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.

Alan Finlay: Poetry as intervention

Alan Finlay lives in Johannesburg where he works as a writer, researcher and editor on issues of media freedoms and internet rights. His poems have appeared in various journals locally and abroad, and short selections of his poetry have been published by small presses. Over the years he has founded and edited a number of literary publications, including Bleksem and donga (with Paul Wessels). With Arja Salafranca he co-edited a collection of prose and poetry called glass jars among trees (Jacana, 2003). He was editor of New Coin poetry journal from 2003-2007. His latest collection of poems, pushing from the riverbank, is to be published by Dye Hard Press in October 2010.

DH:I see a willingness to take risks in your poetry, to experiment not just with form but with language itself. Notable examples are your chainpoems with Philip Zhuwao, The Red Laughter of Guns in Green Summer Rain, and two poems – ‘wind& sea’ and ‘poem for béla bartók’ - in your forthcoming collection pushing from the riverbank, particularly stand out. There is a sense of play, but a playfulness that has a serious purpose.
AF:Well I wouldn’t want to make too much of it. I experiment to a point, and there are some interesting experiments going on by other poets: I’m thinking of Aryan Kaganof’s happenings with Zim Ngqawana; or Jaco en Z-dog for that matter – the best performance poetry I’ve seen in years. And then there’s Metelerkamp’s total immersion in the poem, Lesego’s [Rampolokeng] work in theatre, Khulile’s [Nxumalo] proems, etc. I think South African poets have experimented quite a bit in general, and you can see that if you look at some of those journals from the 60s and 70s – never mind the likes of Jensma. There is play in some of my poems – with perspective, with form, associations, sound – a lot of this is part of the unconscious articulation of the poem; the form of the poem emerges in the writing, as does the use of “i” versus “I”, which have different meanings. You cannot force a poem that wants to sway across the page to walk in a straight line. I read somewhere recently that children play seriously. This is an interesting idea – to write with that sense of a child's seriousness when it goes about new things. If I regret anything about the chainpoems with Zhuwao, it’s that I over-edited them, tried to make them say something they weren’t really saying. I would probably like to republish them one day with much more space in between the voices, much more disconnectedness, which would be a lot more experimental. ‘wind& sea’ and ‘béla bartók’ were both an attempt at breaking away from the confinement of the page. I was working with an A2 piece of paper, a bit like an artist, and trying to give myself permission to mark the page however I felt. So the spaces are louder and the lines became more associative – the final version of ‘béla bartók’ should probably be published on a much bigger page than the one in the book.

What poets have influenced you? And contemporary South African poets? Do you read a lot of fiction, and do those writers influence your writing?

The anthology of post-war Eastern and Central European poets called The poetry of survival had a formative effect on me in my 20s and my edition is in tatters from all the reading; so much so that I had to replace it. The poetry resonated with me. It is the historical context, which is immediately interesting, but then the way the poets entered that, with such clarity, and with a range of styles and perspectives that did not seem to be hobbled by a narrow view of what poetry should be. In some ways, looking at it now, the feel of the book reminds me of it all begins, the anthology Robert Berold put out after his work on New Coin in the 90s. And then you just have to read Slavenka Drakulić’s café europa to know in a journalistic kind of way how similar many of our experiences have been in the post-apartheid period, and with the fall of communism. They have produced some wonderful poets: Zbigniew Herbert, Holan, Różewicz, Amichai, Celan, Enzensberger... What was for me critical about the 90s was that I was picking up on the colours and sounds of contemporary South Africa through the poetry, particularly in New Coin, but also from some of the other publications that were emerging at the time; and then the readings, the recordings, the interactions with the poets, which was profound in that it cut right across class and race lines, and connected people with a common interest in poetry. All this was influencing how I was learning to write. It was a period of great imagination for the poets, and I think we probably heard this from each other. New Coin also gave me my first confrontation with the some of the Spanish poets – Hernandez, and others – in those excellent translations by Geoffrey Holiday. These two currents, the Spanish and the Eastern Europeans, seem to carry so much of what is important in 20th century poetry – seem to form the bedrock against which other poetry is heard. Even more so than the Americans. But who have I been reading recently: Nina Cassian, Ponge – the clever Soap from a Paris Review that also has an amazing interview with the later Kerouac (conducted by Berrigan). Alan Dugan, cropped, cynical, in a life giving way, in an originating way; in a way that takes out the trash. Then Dorfman's poems, for obvious reasons – devastating, important when it comes to speaking and voice in this country. What does he say: "But how can I tell their story/ if I was not there?" A lot of the really good writing I have found is in children's books. I am thinking of Jim Eldridge, and, of course, Dahl. But someone like Eldridge, who writes war books, has the most focused and clear voice as a children's author.

