Richard Fox: Engaging with language

Richard Fox was born in Cape Town in 1975. He lives in Johannesburg and runs the T-shirt company T-Shirt Terrorist. His first collection of poems, 876, was published in 2007, and his second collection, otherwise you well?, was published by deep south in 2021. He has had poems published in journals such as New Coin, Ons Klyntji, Carapace and donga, and in the anthologies it all begins and glass jars among trees.

otherwise you well? is your second collection. Your first, 876, came out in 2007. I remember you had stopped writing for a while, and it was around 2013 that you started up again. Was there any reason for that period of silence?

I did take a hiatus; I think it was around 2002 though, and it lasted until 2006/2007, just before the release of 876. This was a difficult period for me. I was ‘going through changes’. The poetry in 876 was written between 1997 and 2001, most of that body in the last six months of 2001. This was the year I cancelled my corporate subscription with the world – I resigned from my job and holed out in a garden cottage at the back on my parent’s property, stayed up late, did all kinds of weird stuff, and wrote.

And after that, 2002, the real world kind of caught up with me, and I got a new job, albeit in a calmer, more creatively sustaining environment – a bookshop. I moved in with my future wife, and things took me away from writing for a while. Being away from writing, I felt I couldn’t rightly publish 876, so I backburned that project. Creatively I went through something of a transformation, and it was a painful process; one I both embraced and fought against – I founded the online T-shirt company, T-Shirt Terrorist, which was later to become my full-time profession and focal creative outlet, but I kept hacking away at poetry, none of it really working, until somehow, in 2007, something in me calmed or shifted, and I found I was able to balance my focus between T-shirt design and poetry.

It was strange, both processes come from the same core, it seems, and I had to complete the build of the new form before being able to return to the previous, but once done I was then able to access both with the required intensity to produce decent work.

I don’t see any major change in the poetry contained in the two volumes – do you feel it has been a continuous flow? With 876, you dropped your first name, but with your new collection you have used it.

I build pieces around voice, and perhaps, despite the break in linear continuity between the two volumes, I’m still looking to address similar issues. I look within and without, and my voice is contemplative. I’m concerned on an emotional level with the poetic, artistic identity that forms around an expressive voice, constructing a cohesive simulacrum, a seeker of profundities, or even absurdities, but never generalisations. I want to know more about the person who writes. I don’t know entirely who that is yet. I think the person who writes creates himself anew with each word placed in arrangement, in collusion or in opposition to other words in the vicinity. So internally, poetry is a search for truth. Externally, poetry is a perhaps a search for beauty, and in opposition to that, in tension to that, is the world in which we live where beauty is often hard to find. I think I may take issue with our modern predicament, on this level, modes and modules of society that stand in the way of us achieving beauty. And by beauty I don’t mean a physical beauty, I’m referring to an outcome of consciousness – a desire to make sense and understand the reality we find ourselves immersed within, purposefully. I like the notion of Truth and Beauty as poetic absolutes and writing as a means of uncovering varied ways towards them. A philosophical hole that I am digging myself into, no doubt.

When I wrote 876 I was performing regularly, and I had a stage persona – Fox, which was whittled down from my full name, which is Richard Foxcroft. I also enjoyed the way the title and name thus became patterned and entwined. When I published my earlier work, I dropped the ‘croft’ to create a simple pseudonym – Richard Fox, which I have since kept. It has a nice ring to it, and hankers back to my performance days, my summer years, as it were.

I remember seeing you at a few poetry performances, and you performed at the Grahamstown Arts Festival on occasions. Did you start writing poetry with a view to ‘stage’ as opposed to ‘page’ poetry? Has your view on poetry performance changed since then?

Performance has always been core to my work – spoken word as focal intent, and yet my poetic voice only really works, comes alive, when the work presents itself accurately on the page at first, a written recipe. There is a very definite balance here. A performative piece needs to be perfectly presented on the page. I don’t simply string words together all over the place because they sound good in front of the mic, they sound good in front of the mic because the effort has been made to structure them on the page, so there’s that, that dualism as it were. I’m not sure how I feel about performance currently. I did some slam work, toured some fests and in Newtown, inner-city Johannesburg, I hooked up with some young poets and hip-hop artists, rap artists, and enjoyed the experience, and then I moved on. Now, I’m rusty, and I seldom hit the lights and when I do, I am reminded of how age creeps in from the shadows, how you slow over time, how your work becomes calmer perhaps, less intent to roar and shake the foundations. My performance was based soundly on how, when the poem is written as perfectly as you can manage it, the words come easily in front of the mic, and that is still the case, where I have recorded recent work for otherwise you well?. The best poems are easily vocalised because the voice is sure and true, but I don’t think I’ll be performing much moving forward – too much on my plate currently, but this is still how I write, as if I am addressing people, personally and collectively.

Your approach to language – written language – can be quite idiosyncratic: playing on words or joining words together, using title case in places where one would expect sentence case. It is as if your approach to language is irreverent – an assault on language?

There is an element of contention in my work often – a dynamic that comes from working with language to create novel forms. I don’t think too much about it when I write, but language, the physical presentation of words on a page, can be very patterned and I see relationships on a number of different levels, from the way stanzas arrange in relation to themselves, the poem as a single element on a page or across pages, down to the arrangement of letters in certain words, and those arrangements, across lines and linkages, between certain words in different parts of the poem. While I am using voice to construct meaning, I feel that I am using language in a physical construction to create concrete pieces, and when a poem ’works’ for me, when it comes together, and you know intrinsically that it has and that it does, that is when both the meaning and the physical construction of a poem align. I don’t set out to achieve this, but the outcomes work on numerous levels, where a poem, to go back to performance, hits a certain level of competency because of a series of interchangeable elements, which when correctly stacked effect a complete piece. Still, there is something to irreverence, isn’t there? To conduct your craft in a slightly different manner, and make the words perform in ways that aren’t expected of them. When you get it right, it looks good, feels good. It’s an instinctive drive, process, that creates poetry for me, and I enjoy working with language. Over the years this has developed in a certain way, I wouldn’t necessarily call it formulaic, but you set out from familiar ground as you seek to encounter new places in your work, with your craft, your art. Messing with words is a starting point for me, and when they mess back, well, that’s communion, isn’t it? That’s how we engage with language and evolve as writers, artists.

