The Dye Hard Interviews

Philip Hammial was born in the US and emigrated to Australia in 1972. Two of his 20 collections of poetry have been shortlisted for a New South Wales Premier’s Award. He is also a sculptor and the director of The Australian Collection of Outsider Art.

DH:You were born in Detroit, but after graduating from university you travelled the world for 10 years then settled in Australia. It was a very different time and world travel seemed a lot easier to do. It was part of the whole counterculture scene. How did you relate to that, and why did you choose Australia in which to settle?

PH:At 12 I decided I wanted to see the world, this after reading the adventures of Colin Glencannon, Scot engineer on a tramp freighter; Richard Haliburton’s adventures & hearing Lowell Thomas’ radio reports on his trip into Tibet on foot shortly after the end of the Second World War. So when I graduated from high school I decided to get a job on a salt-water freighter only to discover I was too young. Telling a visiting uncle about this problem, he suggested I join the US Navy, which I did, the next day. Three years (1954-57) in the engine rooms of two ships, it was a great beginning.

I then went to college (university later) & spent two summers hitchhiking around Europe, staying in youth hostels & cheap pensions & reading the collected works of Nietzsche. My third trip (with my first wife) lasted two years. We went around the world for US$1000 each, $500 a year. The US dollar was very strong, & there were black markets in Turkey, Pakistan and India. Anyway, I’ve managed to travel in 74 countries for a total of 10 years – India (4 times), Tibet (twice), China (4 times), much of Africa.

I left the US f

or the last time in 1969 for two reasons; to travel & because I was totally disgusted with the domestic security & foreign policies of the US government &, needless to say, still am. After living in Bali for a year (money almost gone & not possible to again renew our visas) we flipped a coin – Japan or Australia – to see where we would go to work. Tails, we arrived in Australia on tourist visas in 1972 with $100 between us.

A predictable question: when did you start writing and why? I’m curious about your work in sculpture. You said this started up when you had a broken leg and was stuck at home. Why sculpture and not other visual art forms?

Having had a successful career as a juvenile delinquent and three years in the navy (where I came to the realisation that I was a pig-ignorant fool & probably headed for prison) I managed, in spite of my poor high school grades, to get admitted to a small college in Michigan. It was there, thanks to some inspiring teachers, that I started writing poetry, plays, short stories & a novel as well as painting & playing a sax. Couldn’t do it all, so eventually settled on poetry & sculpture. Yes, the broken leg, in three pieces. In plaster from one foot to armpits & taking painkillers, I was too groggy to write poetry. A compulsive creator, what to do? One day my mates loaded me into my Plymouth sedan & took me to a tip where, with me pointing to objects, they filled the boot, then spread all of those wonderful bits & pieces over a big table in the basement of our house in San Francisco. Hobbling around on crutches, three or four months later I had 40 pieces of sculpture. Not sure why sculpture, probably because I discovered I’m not much of a painter. Also, like poetry, I can make a piece of sculpture in one hit – an hour or two & it’s done.

You started up Island Press in the middle 1970s – what is your experience of publishing in Australia? What is the attitude of commercial publishers towards poetry?

Publishing poetry in Australia is a mug’s game. One would have thought after all these years that I’d have smartened up & done something wort

hwhile. I think I finally have – no plans for any further publications. Since the time of Bob Hawk, both Labour & the Liberals have been cutting funding to the arts, with poetry right at the bottom of everyone’s priorities. In any case only a handful of Australians read poetry. Most of my friends are visual artists & musicians & only two or three of them have poetry books on their bookshelves. What hope for the rest of the population?

I’d guess that only one in ten thousand homes would have even a single volume of poetry tucked away on a bookshelf.

We’re a nation of sports spectators. With four or five exceptions, finding a book of Australian poetry in a Sydney bookshop is like finding a needle in a haystack. If, as a person from a small poetry press (not a bona fide rep), I walk into a bookshop in Sydney with books to sell I’ll be out the door before you can say Jack Robinson. Island Press had a distributor for three years. That distributor was worse than useless & took a 65% cut. In the whole of Australia there are, as far as I know, only four distributors that will touch poetry, all of them useless. The large Australian publishers no longer publish poetry; there’s no money in it.

What are your feelings about literary journals in SA that you have seen? What are literary journals like in Australia?

I’ve only seen Green Dragon& Carapace. As I know that you & Gus are publishing on a shoestring you have my sympathy & respect. Literary journals in Australia cover the whole range from elegant to awful, from journals with very good writing to very bad writing. The big academic journals keep battling on. Most of the small magazines have gone under for the reasons listed above, many of them only lasting for one or two issues. To get funding for a magazine from the Literature Board one must prove that one has at least 500 (if I remember correctly) subscribers, a very difficult if not impossible task.

Many small publications in SA are dependent on funding of some sort, whether public or corporate funding. Corporate funding can be a bit dodgy as the companies are likely to want marketing leverage, which risks interfering with the publisher’s integrity. However, obtaining government funding isn’t always that easy, either. What is the situation with regards to funding in Australia?

I can’t think of a poetry publisher who would even think of approaching the private sector for funding. It would be a waste of time. Australian companies aren’t known for their generosity. A few support sports, but the arts ... It’s possible to get subsidies for poetry from the Literature Board of the Australia Council if one has a good track record. Island has received several subsidies over the years, from AUS$500 to $2500 per title for up to four titles. Today it costs about $2300 to publish 500 copies of a good quality 80-page book with a two- or three-colour cover. A book of poetry now costs about $20. Why would anyone buy 80 pages of poetry when one can have a 300-page novel for the same price? As I said above, the federal government only just supports the arts (the Australia Council) & most of that funding goes to the Opera House. Poetry gets the crumbs. By way of contrast, the government of France devotes 4-point something of its annual budget to the arts. Australia? – less than 1%.

A concern in SA is the issue of poetry audiences – how poetry should be shared with an audience. Poetry performance is popular, with the emphasis on active engagement with a physical audience – not the same as publishing a book of poems and hoping someone will read it. You have had texts set to music by Australian world musician Colin Offord; in a sense, this is like poetry returning to its origin, with its basis in song, not as words on the page.

I’m all for getting poetry out to an audience by any means – performance, books, CDs. But Australian poetry audiences, unlike audiences I’ve experienced in Durban, Tokyo, Paris, NYC and Quebec, are usually small, very small, & lazy. To get through to them one must spoon-feed them pabulum. And don’t expect any feedback, positive or negative, after a reading. Much too cool & sophisticated. Australian poets are terminated by indifference. As for performance poetry in Australia: the few performances I’ve seen have been by testosterone-driven adolescents, not my cup of tea.

Your poetry shows the influence of surrealism, and the blurbs on your books usually refer to the influence, but you have said to me you dislike the label, because in Australia the critics use it as an excuse to classify surrealist, or surrealist-inspired, work as outdated. I’m not sure if the situation is different anywhere else in the world, but at the same time it also hints as an establishment conspiracy against any work that is prepared to take risks with language and challenge the status quo.

I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories; but, yes, I dislike the label because (A) surrealism as a movement was officially disbanded in 1967, (B) I don’t practice automatic writing or play surrealist games & (C) it allows my poetry to be dismissed – don’t read Hammial; he’s a surrealist, i.e., difficult, incomprehensible. Australians, like most people, are deeply conservative. And so are most of our poets. We’re still basically a colony. We still kowtow to the Queen of England. We still suffer from the Great Cringe (if it comes from overseas it’s better) and the Tall Poppy Syndrome (stick your head up above the crowd & it will be cut off).This may explain why 98% of Australian poetry is derivative, based occasionally on a British model & usually on a US model – Iowa, Black Mountain, NY, New Lyric, L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E, etc. Our poets, especially the males who fear ridicule from their mates, play it safe, very safe. Where is the excitement, the journey, the sense of adventure? Not here. Also, for whatever reasons – the old copyright laws, high cost of books, lack of information – only a handful of Australian poets have done any in-depth reading in the original or in translation of poets who write in languages other than English.

Your poetry is often a collage of elements: bits of autobiography, word play, but also social comment and political criticism. Your poetry clearly engages with the world around you, dealing with your concerns about the environment, violence, abuse of power and political manipulation. What is your approach when writing?

As a young poet I wrote most of my poems in what might be described as a deep trance, much thrashing about, 20 to 30 poems in one one-hour session. Now, in my dotage, I’m lucky to get two poems from a light trance. In any case, most of my poetry comes from the unconscious or, if that term is problematical, from the subconscious. There’s little or no conscious input. The social commentary, autobiographical bits, word play, etc. simply come up with the rest of the material. That said, most of my prose poems are consciously made, usually in two or three minut

es.

A few years back you published a book of prose poems, Swan Song. You use the prose-poem form fairly often, but it tends to be somewhat neglected these days. In various respects I feel there is more freedom in the writing of prose poetry, less of a concern with structure and form that one deals with in verse poetry.

Prose poems are much in evidence in Europe, Latin America, North America, Japan and Australia. I don’t concern myself with structure. It simply happens. I’ve been writing for so long that the poems come out finished in whatever form they need to take.

You formed, with Anthony Mannix, the Australian Collection of Outsider Art, and have organised exhibitions throughout the world. What has drawn you to outsider art? I have noted both you and Mannix have quoted Henri Michaux: “He who hides his madman dies voiceless.”

We have organised 26 exhibitions & only in France, Germany, Belgium, the US & Australia. Contemporary mainstream art the world over all looks to me as though it was produced by the same three or four art school clones. Outsider Art/Art Brut on the other hand speaks to me powerfully. It intoxicates me. It doesn’t cringe. It’s not derivative. It doesn’t care if it’s accepted. It simply is because its makers are compelled to make it. Having worked in a psych hospital, become close friends with several “mad” artists and studied the productions of the “insane” for many years I think I have a fair notion of what it’s about. With respect to poetry: for me most English language mainstream poetry is too sane, too controlled, too predictable, too entrenched in “ordinary” reality, too concerned with craft, too polished.

What about aboriginal art? Has that had an influence on your work?

Not at all.

You came to SA in 2000, to read at the Poetry Africa event in Durban. What were your responses to SA? What did you feel about SA socially and culturally?

As I was only in Durban & only there for ten days my responses would be hopelessly superficial. Instead, let me tell you about my response to the Poetry Africa festival itself. It was wonderful, one of the best experiences of my life. Peter Rorvik & his staff deserve our utmost praise & support. The events were in great venues, very well organised, started on time, employed sate-of-the-art technology ... And what beautiful audiences. People arrived on time,

didn’t make noise, listened to the poetry, were very respectful, gave feedback at the end of the readings & even bought books. What more could a poet want? And what an excellent idea – to take poets to schools, rich & poor, to a prison & to a street kids’ refuge.I’m still in touch with some poets I met at Poetry Africa 2000. US Poet Laureate Rita Dove & her husband Fred stayed overnight at our place in the Blue Mountains on a recent trip to Australia. I’ve had letters from Thomas Tidholm (Sweden), Susan Kigali (Uganda), Peter Kantor (Hungary), & Benjamin Zephaniah (UK) & have traded a couple of books with Kelwyn Sole. I often wonder how Otis Fink is going. He was doing good but potentially dangerous work. And Eric Hadebe, where are you? I’d love to hear from you.A poetry festival like Poetry Africa has never happened in Australia & probably never will. Our pathetic Sydney Poetry Festival, which only happens every other year, only had a budget last year of AUS$30 000 & only drew an audience of about 200 over a three-day weekend. And the Sydney Writers Festival is all about money, about promoting trendy, flavour-of-the-month books. Poetry is ignored, a few poets, always the same poets, being invited to sit on a few panels.

