Kelwyn Sole
It is unfashionable these days to admit to any intention in one’s poetry. Yet, as a critic and teacher as well as a poet, I find it impossible to imagine my poems without thinking about their generation in the broader context of South African literature and its history. They grow out of this context, and often react either in relation to or against its models and assumptions.
My poems regard no type of human speech and experience as alien to them: I assume that all modes of utterance contain within themselves the potential for transformation into what we refer to as “poetry”. In this new collection, I’ve tried to utilise and tame to my own purposes a variety of poetic traditions and modes of expression.
I’ve interspersed traditional genres and postulations with more experimental moments – satires, polemic, expressive lyrics, humorous poems, and so on – and I’ve ranged over a number of subjects. And yes, there are scenes which contain nudity or sex.
Underlying everything I do here is a compulsion to keep on exploring the relationship between the personal and political. Oddly enough, these days it has again become necessary to have to stress the second, rather than the first, of these two terms. I do not believe that exploring the personal is now more important than more widely social and political interests, or my relationship to such interests.
To me, it is as futile to try and completely separate one’s personal life out from them as it is to separate “art” from “history”. At the same time it is crucial for any writer to realise that there is no facet of human activity or psychology that can be regarded as too small or insignificant for examination.
A poet can banish from his or her attention absolutely nothing – for “a single act of neglect” (to quote Hugh MacDiarmid) may make all the difference to one’s poetry’s scope and effectivity. I have noticed when teaching university undergraduates these days that they, generally speaking, seem to have inherited a legacy of belief that poems have nothing to do with their own speech, lives or concerns.
Whatever type of schooling they may come from, poems were apparently usually taught to them simply as dead artefacts exhibiting a lofty sensibility which they have to strive to feel “good enough” for. They are surprised when they discover that it can be otherwise. For it is surely liberating to understand that any compelling definition of contemporary South African poetry must include (as examples) Charl-Pierre Naud’s ghoulishly humorous poem mourning the loss of his hijacked yellow Beetle, as well as Zola Sikiti’s wry poem bewailing the neighbours’ attitude to his mother’s chickens.
We are at a stage, I think, when the assumption that poetry should deal only with elevated thoughts or higher emotions has become enormously debilitating to all of us; as is the belief, propagated by some publishers, that poems must be short, lyrically subjective, and immediately linguistically transparent in order to sell.
The hijack as a subject for poetry? Well, yes. It’s unfortunately a common enough experience in South Africa – how many poems about it have you seen? Chickens? Lots of South Africans know about chickens! Where are the poems?
It is doubtless true, on the one hand, that an abstract love of humanity grows grotesque if it separates itself from a concrete love of real people. Yet it is equally true on the other that historical and political concerns, in their immediate as well as their discursive effects, invade one’s being at every moment.
This is an edited excerpt from Kelwyn Sole’s speech at the launch of his collection, Love That Is Night