For the virtual launch of otherwise you well? you had organised two videos of you reading your poetry – is this a new way of presenting your poetry, and do you intend to explore video presentation further?

I wish to explore different mediums; in the same way I have explored T-shirt design as an expression of my creative drive. The video performance was a way in which I could use the performance aspect of my work to present sections of the book. And it was fun. I hadn’t recorded before, not purposefully, professionally, besides the odd video camera set-up at readings. I hired a production company, and we went to Fordsburg, downtown Johannesburg, this aging building refurbished as studios for artists and creatives, with a chicken rotisserie on the ground floor, and I performed a few of the pieces from the book. Then we went out on the streets and took long shots and footage of people and the general urban activity on a Sunday afternoon. Pigeons. I’m hoping to get a decent 15-minute film from the project, we’ll have to see, but yes, I would like to do this again. I am also exploring vocal recordings with several artists, musicians. I feel there may be a more pronounced spoken word angle somewhere and it might be the right time to see where this may take me.

In 876 there is a long poem about a train journey, and in your new collection there is a long poem about a road trip. Is travel – journeying, or movement, perhaps energy force – a focus? Are you concerned with the movement of language – of poetic language – itself?

When we move outside of our element, our comfort zones, it excites and activates a certain response in ourselves. I’d not want to think I am alone in this. When I travel my poet piques and I am willingly if not always easily inspired to write about my experiences. The energy here is change energy, isn’t it? Transformative, in the literate sense. Poetry comes from experience and what better way than to experience the world. It’s one thing to contemplate endlessly in a closed room late at night, in front of your PC, all the regular arrangements in place, but this can only take you so far. At some stage you’re going to have to feed the beast and what better way to do it than through travel. For me, even the simple notion of seeing different places, different settings, not to mention the interpersonal experiences, cross-cultural exposures, sets off a reaction and I can feel poetry coming on. So, I take notes, mentally, mostly. Of this, and of that. Feelings. And then I sit down, once I have returned, let it juice then, when the time is right, let it flow. If it does it’s beautiful, that search for beauty in extremity, so my travel pieces are sometimes longer than my other pieces. Epics? Not quite, but certainly different to my other work.

Several of your poems deal with sustainability issues around the environment, our dependence on technology, corporate capitalism and the obsession with status These issues are global, but at the same time your poetry is deeply rooted in  the South African experience.

There is an element to my work which transcends the local. An attempt at achieving an expression sounded in the collective unconscious, the prevailing Zeitgeist. I don’t always get here, I often fall very short, and such pieces come across as pretentious (I won’t publish these) but to hit on a nerve that jolts people, across spatial and geographic divides, as poets we’re speaking on issues that affect all of us, or none of us, surely. In this regard you wish to take your work to a level where it reflects the spirit and the transactions of the age. How you do this is up to the individual artist. It’s often best to keep it simple, root your voice in the immediate and the local, but if you want you can also ideate and fixate on real global concerns, or the metaphysical and transcendent. I like to concentrate on some of the issues we’re facing collectively as a society, because they mean something to me, personally. I take an interest, as a poet. I feel I can do something, something real and meaningful, even if it is only to highlight and expose the problems we’re facing as we evolve as an industrial civilisation.  

Do you think that poetry – or a poet – can change things? Can poetry change the world? Are poets unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelley thought?

Yes. But it’s complicated. And dangerous ‒ for the mind and the soul. You create the world, if not only in the constant of your image, then too through the collection and culmination of thoughts that spring from, grow and govern your consciousness, your single universal expression. Poets are often overlooked, we’re regarded as archaic, relegated to the side lines of commercial enterprise. With poetry I seldom write, I often create, and I feel that that creation moves out in waves, dynamic ripples that are not bound in linear motion and do not abide by temporal and spatial rules. But it is a slippery slope. Once you convince yourself of the power of your own metaphysical incantations, your magnanimous import, suzerain of all you behold, there is nothing that you cannot achieve, and nothing that you can. Your reality becomes guided by nuance, confluence and mounting synchronicity, the face of God in the clouds. Reality will bend to your will, but it will bounce back somewhere else, for someone else. What do we know of any of these things, really? I would advise caution, argue for temperance and balance, in all things poetic, as with all pursuits both intellectual and physical.

What is your opinion of South African poetry at the moment? Do you think we have enough publication outlets Do we have enough readers in South Africa?

There is no market for poetry in South Africa and this is reflected in the limited outlets for young and established poets to seek recognition and an audience for their work. Perhaps this is an outcome of education or policy, or an indication of wider issues. Either way, as a poet, when you publish in South Africa you realise that very few people will interact with your work on a local level. That is a bit disheartening, but you do it for other reasons too, if not only the poetry itself then for yourself; sometimes the sheer compulsion of it all. I applaud those individuals and institutions that still cater to and advance poetry in our society and I’m cautiously optimistic that the situation will maintain its present trajectory, and hopefully expand in the future, although it is likely to remain limited and niche.