What are your feelings about the future of poetry, and of poetry publishing, in Australia?

When I arrived in Australia in 1972 the future of poetry/ poetry publishing was bleak. It still is.

(First published in the fifth issue of Green Dragon in 2007)

Producing poetry that is infused with a sense of social and political commitment may seem like a throw-back to the apartheid era for some, but for poet, editor, publisher and community activist Vonani Bila, the urgent need for poets — and all writers — to address social injustice remains as strong as ever.

Bila, whose fourth poetry collection, Handsome Jita, was recently published by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, was born in 1972 at Shirley Village in the Elim area of Limpopo, into a family of eight children.

He says his parents instilled in him an appreciation of music and narrative.

“My father was a gifted singer and composer,” says Bila. “He even used to play the timbila (a finger harp that is associated with the Vatsonga, Vacopi and Machangani of Mozambique, where the Bilas originally come from).

“My mother didn’t attend any formal schooling, but she’s indisputably a living historian with an astute and impeccable memory of family and social history. My mother tells intelligent and humorous tales to her grandchildren with great passion. It is from her that I inherited the narrative command evident in my poetry.”

But he is deeply aware of the conditions of poverty and injustice into which he was born. His great-grandfather fought in the Second World War but, “like most blacks who served in the army, he got virtually nothing, except that his name got engraved on the walls of Elim Hospital”.

“My father

died after working at Elim Hospital for almost 30 years, earning a paltry R300 a month at the time of his death.”

Bila went to Lemana High School, one of the reputable public schools in Elim, he says, but he had to walk 14km to get there.

He was 21 when his first poem was published. At the time, Bila was a student at Tivumbeni College of Education, where he earned the reputation of being a public poet. His involvement at the time with nongovernmental organisations such as the Akanani Rural Development Association sharpened his political views.

“It motivated me to want to join Umkhonto weSizwe in 1989. I took my passport, but when my father died, I couldn’t proceed with my plans. I guess a certain anger that is in my poetry is that of a guerrilla who fires with poetry rather than with an AK47.”

His first collection of poems, No Free Sleeping, with Donald Parenzee and Alan Finlay, was published in 1998 by Botsotso. He was impressed with the way in which Botsotso got him involved in the production, and this inspired him to start up his own poetry publishing venture, the Timbila Poetry Project, which has published collections by poets such as Goodenough Mashego, Makhosazana Xaba and Mbongeni Khumalo.

Bila has also published two of his own titles — In the Name of Amandla and Magicstan Fires— as well as an annual poetry journal, Timbila. He has also released a CD of his poetry, Dahl Street, Pietersburg.

Bila emphasises the value of the spoken word, and of the benefits of being able to listen to poetry. “If a poet can project their poetry well through their voice on CD and on stage, then they can easily communicate the feeling of the poem to a large number of people who wouldn’t necessarily have access to the book, given that poetry books are not widely distributed in shops.

“But SA needs books as much as we need CDs, printed T-shirts and posters bearing po

ems. When we explore new technology such as the internet, we must always remember there are millions of South Africans who don’t have access to that medium.

“SA’s illiteracy levels are shocking and for that reason, we will always need books.”

But despite this emphasis on the need to reach a wide audience, Bila does not see himself as a public poet.

“I am a poet who comments on life around and about me,” he says. “Yes, I confront the reader with stories of shame, degradation, retrenched workers, prostitutes in substandard conditions, the unemployed and beggars — these are stories few dare to tell with honesty, love and compassion. Instead they sensationalise them and further dehumanise these people.

“This sordid reality I feel nobody, especially poets, should be ignoring. Of course, there is a price one can pay heavily for raising such embarrassing questions of the government’s failure to take care of the poor.

“Where I come from, poverty hits you straight in the face and you wonder what changes (Jacob) Zuma or (Thabo) Mbeki or the African National Congress (ANC) will effect to improve the lives of the poor. All I see is politicians accumulating wealth, buying farms, sitting on several companies as directors, fixing tenders for their relatives.

“I comment on all these matters, not because it’s sexy to do so, nor because every angry young poet feels the ANC has sold out. I do so because I am a patriot. I care about finding the roots of social and political problems we are facing.

“Poetry is not a h

obby for me. It’s a lifelong commitment, and I can only be true to myself when I express that which I believe in, without being a propagandist.”

Apart from disappointment over the government’s lack of service delivery, Bila is also troubled by the fact that the spectre of apartheid has not yet disappeared and that incidents of racist attacks are rife in SA’s rural areas.

“I am antiracist,” he says. “I come from a province rife with racism. White farmers chop off a farm worker’s head, throw him into a river, and say he was bitten by a crocodile. They mistake black people for dogs and baboons.”

His poetry has won him recognition overseas and he has been invited to countries such as Belgium, Sweden, Holland and Brazil. But one particular overseas trip was harrowing: last year, when arriving at Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Kenya to attend the World Economic Summit, he was detained for three hours for allegedly travelling on an out-of-date passport.

“It was a nasty experience,” he says, but also points to a lack of solidarity among writers in SA.“If poets were organised, they would have spoken out against the Kenyan government’s trampling on my rights. But a writer could die in prison without other writers saying a word.”

Bila is encouraged that Keorapetse “Willie” Kgositsile is now SA’s poet laureate and hopes there will now be some dynamism in the country’s literary development.He also says poetry would be better known if schools were studying local poets.

“Most schools exclude poetry. What is commonplace in the school and varsity arena are proponents of British and American modernism such as TS Eliot.

“With the exception of black consciousness-inspired poetry of the ’70s, those who teach poetry pretend there’s a desert between 1980 and now.”

Bila, however, takes a critical view of work being produced by younger South African poets.

“They slam, and in their slam jam there’s little poetry. They mimic some of the worst US thugs and choose to ignore rich and unusual voices. To generalise is not fair, but those who appear to have become celebrities, whether (that status is) self-constructed or acquired, are worshipped by the youth because their faces are visible on TV and from time to time they are invited to perform at government and corporate functions.

“Some poets are happy to be commissioned to write about brands and labels; I’m not such a clown. They demand to perform at government functions, and they are paid good money. You’ll hear so and so was in Cuba, attending a writers’ conference. How they get there is through connections.”

But thankfully for South African poetry, Bila is no performing puppet and nobody’s clown.

(First published in The Weekender 12 January, 2008)

Arja Salafranca has published two collections of poetry, A life stripped of illusions, winner of the 1994 Sanlam Award, and The Fire in Which we Burn, which was published by Dye Hard Press. Her collection of short stories, The Thin Line, was recently published by Modjaji Books. She edits the Sunday Life supplement in The Sunday Independent and is studying toward an MA in Creative Writing. She is the recipient of the 2009/2010 Dalro Award for her poem, 'Steak', published in New Coin. You can visit her blog here.

DH: Short fiction has been referred to as a sort of poor relation of the novel. What are your thoughts on that, and why do you prefer short fiction over the novel?

AS: I think short fiction is certainly the “poor relation” to the novel, but only in the way it is perceived by the majority of publishers, readers and booksellers. The majority, not all, otherwise we would have no collections by single authors out there at all! It’s been all a bit of a catch 22 – with stories not selling in significant volumes, publishers seem to have cut back on publishing collections by single authors in the last ten, fifteen years. In addition, magazines from the late 1980s onward stopped publishing short fiction, which they used to do quite regularly. So stories became quite marginalised, off the radar as a genre. Instead, in this country, we saw interest in South African novels peaking, as well as in nonfiction works.

There has been a rise in the number of short fiction collections and anthologies published in SA recently – do you think the tide is turning?

Yes, thankfully the tide is turning, albeit slowly. I wrote a piece for The Star in 2008, titled The short story renaissance in which I asked a number of writers, booksellers and publishers for their views. The assumption, generally, was that there was a bit of a shift. For a start, some magazine had began publishing stories again, or running competitions for short stories, bringing them back into the public eye. This year we’ve seen a “flood” of short stories – I call it a flood, because compared to the amount being published in previous years, this is a delightful amount. There was Home Away, an anthology edited by Louis Greenberg, which has done very well; Modjaji Books has published two volumes of stories, my own, as well as Meg Vandermerve’s This Place I call Home, and TheBed Book of Short Stories, David Medalie has a collection out, Ivan Vladislavic’s early short stories have been reissued, and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Homing has just been released. Usually we see a single volume every couple of years by a single author, so I think stories are receiving more prominence now. They are being published again – and that’s the first step to getting readers.

There’s still a long way to go, of course – we need to demand their prominence as readers and writers. We need to ask more magazines to publish them; we need to buy more collections, ask booksellers to stock them, or shop online. We need to read and buy short story collections – for lovers of short stories that’s not a huge ask, of course. But some readers are a little afraid of reading short fiction, whether it’s because it’s not a familiar read, as poetry isn’t, or whether that “quick fix” offered by stories isn’t seen as satisfactory. We need to write stories that draw readers in, and very importantly, as writers, we need to read short stories and read widely. As I said before, if you can’t find volumes of stories in your bookshop, go online, there are collections and anthologies out there that don’t make it to our South African shelves. Go explore.

We tend to refer more to short fiction these days rather than short stories. Why is that?

I’m not quite sure. I still use these terms in interchangeably, but the terms “short stories” may be regarded as limiting, a short story must be X no of words etc, whereas short fiction is more open, it can be anything, just not a novel, I suppose.

What short fiction writers have influenced you and why? Are you more influenced by contemporary short fiction writers than by more classic writers of the genre, such as Hemingway, Chekhov, DH Lawrence or Katherine Mansfield?

I’m definitely influenced by more contemporary writers. Although I wrote some short stories starting at eleven, and into my teens, I really fell in love with short stories in my first year at university. I was studying African and English literature and both introduced me to a wide variety of South African writers – from Pauline Smith to Nadine Gordimer. I read all of Gordimer’s short fiction, I read Margaret Atwood. I love the US writer Lorrie Moore’s witty, sharp, clever short fiction, she remains one of my favourites. I read a wide variety of short fiction – from local stories published in local journals and some of the local anthologies that have been brought out over the years, from Oshun’s three volumes of short fiction by women writers, to those collected from the Caine Prize published by Jacana yearly, to that great American series, The Best American series...they publish volumes of stories every years, chosen from American magazines. There’s also the Best American travel, essays and other genres, which I read. I love anthologies, that’s how I often get introduced to other writers, and then search out their individual collections.

What is the inspiration for your short fiction? Most of it seems autobiographical, and they also touch on issues that are relevant to contemporary South Africa, such as immigration and crime.