In South Africa we obviously hear and read the term ‘black poetry’ a lot. It is probably a legitimate label, since it points to a poetry that is concerned with common experience, a common past and issues of identity, although the approaches to the poetry itself can be very different. But if the term 'white poetry' is used, it sounds absurd. Is there such a thing as 'white poetry' in South Africa? Should we not be striving more and more to talk of an inclusive South African poetry?

This feels like a complex question – and maybe even loaded. I am wary of these sorts of terms when they are used politically to exclude, or short change; so they can be red herrings. On the one hand, you don’t want to deny an analysis of race and ideology, and how this emerges in poems. But I am not sure there is necessarily a coherent ‘white consciousness’ in poetry – it has been quite fragmented, diverse, in tension and argument with itself; ideologically, aesthetically, in a poet’s experience of marginalisation, and so on. How else do you make sense of, I don’t know, Butler, Beiles, Clouts, Cronin, Jensma, Livingstone all living in the same room? And that’s just a klomp white male poets writing in English – and doesn’t take into account what was happening in crazier, wilder spaces, like music. We are a lot more migrant, fragmented, displaced than we acknowledge. I suppose one needs to ask: what do these sorts of descriptions hide? What are they trying to repress? I am not saying that something of a conservative liberal ideology that runs through the poetry, its off-shoots, its shards and fragments that result in a certain kind of ‘taste’ or instruction to would-be poets, is not important to consider. I think it is, because it still seems to filter back into a lot of what goes on in the publishing world and in our media, in the ideas of what’s marketable and what isn’t, in prizes, with the guardians of ‘correct’ English and grammar, of so-called ‘good writing’. Many of them come across as moralists, more than anything else. And there are ingrown and ingrained expectations of neatness. I think we will have reached somewhere when reviews don’t praise a text for being “well written”, or poetry for its absence of “self pity”.

What about the so-called cultural gatekeepers – big publishers, academia, and – to a certain degree – the media. To what degree do they shape perceptions about what genres – and what subjects – there is ‘a demand for’?

This becomes more important if you’ve got nowhere else to go. Now we have the internet, more access to the means of production for small publishers etc. I tend to read outside of the mainstream – on the fringes of the ‘literary machine’, which invites a sociological reading more than anything else. I do pay attention, and I eventually find my way there, in one way or another. But this injunction that we should read read read everything that gets published makes reading too much of a commodity practice for me. Saying that, the circulatory fate is the political fate of the text, as Warner put it. What frightens me is how you can pick up an old journal of, say, American poetry, and there are some brilliant poems in there - yet the name of the poet is hardly recognisable. So where does good poetry go? There are serious dangers of forgetting. Small presses are critical in circumventing this all, and the archive – which is something that interests me more and more. Just look at what your publication on Belies has awakened – people around the world who knew him are now writing richly about what they know. And there is something new that has been added to the Beat archive – much more than just a footnote of Beiles as “basket case”.

You started up Bleksem in 1994, at a time when there was an eruption of small presses and journals in South Africa. Bleksem was sort of unique in its layout – cutting and pasting of manuscripts onto the page. Why did you use this approach?

Bleksem was really quite a little journal – as an idea it had much more potential to grow into something. I sometimes regret not pushing through with it. It reflected what came in my postbox, as editor. It was that and the process of publishing that was foregrounded. You couldn’t do it now – with e-mail, and PCs everywhere – although donga was an attempt to do a similar thing online. Its simplicity, and HTML coding had the hands-on feel of the early internet. Many of the poems sent to Bleksem were handwritten, or typed on manual typewriters, on different kinds of paper; some that reflected the social conditions of the writer. This created a geography of text, something very tangible, concrete. I relied on a photostating machine and a lightbox I took from my grandmother. I grew up amidst printers whirring, and dark rooms, and the red hands of my grandfather as he looked at the plates. Guillotines, and staplers, and envelopes and stamps. It was that that I was also responding to. I was re-appropriating, and upsetting the apple cart on a personal level. I was recreating, cutting and pasting that experience.