 Richard Fox’s book, otherwise you well?, is available from Deep South via their distributor Blue Weaver in Southern Africa, and international distributor African Books Collective in all countries. The book can also be purchased or ordered in South Africa from all bookstores that sell poetry. An ebook version is available from African Books Collective.

This interview first appeared in The Odd Magazine 23.

Dimakatso Sedite: With poetry, there is nowhere to hide

Dimakatso Sedite was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Her poetry has appeared in Teesta Review, Brittle Paper, New Coin, Stanzas, Kalahari Review, BKO, Botsotso, Aerodrome, BNAP and elsewhere. She was the joint winner of the 2019 DALRO Prize. She holds an MA in Research Psychology from the University of the Witwatersrand. Yellow Shade (Deep South, 2021) is her first book of poems.

Yellow Shade is your first collection, but I am curious about how long you have been writing for.

I have been writing intermittently for myself since I was about 19 years old, or even earlier, if the short story I wrote when I was 10 is anything to go by. I would write mainly short stories and some poems, throughout my 20s and 30s, but did not see myself as a writer by any stretch. It was only in 2016, 27 years later, that I decided to submit my work for publication in journals. So, in that way, I’m a bit of an anomaly. All poems in this book were written between 2016 and 2020.

It has already been said that there is a strong physicality in your poems and you have said that writing a poem for you starts with an image rather than an idea. What is your process for writing poetry?

I find it easiest to write early in the morning, before the clutter of the day starts to clog my mind. That is the time I am least guarded, because I have not yet put on my coat of daily defences. I write a poem in bits and pieces, so a single poem can take me weeks or even months to write. When clichés start creeping between the lines, I pause the writing, to be resumed when new bits of the poem enter my head again. At times I struggle to find the right word(s) for the imagery I see in my head, and will not end the poem until I find that word. The self-editing usually starts with the sixth or seventh draft, and may be repeated six to seven times before the poem becomes ready. There are some poems that do not need to be worked this hard, but they are few.

I try to make the ordinary look strange, to surprise, to heighten the reader’s senses, all with the aim of trying to make the reader feel something. My poems have a hint of vulnerability about them, the kind that carries a surprising resilience within it.

I am very taken by your use of language; I thought I had detected some influence of Dylan Thomas.

I find your observation to be interesting because Dylan Thomas has not been one of the poets I have read. I write largely about the ordinary, and there is something about simple lives that I find exquisite, laden with feeling, and I try to express that in words. Dylan Thomas lived in socio-historical times and a socio-political context vastly different from mine. The only commonality I see is that, like me, he was perhaps not afraid to go where most people dare to tread, by confronting our own mortality. Writing about things we cannot control seems to loosen sand underneath people’s feet, and that can be quite unsettling.

I have always had a wild imagination. As a three-to four-year-old, I would often wonder how the words that were being spoken in daily language looked like even before I could read and write. I would create a story out of a picture emblazoned on a Rooibos tea box and the like. But then again, all children dwell in that fantasy world. I just never seemed to have lost that. I have been told quite a few times that I live in a dream world. During the time I was working for a child rights organisation, I was always drawn to direct work with children so that I could create that imaginary world that could be found only in play, and in a sense poetry is about a play of words. I grew up in a socio-cultural context where stories were being told and not read, this necessitating one to create an imagery in one’s head. I have a Sesotho and Setswana linguistic background, which is intrinsically visceral in its expression. The rhythm and arrangement of my words are influenced by my daily way of speaking, which is in my two mother tongues. 

Needless to say, township primary schools in apartheid South Africa had no textbooks, so we would complete the picture in our minds as a book was being read out loud in class. This deprivation got offset only by my father’s large collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books and magazines, which I read a lot of, as well as the convent education I received later when I started high school. Our little library had these post-Russian revolution novels that Sr Sighilde (one of our English teachers, who was originally from West Germany) would lend us to read for leisure (whose titles and authors now evade me). There was something about how they had been written that I had found fascinating and different.  I also read a lot as a pre-teen and teenager, and spent a lot of my pocket money on magazines (including Time magazine, to which I had a subscription) and newspapers. So my writing has largely been influenced by the ordinary, the not so obvious, and the distant past.

I think it was Siza Nkosi who said that thematically she saw parallels in your work with that of Isabella Motadinyane – was Isabella’s work an influence? What other poets have influenced you?

No, not at all. I got introduced to Isabella’s work only in 2019, and similarities between her writing and mine were not apparent to me. Stylistically, we also write differently from each other. Before 2016, my reading had been mostly fiction. What struck me about Isabella’s writing was how effortless it was, as if she did not try too hard. Even ‘Sink a shaft’, her most erotic poem, has that innocence about it, the kind that seems to be a cross-cutting tone  throughout her book. Siza (Nkosi) may need to explain why she made such a comparison, because I might be too close to see. Writers who I think may have had some influence on my writing may not even be poets, namely Gabriel Garcia Màrquez and Ben Okri (who I think is a much better novelist than poet, and whose poetry I do not even read). To a lesser extent, I could also mention Antjie Krog, James Matthews and Patrick Cullinan.

Some of your poems deal with domestic violence. It’s a harsh reality for many women and an issue from which you do not shy away. But overall, do you feel that poets have a duty to address socioeconomic or political issues?