I do plumb my own autobiography – and I’m not alone here. Simone de Beauvoir famously used her own life as the basis for so much of her fiction and she in turn defended herself by referring to War and Peace and Tolstoy’s reliance on real-life characters.

I sometimes start with an image or a faint story I have heard and transform that into fiction. Sometimes I take episodes of my life, situations, happenings and they become short fiction. Sometimes the stories are wholly imagined: ‘A man sits in a Johannesburg Park’ about emigration, began with the image of a man sitting on bench in a park taking his dog for a run the day before he is to leave the country with his family, which is an entirely imagined piece.

I do touch on crime and emigration – as these are facts of life in our country. Crime often leads to emigration, unfortunately, too. I don’t consciously set out to depict the ways in which crime has impacted on us, or the way emigration has crept into all our lives in various ways, but it enters as most of my stories are set in this country. It’s part of us, if we choose to live here.

Anais Nin was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, resulting in some very in-depth character studies in her fiction. Has psychoanalysis had an influence in your own work?

I majored in psychology, as well as African Literature as part of my undergraduate degree at Wits. For a very brief time I even considered taking it further, becoming a psychologist. I am still interested in what motivates people, in their foibles, in their scars and in why so often people remain mired in patterns they can't break out of. I’m more interested in motivations and dramas, and tend to read more widely and watch more TV and movies in which the characters drive the storyline rather than plot, so people are certainly an interest. I think that interest is naturally part of my writing. As for whether the practice of therapy has directly influenced my work, I’m not sure. I’m writing a series of novellas for my MA in Creative Writing at Wits university and one of these may be a study of the therapeutic relationship, so perhaps that will be an influence.

You are also a poet, and have had two collections of poems published. To what degree does your poetry inform your short fiction and vice versa?

Does it inform my fiction? I’m not sure. I’m very drawn to short forms – I love essays, for example, I love reading short stories, of course. But I do love longer works: novels, biographies, nonfiction works, for example. My fiction gives me the space to explore themes that poetry can't; similarly some experiences or subjects are expressed as poems, they can't be stories or anything else. I’m not sure that each influence each other, but everything in life influences everything else, so perhaps I’m just not seeing the influ

ence, but it’s there.

What are your views on the situation of poetry publishing in South Africa?

It’s in the doldrums as far as publishing collections goes. It’s “easy” enough to have poems published in literary journals, but it’s hard to get a volume published these days. Same old catch 22 – publishers aren’t publishing, readers aren’t buying. And so we go back to publishers not publishing ... there are some exceptions. Colleen Higgs at Modjaji Books is leading the way and is publishing a vast amount of poetry collections. Then Leon de Kock’s Bodyhood has just been brought out by Umuzi. But, at the moment, it’s a huge struggle to get poetry out there. Another prominent poet, who has had a number of collections published and is widely known and well regarded, can't get local publishers to look at her latest volume. I find that unbelievably sad and tragic.

You are also very focused on creative nonfiction, another genre that seems to be marginalised in SA. What is creative nonfiction, and why do you think it is marginalised?

Creative nonfiction uses techniques of fiction to tell a story – but it goes beyond that. In trying to describe this, I return often to Jo Anne Beard’s piece 'Werner', originally published in the US journal Tin House. It’s about Werner, an ordinary man, who returns to his apartment building after work and wakes in the middle of the night to find that the building is on fire. Beard’s piece is a fast-moving, dripping account of that incident. It reads like a thriller. It’s an alive, moving piece of writing – and that’s what creative nonfiction sets out to do. It’s not about dry boring facts presented in a dry boring way.

For another “definition” here’s Lee Gutkind’s description of it. Gutkind is considered the “guru” of the form. In 1973 he was the first to teach it in an American university, and started up the journal Creative Nonfiction twenty years later in 1993.

He writes in the forward essay to In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction: “Of course I am a creative nonfiction writer, 'creative' being indicative of the style in which nonfiction is written so as to make it more dramatic and compelling. We embrace many of the techniques of the fiction writer, including dialogue, description, plot, intimacy and specificity of detail, characterisation, point of view; except, because it is nonfiction – and this is the difference – it is true.”

It has been said that fiction in South Africa tends to be dominated by women – do you agree with this, and if so, why is this?

I don’t think that it is dominated by women – we have some fine male writers producing novels. I think that’s a misconception: what we have now are more women writing and having novels published.

What contemporary South African writers do you admire and why?

I look forward to new short story collections by Nadine Gordimer. I’ve recently started reading the Afrikaans writer Ingrid Winterbach in translation, and I admire Damon Galgut’s spare, bleak vision. On the nonfiction front I love what Ndumiso Ngcobo achieved in his sharp essays in his book, Some of my Best Friends are White, and Don Pinnock’s travel and nature-related essays are a real treat and deserve wide readership.

What are your thoughts on ebooks? It’s an approach to publishing that South Africans seem to be resisting.

And no wonder! The speed of our internet as well as the reliability or lack of are real factors in preventing this uptake. Also there is this perception that ebooks aren’t real – you’re not published till you’re between the covers so to speak. Overseas this perception is changing and I think we might catch up.

How do you see short fiction going in the future?

I hope that the short story renaissance discussed earlier really does take off and that we see more and more collections and anthologies appearing. I hope more magazines and Sunday supplements embrace the form and start publishing fiction as part of their offerings (as they do in England) and I hope that the genre achieves more prominence and gains in readership. I’d love to start a short story festival in South Africa and introduce even more readers to the delights of the form - which can be as satisfactory to read as a novel or a nonfiction work.

The Thin Line is available at bookstores countrywide in SA. You can also buy a copy online from Kalahari.net, Loot,Exclusive Books and Amazon.

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 abro

ad, 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 to

tal 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 readi

ng; 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 emer

ges 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 simp

licity, 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 rei

nvention 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 Internationalis 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, int

imate 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.

Subhankar Das is a writer, publisher and film producer living in Kolkata, India. He has publishe

d fourteen collections of poetry in Bangla though his most recent collection The Streets, the Bubbles of Grass, is published in English by his arts collective, Graffiti Kolkata. He has translated Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish into Bangla and is the editor of the stark electric space..., an anthology of international experimental writing. He has produced six short films and owns a bookstore.

DH: Tell us about your background. When did you start writing poetry?

SD: There is a saying in Bangla – ‘once a bone got stuck in a tiger’s throat’ – which I would recreate as, or I would prefer to say, remix it as – ‘once a tiger got stuck in a bone’s throat’ – and I do not remember when I got trapped in the bones of poetry. I remember only the poem I wrote and received a second prize for at the age of nine, mixing Hindi words in a Bangla rhymed poem.

I was born in 1963 in Kolkata, also known by its old name, Calcutta. I was the youngest among two brothers and a sister. My father was a descendent of a family of Zemindars, or landlords, of Midnapore, a village about 100km from Kolkata. Zemindars generally held considerable tracts of land and had the worst reputation as landlords for their cruel behaviour towards the bonded labourers working for them.

My father left home due to a feud about his love marriage and went to re-establish himself as a small businessman in Kolkata with his wife and one-year-old son, my elder brother.

My parents were never bothered about literature, let alone poetry. But they had a love for myth, fable, allegory and legends, which was a blessing for me. One of my grandmothers could recite by heart the rhymed and the most colourful epics the Ramayana and Mahabharata, each consisting of thousands of pages. It still remains the most surreal moment of my childhood.

My parents wanted me to become an engineer and forget about my Zemindary blood. So I became an engineer but one fine morning I was disgusted, though ‘disgusted’ isn’t a strong enough word to describe the feeling that I had to do more than hate corporate society and those powdered beasts who knows nothing about nothing, sitting in an air-conditioned room acting the Big Boss. I was told not to think but to act according to orders. So I left after six months and started writing poetry seriously, working on and off at odd jobs from selling insurance to compressor spare parts, or acting as sales boy in my father’s shop, selling underwear and children’s wear. After my father’s death I changed this shop to a bookstore, which I still own.

When did you start publishing poems?

The first rhymed poem for which I received the second prize was published with the other poets in a special issue of a commercially printed magazine. It was just like all the special issues of these kinds of magazines: hundreds of pages of glossy coloured printed papers and coming out to coincide wit

h a particular festive calendar date to maximise their sales. You might also sometimes get a free issue with your new washing powder.

So my first poetry was printed in a commercial magazine from a publishing group in Kolkata whom I later learned to hate, when I saw how they turned creative writers into slaves and how a good fiction writer became a sports journalist, or a poet turned into a gossip columnist. I preferred to remain an author of the little magazines in the Bangla language which believe in a free literary flow that advocates the liberty and individuality of authors. All the off-the-beaten-track writing in Bangla is published chiefly in little literary magazines, nearly 2 200 in number.

An editor of a little magazine called Samprotik Uttaran was planning a new look for his magazine and requested me to join as an editor. For years I worked for that magazine doing lot of translation work. My first chapbook of poems, Songs of a Damaged Brain (1987), was published by this little magazine during that period.

Who are your favourite poets? What have you learned from them?

They are Jibanananda Das, the Bengali poet of the ’30s, and Allen Ginsberg, the US beat poet. Jibanananda Das was the first modern poet of Bangla literature, whose poems still work inside psychosomatically, a kind of gut feeling, keeping wit and intelligence aside. ‘Don’t put all importance on the head – the intelligence and wit’ – Subhash Ghosh, a Hungryalist prose writer of the ’60s, often told us. ‘Only when the body reacts psychosomatically, only then the language, your tool of expression, is successful.’ This I felt in Jibanananda’s works. I learned the distress of words from him. The dark side of the moon. How important a comma or a full stop can be.

In Ginsberg I learned the use of materialistic spoken words, how the local becomes global. Stripping the extra ornaments of the language to create that evocative prosaic language. I still remember that comment of his which goes more or less – 'in my poem the length of the line depends on the size of the paper'. It is also very interesting to note that poems written by Ginsberg after his India visit are composed in the breath-span of mantras, pranayamas. The basis of his later belief in good and bad vibrations is also these mantras of the east. This postmodern attitude of understanding local as global attracts me towards him more. I have also translated Ginsberg’s great poem Kaddish into Bangla.

The anthology you published recently, the stark electric space... looks back in to the Hungry Generation, or Hungryalist movement, in India in the 1960s. To what degree has this movement influenced your work and outlook?

The Hungryalist movement made a big difference in the attitude of the Bangla literary scene, though I always felt that any kind of movement finally aspires to a kind of regimentation, you know, closed groups where the freedom of the authors needs to be sacrificed to keep the movement going.

In a recent conversation with Malay Roychoudhury (a founder of the Hungryalist movement) I asked about this and he said: ‘Don't think in terms of your knowledge of the movement in western literature. The hungryalist movement did not have a centre of power, high command or politbureau. Anyone and everyone were free to join the movement just declaring himself that he was a Hungryalist. In fact some of the later Hungryalists are not known to me even today!'

But I still feel because of this pressure of being a closed group, not recognising the later Hungryalists, and the possbility of a high command or leadership arising, helped this movement to fizzle out. But that does not demean their defiance, their experimentation with forms but retaining the content vehicle, and the expression of subjective personal feelings in their texts. These aspects really influenced me and I knew that an anthology of indie writers without their participation would always be incomplete.

