Over the telephone, poet and literary editor Liesl Jobson seems a mix of contradictions. She finds writing poetry a ”long, agonising” process, but when it comes to flash fiction she revels in ”playing in the immediacy of the process and images” evoked in her mind. (Generally written in an hour or so, flash is a short story form in which a sort of prose poetry meets attention deficiency disorder.)
She is enthusiastic about the online workshops with fellow writers where, for example, five specially picked words are used to construct stories in a day.
Yet, even over the telephone line, a cringe is palpable when she notes that bad early work remains immortal on the internet.
The 43-year-old — with a music degree and a CV including jobs as a psychic and bassoon player in the SA Police Service band — was a late bloomer in poetry circles. She admits to ”never really having an interest in poetry” even at school and considers herself ”lucky”.
She first published in 2004. Accolades followed, including winning the People Opposing Women Abuse Poetry Competition in 2005 and the 2006 Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award for her flash fiction.
She published a collection of her poetry, Views from an Escalator (Botsotso Publishing, 2007), and a collection of flash fiction, 100 pages (Botsotso Publishing, 2008), much of which featured in her MFA thesis.
Jobson dismisses her work as ”South African angst and identity angst”, yet she delves into the deeply personal while maintaining universality in her words, themes and the images evoked. She doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in the constructed skin of a South African middle-class white woman, but knows that — on various levels — she is. It is obvious that Jobson has a particular sensitivity to the often ”Janus-faced” experiences of life and the human condition.
We catch up a few days after Jobson has returned from the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Ireland. While enthusiastic about the literary festival circuit on which she is increasingly becoming a fixture — she visited the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam earlier this year and will feature at the Poetry Africa Festival in Durban next week — she also name-checks the two-faced Roman god of polarities, of beginnings and endings, in describing the experience.
There is the ”profound validation” inherent in propping up bar-counters with the likes of Petina Gappah and chewing pencils nibs over creative processes usually conducted in a state of solitary confinement.
And there is something reassuring in confirming that there are other people out there paying attention to life’s minutiae and their metaphorical echoes. These points of connections she calls the ”naked moments” which are ”counterbalanced by human vulnerability”: bitchy, petty moments of spending an intensive few days with contemporaries who may or may not be better than you, who sometimes are incomprehensibly more successful, and so on.
There is meticulousness in her poetry and Jobson feels integrity is important in art, as is the urge to continue aspiring towards something ”more robust and resilient”.
She also notes the influence of music from her academic past: ”I really strive for the harmonic connections in creating [poems]. I’m really concerned with the architecture of a piece when writing and it’s also what I look for as an editor.” As editor of the online literary website, Mad Hatter’s Reviews, and the South African domain of Poetry International, Jobson is well placed to cast a discerning eye over the state of the country’s poetry.
She says of her quality-controlling that if a poem’s ”first stanza, or first three sentences doesn’t work, then it’s out”. Of the current crop of poets she says there is ”absolutely fantastic stuff out there”. When editing and filing on average ”nine or 10 profile focuses a year” for the local domain of Poetry International, she feels hard-pressed to shoehorn all the talent:
”There are usually about 40 poets who are writing with intensity and a profound sense, who don’t get in,” she says.
But it’s not all Lesego Rampolokeng, Jo-Anne Richards and polished poetry.
Jobson admits to a mountain of ”dross” out there: the ”tits-and-arse brigade, who write about ”me and my cunt all the time” and those who use poetry for personal therapy.
”There is the impulse to stare down into the bleakest chasm of life and there is a point in creating poetry when you must walk into that to know what that space smells and feels like, but if you stay there, you become preachy, superficial and remain in the realm of therapy”, is Jobson’s advice to emerging poets.
I leave Jobson ”agonising” over a poem, drawing inspiration from the images of two visits for an ultra-sound. One is from more than 14 years ago, when the technician was focusing on ”this little speck of life”, now her teenage son.
The other is from a more recent visit to locate a tumour behind the same son’s eye.
Her son is doing well after an operation, and Jobson reflects on why it is taking her so long to write this piece: ”Maybe I’m still in the therapy stage,” she trails off.