I think it is important for the reader to experience the book as a whole, instead of singling out one or two poems. That would be making the body of work more (or less) than what it intended to be. In Yellow Shade, gender-based violence as a subject appears in three poems: ‘The day she disappeared’, ‘Soldier in a black dress’, and ‘Last words to my sister’, and the book comprises 44 poems in total. You will notice that my book follows a narrative arc. The poems start with a somewhat light innocence that slowly builds up into what is stark and dark, before lightness creeps in again towards the end. So each poem carries a different tone that connects it to the next one, offering waves of symbiotic variations. Throughout the book, there is a fracture that attempts to build itself somehow ‒ a paradox of fragility, strength, humour, and hope. The poems came into being within a cusp of magic unfolding within my head. Each poem carries a different mood all its own, and deserves to be read with a similar attitude. On its own, a subject would never be able to hold a poem together, one would still need to write a poem around it, and that takes a lot of hard work, intuition and practice.  

Some writers may write to erase reality, others may write to confront it. Either way, they are all taking a position. Poems that are devoid of social issues are still politically laden. The more one hides, the more glaring the hidden becomes. Writing poetry is the ultimate test of one’s vulnerability, without which a poem  may not be possible. With poetry, there is nowhere to hide.

Do you feel that poets should have a role at all?

A poet’s only role is to make the reader connect with the poem, and that can happen only if one is honest with one’s writing. British-American poet Denise Levertov once said: ‘Insofar as poetry has a social function, it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock’. Unfortunately, the feelings being evoked by a poem are not always pleasant ones, neither should they be. Not all poems are meant to entertain. We write poetry so that we do not have to explain. Once a poem reaches the reader, the poet starts to disappear. The poet’s ultimate aim is to make herself useless, because a finished poem no longer needs its creator.

What is your opinion of poetry as therapy, as a means of ‘healing’?

It takes a lot more than a brush with poetry for one to heal emotionally, that is why we have mental health professionals to help with that. What a poem can do, however, is to help a reader, or at times, a writer, with the cathartic process of offloading some of the emotional burden, and the sense of lightness that one feels as a result, may be confused with therapy, which would be a dangerous thing to do. Poetry is an emotional experience, but to assert  that it could replace therapy would be a bit far-fetched.

What has your experience been of getting published in South Africa? Has it been difficult for you?

I started submitting my work for publication only in 2016, so it might be too early to have a well-informed opinion on that. However, so far, it has been fairly easy to get published locally in journals and a couple of anthologies. I have been writing for myself, on and off, for a very long time, so I might have unknowingly had a bit of practice. I have experienced rejections from some local journals as well. I find getting published overseas to be a lot harder, although some of my work has been accepted in a couple of international publications. However, rejections have given me an opportunity to look at my work with a critical eye, and to challenge myself more, as I explore new ways of approaching my writing. When I began doing that, some of the journals that had previously rejected my work started accepting it. I still get more rejections than acceptances, though, so the need to improve remains constant.

South Africa’s poetry journal landscape is quite small, because a lot of journals have inadequate human and financial resources to be sustainable, so a lot of them have shut down. Writers who have suffered the most have been those who write in indigenous languages, because there are such few publishing platforms for their work. However, in recent years, new, exciting journals have emerged locally, so that is encouraging.

There are currently only a handful traditional publishers of books of poetry in South Africa, all of which are small independent presses, with limited resources. Major local publishing houses are currently not prioritising poetry. This makes the poetry publishing environment quite competitive to prospective authors. So I took a risk and took time off work, so that I could focus solely on my writing, because I knew my manuscript would be competing with tons of others for a chance at being published. One also needs to be patient and willing to accept constructive criticism. For instance, my manuscript went through ten drafts before it was ready, after many rounds of many poems getting dropped and just as many new ones being written from scratch to replace the cancelled ones, as well as many rounds of editing. The whole process of putting this book together technically started in early 2018 and ended in early 2021.  

There are, of course, self-publishing and hybrid publishing options as well, but all publishing models have their own pros and cons.

What do you see as the challenges facing poets in South Africa?

I think there is an emerging trend of a collective identity, based on a particular aesthetic preference and/or social positions, which can also be complexly heterogeneous within itself. More than ever before, social media has made writers more aware of one another, making the writing experience less solitary. From an activism point of view, some of the writer allegiances play an important role as change agents, particularly those striving to redress inequities for historically disadvantaged writers, such as women, people of colour, LGBTQAI+ people, as well as writers living with disabilities and those who write in indigenous languages. Writer networks also make access to information and opportunities a lot easier. Within this dynamic writer context, a distinct writer identity is still a possibility for new writers, provided the writer can differentiate between the two. Usually, as one gains more experience, one becomes more aware of the kind of writer one is. 

There also appears to be an occasional intolerance of diversity in poetry. Oral poetry remains undervalued, as if a poem needs to be in written form, for it to be good. After 1994,there has been an increasing pressure on poets to remove a poem from its social context, to control certain emotions in a poem, to not stay true to what a poem wants to say, and how it wants to say it. What needs to be borne in mind is that there is more than one approach to writing poetry, and readers are a heterogeneous group with their own individually varied aesthetic preferences. This censoring may be symptomatic of a resistance to diversity and inclusivity. Such an environment may not be enabling, and may stifle efforts to explore fresh ways of producing new work. It is within the foundation of the old that exciting voices can emerge. Nothing happens within a void.

Creative writing programmes are often expensive and out of reach for most writers. Those being offered for free often happen as once-off sessions during annual book festivals. 

There is no culture of writer mentorship in South Africa (however, there are a few good exceptions), and local writer residencies rarely get awarded to those who need them the most: new writers, much less writers of poetry.

Lastly, we live in an era of instant gratification, and may, at times, rush to submit work that is not quite ready.

What has the reception to your book been like so far?

I may not be the best person to make such an assessment, so I will leave that to the reviewers and critics. In terms of sales, the book did fairly well during the month of the launch, particularly in direct sales, with in-store and online sales slowly picking up. Deep South has done a second print run of the book, in preparation for the second (minor) book launch which will happen either in the Free State or the Western Cape later this year.

