Poetry has always been the least lucrative area in South African publishing, as it probably is around the world — unless you’re Maya Angelou, of course, and you have Oprah Winfrey on your side.
The present mini-boom in the South African publishing industry, however, seems to have found space for some poetry. Among the volumes recently released are those by three of South Africa’s senior white male poets — Jeremy Cronin, Stephen Gray and Kelwyn Sole. Comparison is fascinating.
To take Gray’s Shelley Cinema … and Other Poems (Protea) first, one’s immediate thought on picking it up is that this is an odd size for a collection of poetry — 20cm by 20cm. But the reason for this large page-size soon becomes apparent: the line of Gray’s poems is especially long here, reaching further across the page than the more standard variety, and it’s good to have the space to allow the line its full stretch.
The long line is relatively rare in English-language poetry; the beat tends to get lost. Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg made extensive use of it, but neither were exactly beat-counters. For Ginsberg, at least, the line is not a measure of some predetermined poetic unit but a unit of breath — an exhalation, even if it is an extravagant one.
That strategy dovetailed with the bardic or shamanic concept of the poet’s role. Gray’s poems, by comparison, despite his long line, seldom take the tone of public pronouncement. Rather, they are mostly meditational, inward, driven by memory. They are often staccato, their syntax compressed. What comes across as public statement is oblique, emerging stealthily in the mini-narratives or portraits that form many of the poems. Until the latter pages, that is, which are filled with brief, humorous, epigrammatic quatrains and, finally, a rhymed work dealing with Aids; interesting that Gray’s most public statements should be the most poetically conservative.
The titular poem is not long-lined, just long; it brings together the turbulent contemporary world and a cinema named for the dead Romantic poet. Gray’s poems here are well-travelled and well-read, filled with poetic personae (tributes to Juvenal, Léopold Senghor, Eugenio Montale) as well as sharp portraits of presumably real people.
At least, they feel very real. Take the opener, David at Settlers Bar: ‘David, in the Settlers Bar: strictly Carling and Stuyvesant, / but there were times when bottles of brandy, only dagga did.” Or, later, Henno the Diver: ‘This is the hard one now: handyman Henno who stoked up, lifted off, dived / to his oblivion, from a building site, head first, flailing …”
Kelwyn Sole’s Land Dreaming (UKZN Press) takes the idea of the long line even further — into prose poetry. As the paradoxical term indicates, this is an ambiguous formal area, even something of a no-man’s-land. Is it prose with a certain poetic density or lyric tone? Or poetry that can’t work out where its lines end? Here, I think it’s fair to say that, since Sole is a poet, this is poetry that hasn’t been chopped up into the usual series of lines — that is, he collapses line and stanza into one poetic paragraph, thus making the line as long as possible.
This technique works extremely well for Sole. It is not hard to read a passage such as the following, from Highveld, as an integrated entity, obviously poetic, yet in no way in need of versified lineation: ‘Grass-stalks itch through their parched palette of siennas and ochres into a pall of uncertainty: the rim of the world is at times so far away as to be without weight. Closer to hand, a line of willows genuflects above a dried-up spruit that vacillates along the line of sight. Fire here is an awaited guest.”
The form allows Sole a wide range of utterances, some more ‘poetic” than others. As the title of this volume indicates, it is earthed in the natural world, and those are the strongest poems in Land Dreaming, where the rhythms seem most effectively elusive and the rhetoric buried in description. Courageously, Sole still sometimes pushes the form further, and on occasion the result is that the prose poem simply becomes prose. This is clear in the most narrative of the poems, such as in Tumi Gets a Child or Textual Bioscope: A Brief History of South African Film.
If both Gray and Sole are poets in whose work there is a tension between the personal and the political, Jeremy Cronin is a poet for whom there appears to be no difference. Perhaps it is because he is a hard-working political leader rather than someone primarily earning his living by writing or teaching. For Cronin, the problem may not be to find in personal concerns a public meaning, but, rather, to take something from the whirl of public statements and find a way to bring it inward. Whatever the case, Cronin’s poetry has been political from the start, but in an engagingly personal way.
This certainly goes for his new volume, More Than a Casual Contact (Umuzi). Unlike Gray and Sole’s new work, there are few long lines here. Often, instead, there is a feeling of jottings barely organised by formal considerations. Much of it feels like the poet’s thoughts in the bath — except that his thoughts are naturally those of a political, observant and thoughtful being, and there is an unmistakeable poetic and rhythmic way with the words on the page. Cronin’s voice is simply a strong voice, very much his own, and the frequently irregular breaks and odd line-lengths usually ask to be read (or felt) as instructions on how to breathe the poems as one reads.
Cronin meditates on the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on social change, and the business of writing poetry itself. These are poems by and about ‘We who have opened our mail and survived”. Cronin is very aware of their ambiguous status as private/public artefacts, but makes that ambiguity productive. As he writes in In a Pool of Water:
months after
in the inquest court, no such thing
as pure poetry.
The poem is not alone,
it must forge its way into the world
between silence and
‘trajectory”, ‘point of entry”
official words …
And if the poem is not alone, neither are we.