What’s your typical way of composing a poem? Where do you usually get inspiration from?

It happens usually like this: a word, sometimes even a complete sentence, haunts my mind for days until finally I write it down. Then follow it up with more words. This is a typical and common process for short poems. But for long poems there is always research work. Sometimes a historical background might shape a sentence or a word.

For example, with my long poem ‘By the banks of Ajoy, Jaideb vanishes into the blue’, I must name three books which were a motivation behind it: Who was Sinclair Beiles? edited by Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller and The poetry of Mr Blue by Henry Denander. Also the different nuances of the word ‘Hydra’ was haunting my mind for days. Hydra, the island in Greece, was once a bohemian h

angout, but was also the Greek mythological water beast with nine heads. I was also thinking of an almost mythical poet of Bengal, Jaideb, whose house was by the banks of Ajoy where every year till today a village fair is organised in his memory. Baul saints sing all night in praise of the love of Krishna and Radha during this fair. The faith of the people makes the love myth between Krishna and Radha continue living. In addition to this, I thought of the parents who name their child Jaideb today – do they know who this Jaideb was? I find the whole situation very magical and poetic and it urges me to write.

I think first thought is the best thought. So I do not believe in many revisions, though my favourite poet Jibanananda not only believed in revisions, he even reworked his proofs, making his printer’s life hell.

To me, a poem is not an arrangement of words. On the contrary, it is sweat, hair, sputum, phlegm, bile – everything is there in a poem. My anger, sorrow, pain, desperation, sentimentality, loves – all are there in that bone of poetry. I just arrange those pieces of bone when I feel like. When the urge comes I write, when it is not there, I don’t. The same goes for the publishing of the poems as well.

Tell us about your arts collective, Graffiti Kolkata.

The name of our publication in Bangla is Graffiti and we have published a great deal – more than a hundred titles and more than 100 issues of our literary magazine in Bangla, which includes my poetry volumes and translation work, along with more than 30 other alternative writers in Bangla in this last 18 years of our journey.

In about 2004 we started experimenting with the audio-visual medium, in the process making six short films. That is when we started translating Bangla works into English for subtitling these films to communicate with the non-Bangla speaking spectrum. Even in India, Bangla is a regional language only and I have lot of friends who do not speak or understand Bangla, so there was a need to bridge this gap.

We started a blog called Graffiti Kolkatain about 2008. It is a publication in English that features poems from

writers from around the world and our first English publication in print was the anthology the stark electric space... in 2010 and then the poetry chapbooks, the Graffiti Kolkata Broadsidesetc.

I have got funding from my left, right and back pockets. Though there are some funds available for poetry it come with lots of political colours, both right and left, which we do not subscribe to. We love to stay independent. Dreams and the agony of life is the inspiration … for us Graffiti is a movement … Graffiti is a lifestyle … it’s a pathway of our dream … it’s a protest against the consumerism of thought … and now we have friends worldwide who also believe in this independence of thought and creation.

What is the poetry scene like in Kolkata?

The poets who started writing poems in Bangla in the 1980s and after, in addition to the creative unrest had to identify themselves with what was happening around them: assassinations, terrorism, Maoists, corruption etc. As a result, linguistically and expressively

their writings became a different phenomenon in comparison to commercial writing.

Bangla literature has a big market when you take into account Bangladesh – a country whose main language is Bangla and is just half an hour by air from Kolkata.

So to capture this market, huge capital is invested and there is a market for literature as well. Against the backdrop of such a scenario, indie writers fight a war of words. They do not get reviews in the big commercial magazines and newspapers. A large number of readers have not even heard of them.

Ingrid Andersen was born in Johannesburg, read for a degree in English literature and film and theatre criticism at the University of the Witwatersrand, and is currently completing her master's degree. Her work has been published in poetry journals for 16 years. Excision, her first volume of poetry, was published in 2004 and her second, Piece Work, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010. She is the founding editor of Incwadi, a South African journal that explores the interaction between poetry and image. (Photo of the author: Liesl Jobson/BookSA)

DH: About a year or so ago you started up the online poetry journal I ncwadi. What was your motivation for starting the journal, and why did you opt for online rather than print?

IA: Getting published is difficult for South African poets, especially for emergent poets. It seems a poet cannot get published without already being published – a Joseph Heller situation.

The realities of the market are that hard-copy journals are expensive to produce and they rely on subscriptions to survive, more so than sales from book stores. There are very few journals out there – most of the journals I grew up reading no longer exist.

For some years, I had been speaking to other poets about my wanting to bring out a journal. I wanted to provide another space where good poetry could be published. Two years ago, I began to speak to friends who were editors of poetry journals, to get an idea of what was involved. I made the financial decision to go online with a simple, quality website. I do the html coding myself, so it costs me two weekends a year, with no overheads other than the cost of bandwidth. The benefit of online is that I can use images as well, and allow them to interact with the poetry – which has fascinating results.

In South Africa we were rather slow to accept online as a legitimate publishing medium. South Africa’s relatively low internet penetration – about 7%-9% of the population – probably has a lot to do with that. Do you think there are other reasons?

It takes time for people to absorb and adapt to change. Think of thirty years ago, when writers struggled to adapt to the new technology and preferred typewriters, tippex and carbon paper to computers.

We’re living in a time where changing technology challenges us to stay relevant almost on a daily basis. Perhaps, yes, we have a lower level of computer internet penetration here in South Africa, but I’ve been speaking to people on the cutting edge of technology who tell me that more and more people now access the internet via their cellphones. South Africa has one of the highest per capita usage of cellphone technology in the world– how do we take this into account?

I know of one

writer who is making good use of the medium by writing serialised stories for teenagers. My publisher, Colleen Higgs at Modjaji Books, uses social networking very effectively.

I believe that online and digital formats are the future of publishing and will complement hard copy. I’ve just bought a Kindle and now purchase a number of my books in that format. I read my news online on News24 (to save trees) and I’ve made both my books available in digital format on Scribd via Book SA’s editor Ben Williams’ company Little White Bakkie.

Do you think that online publishing plays a role in negating the power of traditional cultural gatekeepers?

Without a doubt. The power the internet gives to the average individual is challenging all sorts of gatekeepers – for better or worse. People can now contribute to reporting by means of cellphone photographs/video and the secrets of politicians are now open for all to see through WikiLeaks; but at the same time, one can also read nauseating hate speak, prejudice and uninformed opinion on online fora and news page comment facilities. And, frankly, that open access is a double-edged sword.

As Kurt Vonnegut has said, “A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions” .

There are writers who say that online publishing or online reviews are not as valid as reviews in print. I would like to challenge that perception: the medium doesn’t affect the validity of the message. As with print, it is the credentials of the reviewer that count.

What is the editorial policy of Incwadi, if any?

Incwadi accepts work from all South African poets and photographers. Work that explores the interaction between word and image is particularly welcome.

If there is a policy, it is that I am resolutely egalitarian: work is accepted on its literary merits alone – with no agendas whatsoever and regardless of whether the poet/photographer is established or not.

You recently had a new poetry collection, Piece Work, published. Not only is it a bigger collection than your previous collection, Excision, but the voice seems stronger and more confident.

The poems in Excision were drawn from poems written over seventeen years. Some of them had been published in journals during that time. The first poem I published was in

the last issue of Slug News, before the start of Carapace. It appeared alongside a poem by one G Cummiskey, interestingly. It is interesting to see the evolution of my literary voice in that collection. The progression is visible: over the years, my voice became more sparing, tighter - more succinct, with more focus on the visual.

Over the years, I have interacted with and worked with other poets, which is always helpful to hone and sharpen one’s work. The poems in Piece Work were written later, over a period of four years from 2005 to 2009.

Another difference between the poems in the two collections is, generally, a greater economy of words. Bashō and the Imagists are mentioned as influences.

My poetry has over time grown more visual, terse and lean: words have to work hard – to be functional, to carry power. For me, poetry has the potential to be a visual art form in which one can see through the image or the object to meaning.

Over the years, some of the poetry I have delighted in: Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”, William Carlos Wi

lliams’ “This is just to say” and Eliot’s “Preludes”, Sandburg’s “Fog”, just happened to be part of the brief flowering of the Imagist movement.

Recently, I re-read Pound and Hulme’s writings on Imagist Poetry, and felt that familiar jolt of recognition. Here was the muscular, hard-working, visual poetry I strove for – albeit in my own voice.

I had a childhood that was steeped in both music and the visual arts – music concerts/gigs of many kinds, family members and friends who were musicians, visits to art galleries, a house full of art and art books. In particular, I loved the impressionists, for their focus, their vision of the everyday.

For matric French, we had to undertake the painstaking translation into English of the French Romantic poets - Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé and others. The sensual richness of the imagery stayed with me. I find Bashō’s work exquisite: minimalist, evocative, moving and thought-provoking. All of these influences have shaped who I am as a poet.

The final poem, or rather section, in the book is a sort of “found poem”. In fact it’s called “Found objects”. What was the genesis of the poem and how did it come together?

As I’ve said, I read my news online. Over the years, I have read stories of lonely people who died and who were not missed: whose bodies were found only years after

wards. It was both deeply sad and macabre - a tremendous indictment on the fragmentation of society. I started filing the stories, as they had huge resonance for me. I felt their story should be told.

I attended an exhibition of photographs of nature at the Grahamstown Festival in 2009, and encountered there EO Wilson’s environmental clarion call and his definition of the term Eremozoic as “the age of loneliness”.

All of a sudden everything fell into place – the stories I had set aside, which connected with similar stories in my own experience. I felt that the news pieces should operate as "found objects", as in the visual arts, with the additional dimension that the bodies, themselves, were also found objects. The poem almost wrote itself after that.

Do you regard yourself as a poet, or as a woman poet? Should this distinction exist? If so, is there a difference between black women poets and white women poets? Does South Africa’s history almost demand such distinctions? Do they serve any evaluative purpose?

I am an individual made up of many characteristics, and being a woman and having a particular skin colour are each only one of those characteristics – I am also South African who lived through the struggle; a community activist; a

priest; a mother; a creative artist in different media; middle-class; a poet; a friend; an archer; someone who has experienced a challenging and complex life; someone whose grandmothers were a domestic servant and a taxi driver and whose great-grandmother was a communist; an adult educator; an academic; a lover of music – and I would hope that my poetry reflects that complexity.

I would think that women might not want to be put into some kind of ghetto, as if being a woman is a disability. The present government seems to indicate that mindset in its allocation of ministerial responsibilities.

Globally there has been a decline in people reading poetry. There might be a rise in people attending poetry events but when it comes to reading poetry, it’s a different matter. South Africa is in the same boat. People say they enjoy poetry, but they don’t seem to want to buy collections, to read the words. Also bookstores are becoming more and reluctant to stock poetry. Online publishing vehicles such as Incwadi obviously sidestep this problem. What are your thoughts on this?

It IS encouraging about the rise in attendance at poetry events in South Africa, the shift in the role of the poet as community performer – we are getting back to the oral tradition.