What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently busy with a few new poems that I intend to submit to journals that have not published my work before. I am also exploring the possibility of acquiring translation skills through a learning programme, but have not made up my mind as yet.

Dimakatso Sedite’s book, Yellow Shade, is available from Deep South via their distributor Blue Weaver in Southern Africa, and international distributor African Books Collective in all countries. The book can also be purchased or ordered in South Africa from all bookstores that sell poetry. An ebook version is available from African Books Collective.

Mxolisi Nyezwa: A new dawn for poetry

Mxolisi Nyezwa was born in 1967 in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, where he still lives. He is the author of song trials (Gecko, 2000), New Country (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008) and Malikhanye (Deep South, 2011). His work appeared in the bumper poetry anthology Essential Things (Cosaw, 1992) and has been published in numerous literary journals. He is included in the selection of South African writing, Beauty Came Grovelling Forward, on the US-based literary website Big Bridge. He is the founding editor of Kotaz, a cultural journal.

DH: You were published in the Cosaw anthology Essential Things, in 1992. The sections allocated to each poet were quite big, actually small collections in themselves. You had thirteen poems under the title ‘To Have No Art’. What was your position as a poet back then?

MN: The 80s and 90s were confusing times for many young people in the townships. I had just completed my matric in New Brighton during the most painful and dangerous of times. My school education had proven to me to have been a complete waste of time. The useless piece of paper from the Department of Education and Training, my certificate, stayed for years in one of the old sideboards at home to mock me for my gullible dreams of material or vocational success. In my case the apartheid dream of educating blacks for subservience succeeded. Like a hunted animal I was cornered, gravely concerned about my future, unprepared for the emotional and psychological violence – the steep darkness that was to engulf my life later on – outside the familiar and troubled neighbourhood of New Brighton. So when I wrote my first poems I was creating for myself some distance from this encroaching and awful world of manhood. I was looking for light where I sensed darkness lived, listening for the comforting sounds of words and unaffected spirits. In the 70s Serote had written No baby must weep. He had focused us to see love away from pain and struggle and demonstratively spoke of the maternal instinct in his heroic poem Behold mama, flowers. Under those harsh circumstances of my growing up, poetry became the only accessible language that could talk profoundly and in a way I could relate to about my need for complete meaning, my thirst for direction amid the noisy messages that had been drummed into my ears during my school years. From early on I could not shake off the disturbing feeling that I was in somebody’s crooked plans, that I was fingered, or even that people from somewhere with long, nightmarish dreams were looking for me. I was paranoid. Once, I took all my poems and buried them into a deep hole in our backyard. Amid all these conflicting emotions I arrived at the doors of Cosaw in Korsten, maybe a few weeks or just days before Cosaw closed down. So I was never really part or even that exposed to Cosaw’s culture and activities.  I had submitted my first poetry manuscript to Ravan Press in Joburg. In fact it was from a letter from Ravan Press (Andries Oliphant was their editor) that I first learnt about Cosaw’s existence, and of the plan about Essential Things.

Your first collection, song trials, appeared in 2000 by Gecko. What struck me at the time was the strong sense of bleakness in the poems: there are references to night, darkness, rain, birds, thunder. There seems an atmosphere of desolation and isolation. Already, in the title poem of your Essential Things selection, you had stated ‘I hate the sunshine.’

On their own these references to night, darkness and so on are not exceptional, not in any poetry. It is the context around the imagery that gives the work this other feature of desolation and bleakness.I think therein lies sometimes the value of poetry, because these references are about lived experiences. Experiences that others are being exposed to that none of us may be aware of.

I like to think of my poetry as reflecting the dismal nature of politics and individual existence in the modern society, a reflection on greed and how capitalism and the financial system have devastated people’s lives and cultures without shame. Poetry that identifies this kind of aggression, which is really driven by financial interests as the basis for corruption against human beings, must necessarily be bleak. The poetry must in turn invoke its unique form, impact the usual language extraordinarily, enmeshing flowers, human lives and global manifestations. In so many ways poets are writing to change the world.

In New Country there are indications of a willingness to experiment with form – I am thinking of the long poem 'Sky', which ends with the word ‘rain’ being repeated 88 times, like concrete poetry. There is also the prose piece ‘it is good’, which is a one-paragraph rush without punctuation.

It’s difficult to explain why some poems have to appear in the world the way they do. The challenge for the writer is to stay close to what comes, the primeval music and sound of the poem, its primary bend towards its own unique shape and form, and its own language. Obviously there are always risks involved in this process of transcribing the original voice of creation or composing each new poem. The risks confront all poets. For a poem like ‘Sky’ it was important for me to be expansive in my use of imagery and still maintain movement through the poem. That is what the poem seemed to be saying to me. The poem was taking me everywhere. Its music tugged closely at my arm and pulled me towards desolation and to lonely places, to directions and oppressed geniuses, to bewildered and unfriendly people working under the midday sun. The poem pointed at the whole universe. I saw all manner of things, many lives, some begging to be heard; others that were forgotten and shameless.  I think the last stanza with the long repetition of the image of falling rain tries to celebrate these multiple existences.

What have your poetic influences been? When we were at Poetry Africa together, we chatted quite a bit about the modern Spanish-languages poets, such as Neruda, Lorca and Alberti.  But you were particularly keen on Vallejo. 

  

I like Neruda for his over-exuberant passion, his huge love for life, his strong desire to reach and name all things. Vallejo’s love walks boldly to us through another door, one we never expected. His devotion to humankind is more fundamental, much more intense, even psychotic. Lorca taught me at a young age the use of imagery. His poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias revolutionised my thinking about poetry and its application in human affairs. I’ve always been attracted to writers and poets who wrote as if the entire meaning of their lives dependent on it, on their calling as poets or as writers. I regard Eskia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue as one of the most important books to have been written about South Africa and its people.     

