who are doing this, often on a shoestring budget, usually without
any help or attention from the media. All in all, the mainstream publishers and
media seem to have little interest in poetry, unless it comes from what they
regard as a ‘profile’. They have even less interest in serious or experimental
poetry: it’s only the small, independent, shoe-string publishers who are
keeping poetry’s head above water, bless them.
So there are worrying signs. I can best sum
this up by repeating something I heard a mainstream publisher say in praise of
a book of poetry at a launch recently ... “Each poem is a perfect work of art”
... and then the audience nodded their heads sagely. Ouch. To my mind, such a
view of poetry can only be called pre-modernist: modernist and post-modernist
movements have thrown such a notion of the poem out of the window. If some South
African publishers have this view of poetry, how can we expect to move forward?
I am moreover less than full of enthusiasm about the proliferation of Maya
Angelou look-alikes around at the moment, on the ‘spoken word’ circuit. At
worst it comes far too close to an identity- and self-obsessed Cosmospeak.
It’s a cliché, but nevertheless true, to say
that poetry is the easiest genre to do badly, but the most difficult to do
well. In the last decade in particular it’s been hugely undervalued – in some
cases, in book fairs, it looks like it’s starting to be seen by organisers as a
dollop of light relief between the more urgent tasks of selling genre fiction
to make money. Have a look: the topics given poets to talk about in panel
discussions are sometimes embarrassingly facile.
What to you is the role of the poet in society, if any, and how do you
think society views the role of the poet?
I think the wider South African society at
present views poetry as a harmless oddity, only occasionally useful to launch
brand names or praise the ‘big men’ – no reference to gender – trundling along
our corridors of power. On the other hand, some people take a kind of defensive
position, perceiving the poet as a special individual, a prophet and seer. Both
of these are wrong, in my opinion.
I think poetry has a variety of roles. Let’s
face it, one of these is to entertain. However, poems should also make us
think, and, if necessary, make us uncomfortable. I believe readers should be
goaded, prodded, and delighted – good poetry does all of these.
Do you think South African writers indulge in self-censorship?
Maybe, but I can’t think of immediate examples.
However, I am convinced that there is a form of hidden censorship at the
moment. A new hegemony has risen, I believe, taking its cue from the
interventions of Ndebele and Sachs many years ago, to cast literature within a seemingly
free, but ultimately defined, ambit in society, policed by publishers and
reviewers – and it’s certainly far away from anything either Sachs or Ndebele would
have wanted, I suspect. Who was the Zen master who said, “to give your cow a
wide, open field is the best way to control it?” Everything’s so staid, so
conventional, you want to run. In terms of fiction and poetry, I have had a
number of young writers come to me and talk about publishers saying to them,
off the record, “take out the politics and I’ll publish this.” Though, of
course, no one is prepared to have the courage to say it publicly. There’s surely
a neurosis about political themes among some publishers and academics, which
can only be described as engendered by the fear of a future where the present social
and political settlements could be disrupted.
It’s a pity: here, today, such a viewpoint can only serve the powerful
and rich, and those who want the future South Africa to be a place where they
can be lulled to sleep by literary entertainment in their suburbs. Fat chance!
Photo of Kelwyn Sole: Centre for Creative Arts
Photo of Kelwyn Sole: Centre for Creative Arts
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