An article a week ago on Guardian.co.uk seems to provide a counter-argument to the view that fewer people are reading poetry, fortunately. Jackie Kay suggests that there is an increase in the number of people buying and reading poetry – quoting Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society who says we are in a “renaissance”. Sales are up. Carol Ann Duffy comments in the article that “poetry is very confident now, and it does feel like it should be a guest at the table”. Perhaps poetry has new interest and meaning in the emergent reading generation?

There seems to be a shift in the trends in reading poetry in South Africa – perhaps the cost of books has limited the purchase of poetry books, perhaps it’s about two generations of people who have been deliberately denied an education, or maybe it’s about the shift to digital.

Certainly, the number of people accessing poetry online has increased. Just this week, Michelle McGrane mentioned that her poetry blog, Peony Moon, has reached 300 000 hits – quite an accomplishment.

I have watched the poetry shelf at my own branch of Exclusive Books in the Midlands, once very supportive of local poetry, dwindle to a handful of the canon of dead poets – a phenomenon to be seen at most of the branches countrywide. We are very thankful for the supportive independent book stores.

What is your view on South African literature as a whole, as well as South African publishing? Where do you see it going into the future?

South African literature has been moving for some time into the complexities and nuances of different genres as we have been finding our own voice as a post-apartheid nation.

I believe this is something to celebrate: the fact that South African literature no

w DOES have page-turners and is no longer the literary equivalent of castor oil: hard to take, but good for you.

We’re not, however, always quick to adapt to these changes. On Friday 4th February, Albie Sachs is quoted in the press, praising Margie Orford's Daddy's Girl and saying how amazed he was to find that a novel set in Cape Town could be a page-turner.

We now have an international award-winning science fiction novel, new novels licensed for publication overseas, first-rate krimis and best selling chick- and lad-lit, not to mention a comedy novel now made into an international movie. None of them about apartheid.

As I asked in a recent LitNet think piece, why are our books either absent from our own bookstores or mostly relegated to a South African ghetto at the back of the shop as if they were not quite good enough? Where is the chance for South African authors to be shelved alongside their international equivalents by genre? When will a book be able to be chosen on its own merits, only to be discovered to be local?

The question we need to be asking ourselves as readers, writers and publishers is whether this matters to us? We seem to be, judging by reports in our literary media, in a local literary boom. What are we doing about challenging the status quo in the marketing of South African work and finding opportunities for shifts in public perception about our writing?

It’s a matter of choice. It’s a matter of will.

Yannis Livadas was born in Kalamata, Greece in 1969. He has done dozens of different jobs and travelled extensively in India, Tunisia, Algeria, Italy, France, Morocco, Portugal and Spain. He has published seven poetry collections, the most recent being Ati: Scattered Poems 2001-2009. He has translated the work of authors such as Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Charles Bukowski. He now lives secluded in the Greek countryside.

DH: I'm curious about your background. When did you start writing seriously?

YL:My background was the mess of the entity. Existence whirls and spirals unceasingly in its void; one must find ways to scan it on the wing. To lose self, to be a poet. I started writing poetry because I had a congenital tendency for writing, ink and paper. It was the only thing that was making me feel complete. I started writing seriously when I was sixteen or so, but I first published when I was thirty. It was really great to experience fortitude all this years. I had no reason to be in a hurry about it.

You were once a bookseller and a publisher. What was that period like?

Ahh, that was a period full of mishaps and troubles. But I had to do that; I really liked the idea of making books, selling books, but those four years were more than enough. I faced too much bureaucracy in this country. So instead of being fulfilled publishing books I just suffered at the hands of officialdom. But it was also fun and I made new friends.

At first glance, your poetry looks surrealist, but your main influences seem to be pre-surrealist authors such as Apollinaire, but particularly Blaise Cendrars. What is it about Cendrars' work that attracts you and how has his work influenced you?

Apollinaire? No way! Not even the surrealists! I have studied their work extensively and I still enjoy reading a poem or two of theirs; maybe I prefer them to most of the poets of our time, but that’s all. There are no influences from that kind of stuff. Surrealism lacks what I call, with regard to my own poetry, “awakened realism”. Cendrars, my grandfather, was the most pulsating of all modernists and, of course one of the first. Cendrars still remains a poetic capital. Cendrars is a perfect exception. I consider him the greatest poetic spirit of the twentieth century. His main influence on me was his idea that consciousness is the highest hallucination of all. As a poet I am interested only in the voice of the Muse. I have no other interests. That’s what the poem is all about. Poetry is art, not just writing, as it seems generally considered to be just about everywhere. The world is full of hobbyists, poets are so few. That’s a sign of our times. But this situation still provides a great opportunity to people with dignity to make a difference. Honor alit artes.

You have translated many of the Beat writers, particularly Kerouac, but also borderline Beat figures like Bukowski. What attracts you to the Beats? What relevance do they have in 2011?

Some of the Beats; like those you mention, were geniuses. They forced writing to exalted levels. They were true and serious and headed only straight ahead. A few days ago, my second volume about the Beats came out. It’s a volume of essays, various translations and original criticism. I am translating Kerouac, Bukowski, and many others of that period because readers and new scholars in my country must be aware of them in order to start something new. Which I hope will happen someday.

Right now I

am translating Kerouac’s Vision Of Cody and afterwards there is a series of books waiting. But the Beats have not influenced my writing, as some idiots in my country think.

What about some of the modern Greek poets – such as Seferis, Elytis, Ritsos and Valaoritis – have they had much an influence on your work?

None at all. I am completely indifferent to their work. They are mediocre for my taste. I have studied a tremendous amount of Greek poetry but I choose to turn the other way. I had no time to waste. There were other Greek poets such as Karouzos, Papaditsas and Spanias who elevated Greek poetry in other, more eclectic approaches. Still, there is no influence from them either; I prefer more dangerous and dexterous ways. I gamble, and exalt the existence of man into its natural emptiness. I laugh while I am meditating on death; that’s my aesthetics.

Like many of the Beat poets, you are a jazz aficionado. You have written an as yet unpublished history of jazz. What attracts you to jazz?

Jazz is a whole culture; a way of life. Thus, it is a way of making art. I started to hear jazz and collect records in my late youth, at a time that I was mainly listening to other stuff. But jazz knocked me out. Really. Jazz is absolutely free and at the same time absolutely un

equivocal. I wrote a book about jazz called Round About Jazz: The History of Jazz from the Age of Bebop to The Present. It took some years to find a publisher; now I am waiting to hear from him when the book will finally come out.

What is the literary and publishing scene like in Greece? I should imagine the financial crisis has had a huge effect on publishing? And the small publishing scene?

Greece was running in the wrong direction for many years. It still is. This country faces huge problems. A lack of political direction and, most of all, education and culture. Most of the creative publishers here are in trouble. Still, there are things happening. The future will provide the evidence. We’ll see.

You had two books of poetry published in English, Coltrane and 15 Poems for Jazz, and The Margins of a Central Man, which was published by Graffiti Kolkata. The Coltrane book was translated into English by the well-known US poet Jack Hirschman and Dimitri Charalambous. How did that come about?

I have been in contact with Jack Hirschman since about 2000. I was fortunate to have some of my poems translated by him with the assistance of Charalambous. The book is now out of print. Maybe it will come out again, I have no idea. The Margins Of A Central Man is a book of twenty or so poems of mine, translated by myself for my Indian friends who luckily speak English. It’s a great honour for me.

You have an unpublished prose work – what is it? Is it fiction?

I am not a prose writer, but I wrote that book. I find hard to describe its contents but I can tell you that is quite unique in its style and connectiveness. I keep it somewhat secret. I have not published even a section of it. Most publishers find it too non-mainstream. It’s not going to sell the way they would like. Publishers are in need of a bestseller, so they don’t bother. And that’s fair.

You have travelled quite a bit, mainly around Europe. You obviously like travelling. Do you find that it enriches and inspires you?

Yes, I have also travelled in India and in North Africa. But the matter is not the place, the destination of the journey; it’s all about the traveller. That’s why the journey itself is what matters. As we say: the journey is you, nothing else. But let us not become fakes of the sensibilities. If you have to travel, you travel. When I travel, I do it for a sense of seclusion. Believe it or not, I am in a state of joyous, creative seclusion when I travel. Lately, I find my everyday life to convulse the same way. I am more than lucky. I am in my forties now, and life provides all kinds of gifts with outrageous generosity. Life is itself a poem.

What projects are you busy with at the moment?

Life, as always.

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.

Pravasan Pillay was born in 1978 in Durban. He has published a chapbook of poetry, Glumlazi (2009), and a collection of comedic short stories, Shaggy (2011), co-written with Anton Krueger. Pillay's poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous books and journals and on websites. His short story 'Mr Essop' appears in The Edge of Things, an anthology of South African short fiction published by Dye Hard Press. His humour pieces have appeared in A Look Away Magazine, Mail & Guardian and McSweeney's. He is the editor and co-founder of the small press Tearoom Books. Pillay has worked as a freelance journalist, philosophy lecturer, production and project manager, and copy editor. He currently lives in Sweden and works as the international editor of a Swedish trade magazine.

DH: Your short story ‘Mr Essop’, in The Edge of Things, focuses on a child growing up in Chatsworth, Durban, where you also come from. It makes me curious about your background and how you came to writing.

PP:I come from a single-parent working-class family. Both my parents read a lot and I was encouraged to do the same, so I got through many of the classics at an early age, as well as lots of genre and contemporary fiction. Apart from books, I read superhero, horror, fantasy, sci-fi and war comics, and humour magazines such as Mad. Unlike many parents, mine didn't discourage me from reading comic books. I don't think they made a distinction between high-brow and low-brow culture, which is something I inherited from them. My parents divorced when I was quite young and my mother, brother and I moved around a lot, and that meant having to transfer schools a few times. I think the combination of being quite lonely at each of these schools – which is something I didn't mind too much – and my appetite for reading probably led me to writing. I began writing jokes, stories and plays around the age of 10 or 11.

To what degree has your background influenced your writing? You have said that you dislike being labelled an ‘Indian writer’.

I can understand why I might be labelled as an Indian writer. My short fiction is all set in a little corner of the Indian township of Chatsworth, which is the place I know and can write about best, and the characters are all Indian – so there's certainly legitimate grounds for my race to be highlighted. However, I'd like to think that what I'm trying to do in the stories, technically and thematically, is a bit more universal.

You have worked in various creative forms – short fiction, poetry, film and music – and one common thread among them is humour. I am thinking specifically of the Knock KnockJokes pamphlet you published through Tearoom Books and your most recent book, Shaggy (BK Publishing). I sometimes get the feeling that humorous writing is frowned upon in SA, that it is not considered ‘serious’. Do you think that South Africans, considering our history, are a bit too obsessed with tackling ‘serious’ topics? There are also many different approaches to humour – it is a bit of a loose term. Do you have any singular approach?