Your new collection, Malikhanye, is centred around the loss of your infant son in 2007. There is obviously an expression of loss in the poems, of being ‘haunted by the life we never had’. There is also a directness I do not see in the earlier poems.

I have a feeling that the more direct my poems become, the greater are the chances that they will lose their power. I must avoid ‘directness’ at all costs as the approach goes against my understanding of how life manifests ordinarily. Life works the same way as death works, applying its innuendos and subtlety. I think the obvious misleads, gives the wrong answers. What becomes crucial is finding new paths, discovering for ourselves new rhythms, new nuances. That becomes important. For a fuller representation of loss in Malikhanye I had the sudden revelation that life complicates and yet simplifies. That even as we begin to think we understand, everything around us explodes or diminishes – all understanding, every organic leaf, every rock, like rain patterns against the sea. Malikhanye was driven by the intense feeling of loss. Everything was out in the open. A mad nanny had left the boy alone to die. There was nothing philosophical about that. The truth was out in the open.

You have lived in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth all your life. How has New Brighton informed your poetry, apart from the obvious coastal imagery? Have you never felt attracted to moving to one of the cities?

I don’t think I have the means to move to any other place, well, maybe, because I have now a wife there can be possibilities. Because I am now learning with a wife that one must be communal in thought and not only think for oneself. You’re now with somebody else, and you’re partners in marriage. This always comes as a surprise. But really I wouldn’t like to move to anywhere else. New Brighton is my home. Poetry found me in this place. I feel very close to my ancestral spirits here. Even when we depart I will always come back here.

In South Africa we are struggling to sell poetry. Few bookstores are interested and poetry is rarely reviewed. Yet some events, such as the recent Melville Poetry Festival, have been very successful, and brought audiences who not only listened attentively to the poetry, but also bought books. Do you think events at which to promote and sell poetry have become more crucial than ever?

Yes, certainly. In fact, in March, with a group of local writers in New Brighton, I’m putting together the Nelson Mandela Bay Book Fair, a small-scale books and exhibitions event to focus our community in Port Elizabeth and around the Eastern Cape on buying and reading books. It is true that bookstores are not interested. I think they have their own issues to deal with, surviving and making a profit. There are just too many factors involved. There are problems in education in our schools, the huge inroads that technology and computers have made into people’s lives, the shortening and narrowing of time and the massive pressure this puts on individual lives, and so on. All of this ultimately marginalises reading and books to a secluded area reserved only for devotees and higher culture. Reading books has been turned into an elitist activity.

For how many years has your cultural journal Kotaz been running?

Kotaz began in 1997 as a quarterly publication, so the magazine has been around for about 14 years. I don’t think I ever saw the publication as a business. I didn’t do a public survey about the need for the magazine, no research about other publishers, had absolutely no idea about distribution and was deeply ignorant about production and other costs. In 1997 I didn't know about funders, I wasn't aware of their addresses and their ethics – that South African funders often behave like a spoiled mistress, that they have extraordinary moods and must be managed or sometimes come at a price. I prowled like an injured animal the UPE University computer labs in Summerstrand for a computer monitor. I invaded higher education, hanging around the corridors waiting for the right time to enter the labs disguised as one of their students to gain access, and use a computer. All this time I had my bag with me filled with manuscripts, poems and texts scribbled on notebooks and on torn paper by writers from the township (some I knew, the majority I didn’t know) to type and save on a floppy disc. These were the humble beginnings of Kotaz. Funding, in dribs and drabs, only came in much later. A few years later I realised I could not sustain my hustling activities at the universities. Saving poetry this way was draining me. My cover was blown when some English Department people at Vista University recognised me from somewhere, and enquired if I was now a student, which I wasn’t.  

The next issue of Kotaz will come out in mid-February, this year. I stopped long time ago pretending that Kotaz is a quarterly publication because I found that the financial challenge of publishing the magazine four times a year was just too much.

What is your experience of obtaining funding for publications in South Africa? Do you find it easy or difficult?

It is a tragic consequence of our new democracy that even poetry has managed to attract the wrong crowds. I suspect that most followers come to poetry for the wrong reasons, to make money, to start a publishing business, to workshop writers, to boost their stardom as celebrities or divas, to get into radio and TV and have their own shows, and so on. Now all this is really harmful to South African literature and is killing our poetry. Even government funding for the arts becomes clouded by all kinds of trends and interests, mostly pretentious and insincere. I think most serious poetry journals and magazines, Kotaz included, are really struggling to get any funding. There are so many hypocrites walking around pretending to stand for poetry and getting large chunks of state funds for it. Again there’s the other problem of the government not taking the arts seriously. I’ve often heard that money earmarked for funding the arts often gets diverted to other departments. 2012 should be another dry year for poetry with the centenary celebrations of the ANC taking place.

To your mind, what are poets in South Africa doing at the moment? 

I think poets are using language to unravel the political myth, to say it was not by promises that we found a thriving democracy. Their language seeks to remind of sacrifices that were made by so many in order that freedom and justice for all could be realised. At the same time poets are speaking against those who constantly yearn for the past, black night that was besieged by black night. I think these are matters that must come out strongly if we think of a new dawn for poetry, a new chapter for South African literature and culture. 


Malikhanye is available from bookstores at a retail price of R95, or direct from Deep South's distributors, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. 

