By day, Nadine Botha is the listings editor of the Mail & Guardian. By night, she is a poet, whose debut collection, Ants Moving the House Millimetres, has just been published by Deep South. The poems take a quirkily personal view of life; for Botha, the experiential world is “an onslaught, negotiated later line by line”, as one verse puts it. Her poems have been published online in Donga, Southern Rain Poetry and sweet magazine.co.za, as well as in the journals New Coin and Botsotso. In 2003, she performed at the Crossing Border Festival in The Hague, for which she self-published a book titled Compared to Not Eating Tuna or Chocolate.
Describe yourself in a sentence.
A dishevelled dassie in the headlights of the senses.
Describe your book in a sentence.
It’s A5 size, off-white, with an evocative red picture on the front and the title, Ants Moving the House Millimetres, in navy blue; inside there are poems.
Describe your ideal reader.
Another dassie, with a brain and a sense of humour.
What was the originating idea for the book?
The poems have been piling up for years now. Every year I just had more and more poems. Lying on the floor, covering my desk, stuffed in my wardrobe between my clothes. And my cat started hiding under them, eating them. So I thought I should do something with them. And what does one do with poems? Seeing as I’m soft-spoken, I thought I’d put them in a book.
Describe the process of writing and publishing the book.
Most of the process of the book was covered by the actual writing of the poems. Generally this begins with a heaving gut splurge, followed by a hibernation period of a few weeks and then a few editing scans. The book itself was just a selection process of already formed children. Then putting it in order. I tried to weave a story through the order, or at least an organic tide. This sounds simple, but it actually took a long time — a year and a bit?
Name some writers who have inspired you, and tell us why or how.
I fell in love with the word thanks to Milan Kundera and with the limits of my frigid imagination thanks to Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. I hated poetry until I met Pablo Neruda and didn’t see my unruly forms as valid until I cast my eyes across Joan Metelerkamp’s new language. JM Coetzee took me into the heart of the landscape and Martin Amis left me in awe of the power of narrative. Roland Barthes validated my tenuous abstractness. Lesego Rampolokeng gave me a love for the sound and exoticism of words and Raymond Carver put my heart and nakedness back into my poems. Lauri Anderson made me start hearing my poems. Charles Bukowski and beer got me through my worst jobs without any incidents of hara-kiri.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’m between books. I just finished Kundera’s Farewell Waltz — amusing and challenging, can be read in the sun on a deck chair — and Gilbert Adair’s The Dreamers — some surprising images but lacking in substance. I’m listening to CDs by the Last Poets and Beau Sia that I bought at Urban Voices.
Do you write by hand, or use a typewriter or computer?
My first contact, for poetry, is by hand. Then it is transposed on to a computer and edited. Prose starts in the digital realm.
What is the purpose of poetry?
There are many purposes to both writing and reading poetry. Some people use it as self-help, some to drive a revolution, some for the sheer creative word play. Some to say something, some to hear something, some to write something, some for fame. Readers can gain access into an intensely private language, breach the objective other’s borders, be roused in the blood, and, maybe, just, themselves. Who knows? I like it.
Is there anything you wish to add?
Read the friggin’ book!