I think that the lack of a proper humour culture in South Africa can be traced partially, as you mention, to our history and the fact that humour writing isn't viewed as legitimate as more 'serious' forms of writing – which is a laugh because it’s far more difficult to write a good joke than it is to write, say, a poignant short story or poem. I would add that the national character of the country seems to lack the comedy gene; the majority of people don't seem to get satire, parody or irony. You have to be quite literal if you hope to make it as a comedian. So even if humour writing suddenly becomes respectable, I doubt you would see an outpouring of cutting-edge satire. But, despite these stumbling blocks, South Africa has produced a small but talented pool of genuine comedic masters. I'm thinking here of writers such as Herman Charles Bosman, Pieter Dirk Uys, Robert Kirby, Tom Eaton, Gus Ferguson, Imraan Coovadia, Ndumiso Ngcobo and a few others.

You're right, there are many different kinds of humour; and it’s important for a writer to know what kind of laugh he or she is aiming for. I suppose my own approach to humour tends towards the sarcastic and ironic. The late Robert Kirby said: ‘You can’t have humour without offending somebody. Every joke offends somebody down the line. Humour that didn’t plunge the knife into somebody’s ribs would be terribly pale, vapid, weak.’ I concur.

You published a small collection of short poems, Glumlazi, as Tearoom Books’ first title. Some of the poems are only two lines long, almost like haiku or text messages. Do you think that brevity is often more powerful than longer, ‘more developed' poems? Sometimes it seems to me that very short poems can act almost like a punch in the face or a wisecrack.

I'm not sure if shorter poems are more powerful or not, but they're what I prefer reading and writing. I like your use of the word ‘wisecrack’ because I think that's a more accurate classification of the contents of Glumlazi. It was a mistake to label it as poetry. I think that the brevity of the pieces and the inauthenticity of the emotions expressed in them are a reaction to the earnestness and clichéd register of ‘more developed poems’ that you mention. In a way, what I was trying to do was a kind of anti-poetry.

You started Tearoom Books a few years back, with your wife Jenny. Tell us more about it. There is also the Tearoom Books blog, which posts daily. It’s not just a promotional online presence for your press, but an online publication in itself.

Tearoom Books is the natural development of my interest in zines, hand-made books and micro publishing. I've always micro published in one way or the other. While I was at high school I wrote and distributed comic books and co-wrote a satirical weekly handwritten newsletter, and at university I edited and distributed a photocopied zine. I started Tearoom Books because I wanted to publish Glumlazi and I was pretty sure that no else would. Our aim at Tearoom is to publish well-designed chapbooks and pamphlets of contemporary poetry, fiction and humour. We're happy to keep it very small scale, perhaps a chapbook a year.

The blog publishes new content from writers that I enjoy. To an outsider, the site can appear a bit incoherent ‒ that's a consequence of trying to achieve a tone rather than a unifying theme.

Tearoom Books recently published its first e-book, the anthology of poems and recipes calledReader Digest. Is the shift to e-books likely to be permanent?

I prefer print to the screen. Reader Digest was published as an e-book purely because I didn't have the money to print it. It's been relatively successful receiving close to 1000 reads, which we would have never achieved with a regular chapbook – so that's something to keep in mind for future publications. But if we have the financial resources, I still see us doing hard copies.

You have also made some short films, and with Jenny formed a folk music duo called The Litchis. Tell us more about that. Which filmmakers and musicians/bands do you like?

The films are amateur, essentially home movies with credits appended on them. Last year we shot a more professional – at least by our standards – effort and hopefully we'll get it edited some time this year.

The Litchis was started as an archival project with the aim of translating the sugar-cane plantation stories of the late folklorist Sivakami Chetty into a folk music idiom. We later encompassed a few other folk stories, such as Rachel de Beer.

I watch a lot films and have a particular interest in b-movies and exploitation cinema. I think that there's very compelling art to be found in these genres. Most people watch these types of films in quite a condescending, ironic way – which I think is a shame. There's a quote which I recently came across in the comment section of an exploitation film site which summarises my attitude well: ‘Films like [these] are folk art...like the works of Grandma Moses or Henry Darger. Their failures of perspective, anatomy or narrative logic are excused when they achieve effects that go beyond the conventional. Because movies are seen as a narrative art, naive works like [these] don't get the same sort of consideration that other forms of folk art receive.’ I think that if you consider b-movies in this manner, as folk expressions or folk art, then a different type of interpretation and appreciation becomes possible. Because these films are made by amateurs or people on extreme fringes of the established movie system, their contents and structures are very often free of the clichés found in mainstream and even art house or indie cinema.

As far as music goes, I enjoy the country blues and folk.

You have mentioned your love of comics. What is it about comics that attracts you?

I don't read comics as much as I used to, but when I did it was the stories above all that drew me in – which is the same thing that I look for in prose. Having said that, there are things that you can do with images and text that can't be done as well in prose or film. For instance, look at Alan Moore's graphic novels From Hell or Watchmen, which are two of my favourite books. The structure and the complexity of the plots and references in these works could never be done as well in other mediums, which is why the film adaptations were so bad.

In collaboration with Anton Krueger, you have just published Shaggy, a collection of humorous monologues. How did the collaboration work? Brion Gysin wrote that when there is a bringing together of two minds, there is the creation of a third mind, which, as I understand Gysin, almost starts operating as an independent entity. What is your opinion on that?

Writing with Anton is probably one of the most enjoyable creative experiences I've had. He is remarkably generous both as a collaborator and a person. We have different approaches to humour: Anton is more in-the-moment and favours the absurd while I'm more structured and grounded in the everyday. His humour is also more humanistic while I tend towards meaner, more offensive comedy. I think that either extreme on its own wouldn't work, but by combining our sensibilities we temper each other and the result is a more well-rounded comedy.

The book arose by accident. Anton and I had originally planned to write one story together, and it was meant to be a serious genre piece. We attempted a few more of these but we found it impossible to not insert jokes into them, always at very serious moments. That's when we decided to abandon genre stories and write straight-up comedy. We write a story by first batting around a few conceits until we can both agree on one, then we create a shared online document which we both work on simultaneously. The first draft gets written quite quickly, in about a day or two, then we put it aside for editing at a later date. Even after we'd written quite a few of the stories, we still didn't have any concrete publishing plans in mind. Our sole aim was to make the other person laugh.

I would agree with Gysin's observation. The writing in Shaggy definitely comes from a 'third mind.' Reading through the manuscript it was very difficult to remember which one of us came up with a particular joke.

Any other comments?

Who gives the shower head?

Gail Dendy is the author of seven poetry collections, the latest being Closer Than That, published by Dye Hard Press. She was first published by Harold Pinter in 1993, with her subsequent collections appearing in SA, the UK and the US. Her poetry and, more recently, short stories, are regularly published in journals and anthologies. An internationally trained dancer, she helped pioneer Contemporary Dance in SA between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. Other passions are environmental- and animal-rights issues. She lives in Johannesburg with her husband, pets, a law library, and a huge rock ’n roll collection.

DH: Your first poetry collection, Assault and the Moth, was published by Harold Pinter, through Greville Press in the UK, in 1993. How did that come about?

GD: By accident! My husband and I were living in London for a year, and I set myself the task of completing a poetry manuscript and submitting it to a British publisher. Well, I completed the manuscript, and when it came to sending it off, I had no idea where to send it. So I bought a copy of Macmillan’s The Writer’s Handbook and sent the manuscript to various publishers as listed, mainly in London. One press I chose was ‘Diamond Press’ – I figured that, since diamonds have a South African connotation, this might be a lucky press to go with. So I sent it off to the contact person, in this case Geoffrey Godbert. Soon after, I received a postcard saying Diamond Press didn’t publish poetry (Macmillan was wrong!), but that he, Geoffrey, was an editor of another press called Greville. He said that so far two of the editors were enthusiastic about my work and that the third editor now needed to look at it and give the final say. The second editor was Anthony Astbury and the third was Harold Pinter. Eventually, I got a 3-out-of-3 approval, something that was apparently very rare in Greville Press. Ironically, as a student I’d been nuts about Pinter’s work, so you can imagine how incredible it was to know he’d read and admired my work. He later wrote me a letter saying that he ‘wrote [to me] as my publisher’ and was delighted to have published my poems.

In your second collection, People Crossing, there is a poem called ‘Assault’ which immediately reminded me of Sylvia Plath. What poets have influenced you – has Plath been an influence?

I read Plath as a teenager, but ‘Assault’ is a poem that just happened, its genesis being that dreadful case of those six young girls who went missing in the late 1980s. It turned out they’d been kidnapped by a notorious paedophile and his mistress. None were ever seen again. So I was thinking about child abuse at the time I wrote the poem. I often use a strong voice in my work, as did Plath, and given that I use family members (mother, father, sister, brother, cousin etc) as literary symbols, people might think I’m writing confessional poetry. Nothing could be further from the truth. My poetry is almost entirely fiction. My influences, though, are varied – anything from ancient Chinese poetry onwards. In 1991 I discovered Carol Ann Duffy, and felt there and then she ought to be the Poet Laureate. In homage to her, I based the cover of People Crossing on her book Mean Time. It feels good to know that I was in some way prophetic.

Your work focuses on the immediate and the familiar, but there is also a sense of the magical in some of the poems. What inspires your poetry?

I draw a great deal on biblical and literary references, fairy tales, myths, dream imagery and fables, so that probably accounts for the ‘magicality’. Rhyme (either internal or asymmetrical), rhythm and cadences play a huge part in my work, which is perhaps not surprising given that I’ve been a dancer and that dance is still so important in my life. Ditto the musicality of words and language. It sometimes gets to a point where I know exactly what vowel sounds I need in a line to make the ‘music’ that seems right for the piece I’m working on, but it’s the damn consonants that give me trouble.

There is another poem from your second collection, called ‘Tourists’ which deals with an incident where two tourists were murdered on a Natal beach, in 1992. But the ‘outside world’, if I may call it that, of socioeconomic and political realities, doesn’t really play much of a role in your poetry.Is this something you consciously avoid writing about?

Actually, I’m very aware of the outside world and confess to having become quite a news junkie in the past 10 years or so. What I prefer to do, though, is to personalise and individualise the external world so as to distil an emotion or set of ideas from it. I admire people who’re able to write meaningfully about socioeconomic and political reality, but I could never sit down and say to myself: ‘Today I’m going to write a poem about the earthquake/tsunami/civil war/rebel uprising …’. If I did, I’d probably end up with little more than a news report. What’s so exciting about poetry is that you can create an entirely new world parallel to, and resonating against, the real world, but one that has its own logic and rules of engagement.

Do you think poets have a ‘role’ to play in society, and if so, what?

I’d personally feel very arrogant saying that poets have a role to play as if they were somehow superior beings. On the other hand, I strongly believe that the arts, generally, are necessary and relevant in creating a well-rounded, vibrant society. People turn to the arts for an enhanced emotional experience, and perhaps to connect with what has proved to be both timeless and universal. For instance, I read somewhere that during World War Two more people visited London’s National Gallery than ever before. I like to think that more people bought and read poetry, too. Poetry offers a unique window onto the world. It would be sad if that window ever became boarded up.

Lately, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the diminishing space given in the media to book reviews, particularly poetry. Bookstores are becoming reluctant to stock poetry – they say it doesn’t sell. And so publishers don’t want to publish it. And certainly, from my experience, I see a lot less readers of poetry than there was about 10 years ago.