Kobus Moolman: Defending the value of poetry

Kobus Moolman has published several collections of poetry, including Time Like Stone, Feet of the Sky, 5 Poetry (with others), Separating the Seas, and most recently, Light and After (Deep South). He has also published two volumes of drama: Blind Voices and Full Circle. He has been awarded the Ingrid Jonker prize for poetry, the PANSA award and the DALRO poetry prize. He lives in Pietermaritzburg and teaches creative writing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

DH: Your first book of poems, Time like Stone, was published in 2000 and your latest, Light and After, in 2010. Over the ten years, how do you view your poetry as having progressed?

KM: Phew! Has it progressed? Has it maybe just changed? Has it maybe even stayed the same? The same concerns. The same small patch of earth I’ve walked round and round. The same dry bone I’ve come back to gnaw.

One thing I do think has happened is that I have learnt ‒ am learning ‒ to trust more. To be less obsessed with wanting to know what my poems are about, what they mean, as I write them, to want to know what I am writing about as I write, and just to write. To write and let the words speak. To efface myself. To trust that the words ‒ words, language ‒ have their own in-built system of purpose and beauty and strength. And that the more I allow this natural element within language to speak, rather than trying to force the words to say something deliberately, the stronger will the eventual product be. It is almost like writing with my eyes closed. Like walking with my eyes closed. And only knowing what I wanted to say once I had said it.

Yes, of all the things that might have changed in these ten years, this is it. The overwhelming sense that I don’t know what the hell I am doing. But that it doesn’t matter. That doubt is more important than certainty. That the spaces and the emptiness and the holes in a poem are just as important as the solid and tangible things.

Many of your poems seem to becoming shorter, tighter, and more economical with words – in fact some are like word snapshots, a bit like the short poems of William Carlos Williams. Has he been an influence on your work? What poets have influenced you?

William Carlos Williams has not been such an influence upon me. I have read his work, but only in snatches. This economical style you speak about is probably more the influence of writers like Paul Celan. And Anne Carson, who, although she writes long poems, is always absolutely precise. There is nothing that is not absolutely essential in her lines. Everything counts.

Celan’s apparent obscureness (his difficulty) fascinates me. I come back again and again to his work and always find new experiences. Not new meanings. I don’t know what his poems mean. But there are new worlds of experience, new sensations.

And then there are a whole host of other poets whose work and whose lives have fed and enriched my practice. Locally Karen Press, Tatamkhulu Afrika, Don Maclennan, Joan Metelerkamp and Rob Berold have been huge influences. And internationally it’s Lorca and Nelly Sachs, Ingeborg Bachman, Johannes Bobrowski and Yannis Ritsos, Yehuda Amichai, and Erin Moure, Nicole Brossard and Alberto Rios and Miguel Hernandez. The list goes on. The list changes, and gets updated and revisited.

You live in KwaZulu-Natal, whereas a lot of literary publishing tends to be located more in Johannesburg or Cape Town. There used to be a sort of cultural tension between Johannesburg and Cape Town, which I think has now diminished considerably. Do you think there is still some regionalism in South African writing and publishing? Is regionalism a negative thing, or can it be positive?

Yes, I think there is a kind of regionalism. At least a sense that JHB and Cape Town are where things are happening and that the other centres don’t really exist. Or don’t matter. Or don’t get as much serious attention. But there are also equally other centres of poetic power – like Grahamstown, and Elim (around someone like Vonani Bila). Even Durban – the Durban of Douglas Livingstone and Fernando Pessoa. It is an odd thing, this conglomeration of writers in particular places. And then the sense of egoism and even hubris that builds up there. And it is very, very hard to decide whether one should be part of those centres, be there, sharing, participating. Or not. Whether one can in fact, perhaps not necessarily write, but be published and be recognised and accepted outside those centres. I don’t know the answer. Sometimes I do feel on the periphery. And sometimes not. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. And sometimes the very notion of a centre and a periphery is meaningless. It disappears, and there is just writers. Universal writing.

For 12 years you published a print literary journal, Fidelities, twice a year. How did it start up? Print literary journals now are becoming scarce in South Africa, hardly anyone seems to want to buy them.

The first issue appeared in 1994. It really began like most good things after way too much to drink. A close friend Richard Walne, who sadly died a few years ago, and I were involved in planning an arts festival in Maritzburg. And one night we were sitting around drinking whiskey and he suggested we put together a journal of local poetry for the festival. Well, this was the first edition of Fidelities. We did it together for two years and then Richard moved town, and I just carried on with it. It slowly grew to being more than just local writers, firstly just around KZN, and then nationally. It was really good fun in its heyday. I enjoyed finding all these strange unheard of writers. I enjoyed providing a platform for their work. But eventually a whole lot of negative factors began to tip the scale. I had originally got support from the National Arts Council, and then when this faded I managed to get support from the local city council. And that worked very well for a while. But eventually that too stopped. There were hardly any subscriptions. Some sales, but not enough to support the production costs. So I was eventually funding it myself. And then the time required for the magazine also eventually began to tell. And it ceased being fun. It was like some kind of obligation. And so I eventually let it go. That was in about 2007, I think. Now and then I do miss it. I miss the little community of writers, of likeminded people that congregate around a magazine – Green Dragon has them, New Contrast too. And there is some kind of feeling of closeness, a certain solidarity among them. I like this.

The issue of print publishing  leads onto the issue of online publishing and e-publishing. What is your opinion on this?