You were also editor of one of South Africa’s oldest poetry journals, New Coin, for a few years, and now – unlike in 1994, literary journals in South Africa are battling for their survival. Why do you think that is?

Look, I don’t know. Maybe these journals are more important at particular junctures in our history. The online space has something to do with it, definitely. Poets have more places to go than they did before. Desktop publishing, blogs, they have all made this possible. And this makes a difference to what an editor of a journal receives, how many poems he or she receives, the quality of those poems, and the desire of readers to subscribe, to engage. The internet also gives a sense of an immediate reader – no matter if this sense is problematic. It is funny how access to information implies the death of information. Maybe reinvention is necessary. One of most important online initiatives to emerge recently in South Africa is Hugh Hodge’s plan to put the New Contrast archive online – I don’t know if it’s come to fruition, but if it doesn’t it’s a sign of exactly what is at stake, and the problem. It is a critical idea.

In 2000 you launched what was arguably South Africa’s first online literary journal, donga. What was your motivation for that, and have your thoughts about online publishing now, 10 years later?

I'm not sure how you're defining 'online literary journal' here, but there were obviously others before donga. Even Bleksem had an issue up in 1995. As I say, the New Contrast initiative is important – and New Coin could do a similar thing – never mind putting up something like Quarry. So it’s at the level of archive that a lot could be done online – and this would really free our reading of South African poetry. Ingrid Andersen’s publication Incwadi looks interesting. And Liesl Jobson’s work on compiling Poetry International is getting there – but as an index to South African poetry I think it needs to be opened up much more. Then Chimurenga. Ntone has that rare ability to actually deliver on an idea: and he is very tuned into publishing as an intervention – as a commentary on the act of publishing itself. I’m thinking of those little publications of single essays they’ve put out recently – and what the magazine does. The chimurenga library was a very interesting as an idea – even though I saw none of the post-apartheid journals that were important to me there; Timbila, specifically, in terms of what they were doing, which I think has been such an important publication. But it does feel like a bit of a hiatus. The best journals have responded to something that is not entirely under the editor’s control.

pushing from the riverbank focuses on what you have called ‘the domestic space’…

Did I call it that? I am not sure I like that description. I suppose what it does focus on is the most immediate, intimate space; those who are in it. The ‘home’ is a critical confrontation for me. The echoes are the historical space, which are always there. Then my family, now, and whatever comes after that. We have who we have; and we are those things. We forget easily how things were growing up in the 70s and 80s - how brittle, and uncompromising our parents, our bloodless teachers were. At my primary school, the teachers banged the children’s heads against the wall, the woodwork teacher called us “shithouses”, as he walked around with his cane. I came home with a bandaged hand from fighting - like other kids, there were always the fights. There was no-one to talk to about this. How do the generations recover from that lack and loss of love, from that violence? When do you stop passing this stuff down, consciously, unconsciously? My poems try to intervene. In some ways the place I have selected to work is deliberate, and then necessary. It is a confrontation, a conversation, a ‘non-compliance’, as Winnicott said. Maybe I am trying to save, create, re-create something. Resist further absence. Which is pain, and emptiness. Utter abandonment. So that home, then, becomes a place of intimacy, and that intimacy, a necessary resistance. But there is also something quite objective in the process of speaking personally. The ‘I’ is located in terms of the other, the child, the mother, physically, psychologically, psychically, then beyond that the neighbour, whose wall is always there, in the wrong place, or the world of case studies and conferences, where the only way out seems to be into the physicality of things, the “slapping of wet cement”. A difficulty I have found with my poems is how to balance the personal, which I gravitate towards, with the need to publish. This is one of the reasons this book has taken so long to get out. But I think I am happy I can say what I have said in the end - even if there are cracks showing.