It’s very worrying that poetry is becoming the Cinderella of the arts. Everything works in a vicious circle in that the lower the profile of poetry, the less market there is for it, and the less interest there is for publishing houses to deal with it and for bookshops to make it available. But hopefully the cycle will, at some point, start turning the other way. Wouldn’t it be terrific if poetry made headline news, and if you had to book your seat a year in advance to attend a poetry reading or book launch? Oh, and pass me that glass slipper, will you?

Closer Than That is your seventh collection. Of your previous six collections, two were published in SA, the others overseas. Were the overseas publications available here? Does it bother you that most of your collections have been published outside SA? Do you think it has weakened or strengthened your reputation here, or does it not matter to you?

They weren’t readily available here, unfortunately, although obviously they could be purchased from an overseas source. I particularly wanted to be published ‘overseas’ as I was getting such positive responses from that initial manuscript I sent out (the original full-length Assault and the Moth). It was Gus Ferguson who introduced me to the South African audience, for which I’m eternally grateful. But I’m not sure I even have a reputation here to be strengthened or weakened. All I know is that I write what I write, and I write what I like.

Your story ‘The Intruders’ appeared in the short-fiction anthology, The Edge of Things, published by Dye Hard Press. Here again there was a sense of magical realism, with an interplay between outer and inner worlds. Does magical realism play a big role in your short fiction as well?

Surprisingly, it does. Surprising to me, that is, as I never consciously set out to incorporate this element. It can be seen in ‘Wayfarers’ (2007), and also in 'Venus Crossing' which was shortlisted for the Thomas Pringle Award 2010, so it seems people are liking what they read. But allegory also slips into my prose without so much as an invitation. I specifically used it in a 2007 publication called ‘The Briar Hedge’, and of course both magical realism and allegory are highly visible in ‘The Intruders’.

What are the main challenges facing poets in SA? Getting published is obviously one of them.

It’s the old story of there being no shortage of poets, but a shortage of readers. So the huge challenge is to find vehicles for communicating one’s work. I’ve been a bit lucky in the past couple of years in being able to perform in productions which we call Off the Page, together with a wonderful pianist, Tony Bentel, and an experienced broadcaster and raconteur, Selwyn Klass. In our last Off the Page we added a cellist and flautist. We script the work very tightly, and are fully rehearsed. We’ve had some excellent audiences, and terrific feedback. Will that induce people to buy and read poetry? Probably not. And there’s the rub.

What do you regard as recognition?

I would say the ultimate form of recognition is having someone come up to you and say they can’t wait to read your latest poem, or – even better – your latest book! And believe it or not, that has actually happened to me. I just hope I wasn’t dreaming.

Closer Than That is available from Exclusive Books throughout SA, estimated retail price R105. It can also be ordered from Dye Hard Press for R85 (including postage) in SA, or for R115 for overseas. Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com for order details.

Mxolisi Nyezwa was born in 1967 in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, where he still lives. He is the author of song trials (Gecko, 2000), New Country (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008) and Malikhanye (Deep South, 2011). His work appeared in the bumper poetry anthology Essential Things (Cosaw, 1992) and has been published in numerous literary journals. He is included in the selection of South African writing, Beauty Came Grovelling Forward, on the US-based literary website Big Bridge. He is the founding editor of Kotaz, a cultural journal.

DH: You were published in the Cosaw anthology Essential Things, in 1992. The sections allocated to each poet were quite big, actually small collections in themselves. You had thirteen poems under the title ‘To Have No Art’. What was your position as a poet back then?

MN: The 80s and 90s were confusing times for many young people in the townships. I had just completed my matric in New Brighton during the most painful and dangerous of times. My school education had proven to me to have been a complete waste of time. The useless piece of paper from the Department of Education and Training, my certificate, stayed for years in one of the old sideboards at home to mock me for my gullible dreams of material or vocational success. In my case the apartheid dream of educating blacks for subservience succeeded. Like a hunted animal I was cornered, gravely concerned about my future, unprepared for the emotional and psychological violence – the steep darkness that was to engulf my life later on – outside the familiar and troubled neighbourhood of New Brighton. So when I wrote my first poems I was creating for myself some distance from this encroaching and awful world of manhood. I was looking for light where I sensed darkness lived, listening for the comforting sounds of words and unaffected spirits. In the 70s Serote had written No baby must weep. He had focused us to see love away from pain and struggle and demonstratively spoke of the maternal instinct in his heroic poem Behold mama, flowers. Under those harsh circumstances of my growing up, poetry became the only accessible language that could talk profoundly and in a way I could relate to about my need for complete meaning, my thirst for direction amid the noisy messages that had been drummed into my ears during my school years. From early on I could not shake off the disturbing feeling that I was in somebody’s crooked plans, that I was fingered, or even that people from somewhere with long, nightmarish dreams were looking for me. I was paranoid. Once, I took all my poems and buried them into a deep hole in our backyard. Amid all these conflicting emotions I arrived at the doors of Cosaw in Korsten, maybe a few weeks or just days before Cosaw closed down. So I was never really part or even that exposed to Cosaw’s culture and activities. I had submitted my first poetry manuscript to Ravan Press in Joburg. In fact it was from a letter from Ravan Press (Andries Oliphant was their editor) that I first learnt about Cosaw’s existence, and of the plan about Essential Things.

Your first collection, song trials, appeared in 2000 by Gecko. What struck me at the time was the strong sense of bleakness in the poems: there are references to night, darkness, rain, birds, thunder. There seems an atmosphere of desolation and isolation. Already, in the title poem of your Essential Things selection, you had stated ‘I hate the sunshine.’

On their own these references to night, darkness and so on are not exceptional, not in any poetry. It is the context around the imagery that gives the work this other feature of desolation and bleakness.I think therein lies sometimes the value of poetry, because these references are about lived experiences. Experiences that others are being exposed to that none of us may be aware of.

I like to think of my poetry as reflecting the dismal nature of politics and individual existence in the modern society, a reflection on greed and how capitalism and the financial system have devastated people’s lives and cultures without shame. Poetry that identifies this kind of aggression, which is really driven by financial interests as the basis for corruption against human beings, must necessarily be bleak. The poetry must in turn invoke its unique form, impact the usual language extraordinarily, enmeshing flowers, human lives and global manifestations. In so many ways poets are writing to change the world.

In New Country there are indications of a willingness to experiment with form – I am thinking of the long poem 'Sky', which ends with the word ‘rain’ being repeated 88 times, like concrete poetry. There is also the prose piece ‘it is good’, which is a one-paragraph rush without punctuation.

It’s difficult to explain why some poems have to appear in the world the way they do. The challenge for the writer is to stay close to what comes, the primeval music and sound of the poem, its primary bend towards its own unique shape and form, and its own language. Obviously there are always risks involved in this process of transcribing the original voice of creation or composing each new poem. The risks confront all poets. For a poem like ‘Sky’ it was important for me to be expansive in my use of imagery and still maintain movement through the poem. That is what the poem seemed to be saying to me. The poem was taking me everywhere. Its music tugged closely at my arm and pulled me towards desolation and to lonely places, to directions and oppressed geniuses, to bewildered and unfriendly people working under the midday sun. The poem pointed at the whole universe. I saw all manner of things, many lives, some begging to be heard; others that were forgotten and shameless. I think the last stanza with the long repetition of the image of falling rain tries to celebrate these multiple existences.

What have your poetic influences been? When we were at Poetry Africa together, we chatted quite a bit about the modern Spanish-languages poets, such as Neruda, Lorca and Alberti. But you were particularly keen on Vallejo.

I like Neruda for his over-exuberant passion, his huge love for life, his strong desire to reach and name all things. Vallejo’s love walks boldly to us through another door, one we never expected. His devotion to humankind is more fundamental, much more intense, even psychotic. Lorca taught me at a young age the use of imagery. His poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias revolutionised my thinking about poetry and its application in human affairs. I’ve always been attracted to writers and poets who wrote as if the entire meaning of their lives dependent on it, on their calling as poets or as writers. I regard Eskia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue as one of the most important books to have been written about South Africa and its people.

Your new collection, Malikhanye, is centred around the loss of your infant son in 2007. There is obviously an expression of loss in the poems, of being ‘haunted by the life we never had’. There is also a directness I do not see in the earlier poems.

I have a feeling that the more direct my poems become, the greater are the chances that they will lose their power. I must avoid ‘directness’ at all costs as the approach goes against my understanding of how life manifests ordinarily. Life works the same way as death works, applying its innuendos and subtlety. I think the obvious misleads, gives the wrong answers. What becomes crucial is finding new paths, discovering for ourselves new rhythms, new nuances. That becomes important. For a fuller representation of loss in Malikhanye I had the sudden revelation that life complicates and yet simplifies. That even as we begin to think we understand, everything around us explodes or diminishes – all understanding, every organic leaf, every rock, like rain patterns against the sea. Malikhanye was driven by the intense feeling of loss. Everything was out in the open. A mad nanny had left the boy alone to die. There was nothing philosophical about that. The truth was out in the open.

You have lived in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth all your life. How has New Brighton informed your poetry, apart from the obvious coastal imagery? Have you never felt attracted to moving to one of the cities?

I don’t think I have the means to move to any other place, well, maybe, because I have now a wife there can be possibilities. Because I am now learning with a wife that one must be communal in thought and not only think for oneself. You’re now with somebody else, and you’re partners in marriage. This always comes as a surprise. But really I wouldn’t like to move to anywhere else. New Brighton is my home. Poetry found me in this place. I feel very close to my ancestral spirits here. Even when we depart I will always come back here.

In South Africa we are struggling to sell poetry. Few bookstores are interested and poetry is rarely reviewed. Yet some events, such as the recent Melville Poetry Festival, have been very successful, and brought audiences who not only listened attentively to the poetry, but also bought books. Do you think events at which to promote and sell poetry have become more crucial than ever?

Yes, certainly. In fact, in March, with a group of local writers in New Brighton, I’m putting together the Nelson Mandela Bay Book Fair, a small-scale books and exhibitions event to focus our community in Port Elizabeth and around the Eastern Cape on buying and reading books. It is true that bookstores are not interested. I think they have their own issues to deal with, surviving and making a profit. There are just too many factors involved. There are problems in education in our schools, the huge inroads that technology and computers have made into people’s lives, the shortening and narrowing of time and the massive pressure this puts on individual lives, and so on. All of this ultimately marginalises reading and books to a secluded area reserved only for devotees and higher culture. Reading books has been turned into an elitist activity.

For how many years has your cultural journal Kotaz been running?