I don’t really have an opinion. I don’t unfortunately use online publishing that much – or read material online. I’ve never read a book online. It’s not snobbishness, nor even some kind of Luddite prejudice. I just haven’t got into it. I still like the smell of a book. But I don’t have a problem with online publishing and e-publishing. It’s another resource for people. And that’s fine. It’s just not one that I am comfortable with – from a practical point of view. I don’t know if this question of yours is also meant to probe the future of the book, and of bookshops. And here I would have strong feelings. It is clear that we cannot go back to some kind of mentality pre the Kindle etc. That is reactionary. But like newspapers, and all other print media, books and bookshops are going to have to find some kind of strategy of survival, some niche that they occupy alone, and that they can aggressively sell. I grew up in bookshops. My greatest pleasure in life is to sit on the floor in a bookshop, behind a high shelf, and to make a pile beside me of options: this or that, this or that.

You teach creative writing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. What sort of contribution does teaching creative writing at tertiary level make to South African literature?

I don’t know that our job as teachers of writing is necessarily to turn out writers. This might sound odd. I think writing courses – and specially accredited ones that give the student a degree – can give people false hopes; can give them a whole lot of expectations that simply will never be met out there in the big real world. Quite simply not everyone who attends a writing class is a writer. Just as not everyone who studies history is going to be an historian. People study history, and writing, for a whole lot of other reasons than simply wanting to be an historian. Or wanting to be a writer. And this is right. This is good. There are a whole lot of other skills and forms of knowledge that are acquired in the process, apart from a very narrow focus on the demonstration of the ability to be a writer or historian or mathematician, etc. We learn what goes in to making a poem or a novel. We learn what is takes to be able to make a poem. We understand the process. And this is vital in making us better readers; more able to appreciate what other writers have done. So I think this is what writing courses, degrees in writing, can contribute. Apart from just churning out a whole lot of writers – which is unrealistic.

You did some creative writing workshops in prisons back in the late 1990s. What was that like?

Teaching in prisons has taught me a lot about our prejudices towards people, the way we stereotype ‘the criminal’. In most case what really shocked me about standing in front of a class of inmates was actually that there was very little distinction between myself and them. Between them and the warders. In many cases (of course not all) it is often just wrong decisions. And we all make wrong decisions.

And then also teaching in a prison – particularly teaching writing – has really brought home to me the fact that literature is not an elitist activity. That it has got nothing to do with intelligence or cultural sophistication. I have read Wopko Jensma to men and women inside, and they got it! They have understood what Jensma was saying much better than many third- year English students ever have. The inmates felt what Jensma was saying. Many of the inmates were enormously receptive to studying and then writing poetry, precisely because they understood the value of poetry. They understood what poetry could do for them sitting inside. It was and is a vehicle for understanding themselves, for understanding and expressing who they were.

An issue that has been cropping up lately is the question of whether South African readers – and writers – are losing their sense of critical evaluation, for a number of reasons. While I think it is excellent that South Africans are reading and responding positively to local literature, there is a danger than assessment turns into a sort of cheerleading session.

Yes, I think there is something of this ‘cheerleading’ which has descended upon writing here and now. And what alarms me about this is the parochialism and, on the other side, the mediocrity, that is cultivated. Instead of looking inward – at the South African market – we should be looking outward – at the global market. How do our writers compare and compete there? That is for me more interesting that how we compare with each other. And then I also feel writers must be prepared to take greater risks with their forms, their content, with themselves than many South African writers do. We must be prepared to be even slightly ahead of what the reader out there is wanting or expecting. Of course, this is very tricky. We all want our books to sell. And if they do not sell then it is unlikely we will be published again. A vicious cycle! But as writers we must challenge both ourselves and our readers. We must challenge what writing is today, what its conventions are. This is the way that we will stay relevant and new. That we will be able to keep our society on its toes ‒not by placating each other.

To get back to your writing: you have published two volumes of drama – Full Circle and Blind Voices. What has been your experience in writing drama and having your plays performed?

I love writing drama. But I do not like writing for the theatre. I love the sound and the taste of real words in real people’s mouths. But I do not know how to get the plays out there and performed. The latter is so fraught with costs and stuff. I find it very hard to get my plays performed, so much so that I am now just focusing on writing plays that don’t need to be performed. That can simply be read. Is it still a play? I don’t know. I don’t care. I call it a play. And that’s what matters. Writing is for me important. Writing is for me the real and main challenge. I am not good at negotiating with people and doing the whole production thing. Raising the funds etc. I just want to write the thing and then give it over to someone else to do all the rest of the production stuff, and then just let me know when the opening night is. But in most cases, at least in South Africa now, it does not happen like that. We have to write and produce our own work. And I don’t honestly have the psychic energy to do that anymore.

What would you regard as the main challenges facing South African poets now?

Firstly, finding publishers. Publishers who will take on the challenge of solo or even group collections. The magazines are doing a fantastic job. And they themselves are struggling. Battling for subscribers. But they are out there. And they are brave. But the publishers themselves are afraid of poetry. Clearly, as they argue, because it doesn’t sell. And it doesn’t sell – at least not in this country – because nobody reads it. And nobody reads it because they don’t see the significance of it; they don’t value it. It is just fluff, decoration. But after publishers, what we desperately need in this country are people who can distribute and market poetry. This is so critical. It is a real skill. And it is also the main reason that as poets our work isn’t really read. Because people don’t know about it. And they don’t know about it because nobody is going around to the bookshops to promote poetry titles. It is not up to the poets to do this. All of us have done this. But we are not cut out for this. This is not our job. We can barely keep body and soul together enough to write, never mind having to schlep around to bookstores to sell our work. I will gladly pay someone to do this. But there are very few such people in South Africa. Again, the publishers should do this. But my experience – certainly of those who publish poetry – is that despite their sterling efforts they do not have the time or the resources. And so once again poetry falls by the wayside. We can’t really blame the public for not reading poetry, or bookshops for not stocking poetry (there are many out there who do want to), when in actual fact the problem is the marketing and the distribution of poetry books.