Kotaz began in 1997 as a quarterly publication, so the magazine has been around for about 14 years. I don’t think I ever saw the publication as a business. I didn’t do a public survey about the need for the magazine, no research about other publishers, had absolutely no idea about distribution and was deeply ignorant about production and other costs. In 1997 I didn't know about funders, I wasn't aware of their addresses and their ethics – that South African funders often behave like a spoiled mistress, that they have extraordinary moods and must be managed or sometimes come at a price. I prowled like an injured animal the UPE University computer labs in Summerstrand for a computer monitor. I invaded higher education, hanging around the corridors waiting for the right time to enter the labs disguised as one of their students to gain access, and use a computer. All this time I had my bag with me filled with manuscripts, poems and texts scribbled on notebooks and on torn paper by writers from the township (some I knew, the majority I didn’t know) to type and save on a floppy disc. These were the humble beginnings of Kotaz. Funding, in dribs and drabs, only came in much later. A few years later I realised I could not sustain my hustling activities at the universities. Saving poetry this way was draining me. My cover was blown when some English Department people at Vista University recognised me from somewhere, and enquired if I was now a student, which I wasn’t.

The next issue of Kotaz will come out in mid-February, this year. I stopped long time ago pretending that Kotaz is a quarterly publication because I found that the financial challenge of publishing the magazine four times a year was just too much.

What is your experience of obtaining funding for publications in South Africa? Do you find it easy or difficult?

It is a tragic consequence of our new democracy that even poetry has managed to attract the wrong crowds. I suspect that most followers come to poetry for the wrong reasons, to make money, to start a publishing business, to workshop writers, to boost their stardom as celebrities or divas, to get into radio and TV and have their own shows, and so on. Now all this is really harmful to South African literature and is killing our poetry. Even government funding for the arts becomes clouded by all kinds of trends and interests, mostly pretentious and insincere. I think most serious poetry journals and magazines, Kotaz included, are really struggling to get any funding. There are so many hypocrites walking around pretending to stand for poetry and getting large chunks of state funds for it. Again there’s the other problem of the government not taking the arts seriously. I’ve often heard that money earmarked for funding the arts often gets diverted to other departments. 2012 should be another dry year for poetry with the centenary celebrations of the ANC taking place.

To your mind, what are poets in South Africa doing at the moment?

I think poets are using language to unravel the political myth, to say it was not by promises that we found a thriving democracy. Their language seeks to remind of sacrifices that were made by so many in order that freedom and justice for all could be realised. At the same time poets are speaking against those who constantly yearn for the past, black night that was besieged by black night. I think these are matters that must come out strongly if we think of a new dawn for poetry, a new chapter for South African literature and culture.

Malikhanye is available from bookstores at a retail price of R95, or direct from Deep South's distributors, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Dawn Garisch lives in Cape Town and has had five novels and a collection of poetry published. Three of her novels have been published in the UK. In 2010 her novel Trespass was short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize in Africa, and in 2011 her poem Miracle,from her debut collection Difficult Gifts (Modjaji Books)won the EU Sol Plaatjie Poetry Award. A nonfiction work, Eloquent Body, will be published by Modjaji in March. Her work has appeared in literary journals such as New Coin, New Contrast, Carapace and Green Dragon. She runs workshops on writing and creative method, and is a practising medical doctor.

DH: How did you come to writing? Has your profession as a medical doctor influenced on your writing at all?

DG:I have always had an affinity for books and writing – I demanded to be taught to read at a very early age and wrote my first poem at seven. Left to my own devices, I might have become a librarian, but life had other plans for me. My family decided I would do medicine, and I fell in with their ideas. The split I have felt between my calling as a writer, my training as a scientist and my interest in psychology has provided a tension in my life which I have attempted to resolve on the page in my forthcoming nonfiction book Eloquent Body.

A doctor is in a privileged position of having access to intimate details of people’s lives. This has deepened my understanding of human frailties and strengths. In the consulting room I have also been able to observe the patterns we set up for ourselves, and how we often do not act in our own best interests.

Medicine has enabled me to work part-time, and to keep the space open to write.

You are known mainly as a fiction writer. How do you see the relationship between fiction and your poetry, particularly with regards to your approach to the two genres? I am thinking of how Lawrence Durrell said something to the effect that novels are like lorries, but poetry is like an arrow.

I like that! I experience poetry as an instant download, which I then have to work out further on the page, whereas a novel is like finding the end of a thread and following it on down. Both forms ultimately contain the pleasure and the difficulty of trying to solve a problem that lives simultaneously inside myself, out in the world, and on the page; each offering I bring into being is a part-answer to the puzzle of who I am and what the world is about.

What writers have influenced you – fiction as well as poetry?

So many: Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, Patrick White, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood’s poetry, Joan Metelerkamp, Salman Rushdie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Sharon Olds, Tristan Tzara, Marion Milner, Ivan Vladislavic, Mxolisi Nyezwa - to name a few who changed the way I thought about writing. Who opened doors in my head and my heart. Who gave me permission to experiment.

In your poetry collection Difficult Gifts, there are recurrent images of searching, of journey, of opening and discovery, as well as intimacy.

I write out of disturbances that arrive in my body. Sometimes the disturbance is unbearably beautiful, or it arrives out of enormous difficulty. Writers who have affected or influenced me have written as honestly as possible from an intimate space; they have helped me respect my body as an antenna or radar, and offered a chink through which I could view what is happening beneath consensus or veneer.

If I take a step back and try to see what I have been doing on the page when writing poetry over the years, primarily it has been a medium through which I try to find out what I am feeling and thinking – a discharge of tension which sometimes speaks to other people, and then finds its way into print. I think that underneath many of my poems is a conversation I constantly have with the creative process itself – The Edge, Great Fish, The Proper Use Of Flowers, Making Fire, Difficult Gifts – these and others are about what they purport to be, but also about the urge and search for connection with the creative force itself. I see desire, sex, libido, love and creativity on the same continuum – the trajectory that must look elsewhere for completion, the driving spirit behind life itself.

Your poem Miracle, from the collection, won the 2011 EU Sol Plaatje Poetry Award. What is your feeling about literary awards in SA? Do we have enough or too many? Should we have more genre-specific awards?

I feel split about poetry awards. On the one hand it was wonderful to have that acknowledgement, and I am immensely grateful to the European Union for their vision of encouraging diversity of cultural expression by supporting the least valued and possibly most ubiquitous art form: poetry. On the other hand, it did feel uncomfortable to be awarded ‘best poem’. Best collection of poetry is more understandable, and easier to judge, I imagine.

Awards do create a bit of a stir, and they hopefully encourage people to support local writers. We have much more talent in South Africa than people realise. My first drafts of Eloquent Body contained quite a number of quotes and extracts of poems from writers abroad. When we applied for permission, many publishers wanted prohibitive royalties. So I again turned to local poets, and spent weeks reading, trying to find suitable replacements that complemented the text. Although I do regularly read local work, I was astonished by how much truly stunning poetry had escaped my attention. And the local poets were only too willing to let me quote their work in the spirit of collegiality.

What are your thoughts about publishing in SA? A few years ago, when the Kindle first came out, there was a feeling that e-readers would not take off in SA. Now sales are rising...

If e-publishing allows writers to flourish, that is great. Personally, I still like the feel and smell of a real book, and to have tangible old friends sitting on a shelf near me in my study. And as someone pointed out, you cannot lend out a downloaded Kindle book. It is attached to the gizmo. Another said, when all books are virtual, how will we decorate our walls?

Publishing in SA took off after 1994, but now in the recession, I have the impression that it is slowing down again. Both impetuses are perhaps a good thing – initially broadening what South Africans write about and what kind of work was published, and now tightening up, making authors work harder to improve what they are doing.

What do you feel are the main challenges facing writers in SA?

There is much interesting writing coming out of SA; the question is how to get noticed in the great overwhelming sea of mega-publishing. I have the notion that most readers do not hone in on literature – or any other art form – as a way of finding out what artists are reporting back on. Readers buy newspapers regularly to see what journalists are saying about the day-to-day state of the world; they need to understand that artists are reporting back on the Zeitgeist – the themes and spirit of our times. If readers took art in all its forms as seriously as they take the newspapers, they would, to my mind, be better informed. In addition, our writers and artists would attain the recognition they deserve.

What about you busy writing at the moment?

I am putting the final touches to Eloquent Body, and catching the odd poem when it falls. I have started two novels, both of which intrigue me. One is a reworking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the biological age, and the other is an exploration of love in all its guises. In both, I am eager to find out what is going to happen next. One of them will have to wait for a year or so in the bottom drawer...

Kelwyn Sole was born in Johannesburg in 1951 and has lived in Windhoek, London and Kanye. He is a professor in the English department of the University of Cape Town. He has published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Absent Tongues, was published by Hands-On Books, Cape Town. His work has appeared in many poetry anthologies and literary journals, including Green Dragon.

DH: Your first collection, The Blood of Our Silence, was published by Ravan Press in 1987. It was a very different time politically. I read that back then independent publishers like Ravan had had their phones tapped, mail opened and were subject to police raids. How did you feel about writing back then, compared to now?

KS: I thought, at the time, that liberation would neither mean the end of the need for a critical politics vis-à-vis Government, nor the end of critical utterances from writers. I believed writers should maintain their independence at the same time as they joined in the struggle against apartheid. So I don’t feel the themes in my poetry have hugely changed; or at least the stance I adopt in relation to political questions and politicians.

At the same time, of course there was danger. The phone-tapping and interception of mail you mention; I experienced both of these. In the early days the technology was such that they still had to physically install the bug within the phone – I became pretty good at finding these. I got death threats in Namibia when I was an activist, and there was police harassment of me from time to time in the 1980s, which were nasty times generally. But my harassment was not about my writing, and wasinsignificant compared to what some people went through. Mind you, a lot of the actual history of that period is being lost, in the face of the cleaned-up Governmental versions of those years we’re being fed now ... for instance, who these days remembers the Yeoville Debating Society, set up as a left critique of JODAC? This alternative history is important: it would allow many people to understand the present better.

Two of your earlier collections, Love that is Night and Mirror and Water Gazing show various approaches to poetic form, ranging from fairly traditional four-line stanzas to a more free-form approach, which is what you use most often. It reminds me of the experiments of US poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, but also the British poet Lee Harwood.

The first person whose poetics influenced me was Charles Olson, when I was an undergraduate; and that has remained a source, to some extent, for my poetry since. I think the other members of the Black Mountain School were less influential – I read Creeley at the time, but it’s only now, through an American friend, that I’ve rediscovered him, and understood his gentle, light, occasionally humorous touch. I’ve never liked Duncan much, although I did take to Ed Dorn. In addition, many of the young poets I knew in Jo’burg were into the Beat Poets; and we all read Kerouac. I still remember his injunction, “you can’t fall down a mountain.” Oh yes you can, Jack.

In retrospect, I was also heavily influenced in the beginning, especially in phrasing and spacing, not only by Olson but by the poets influenced by WC Williams – such as Snyder, Denise Levertov, a couple of others. I also read quite a deal of Black Power poetry for a while, especially Amiri Baraka. But it was Williams’ mixture of poetic and prosaic language that really appealed to me, in terms of what I was trying to do.

As an undergraduate I was in addition taken by Chris Okigbo’s and Tchicaya U Tam’si’s poetry. Looking back now, it was probably more as regards Okigbo’s style than his content; although I am still in awe of U Tam’si. I remember being less drawn to South African poetry, especially the white poets. I had extreme views then, and believed they had left me a legacy I should try to obliterate, rather than build on. I probably should have been more receptive to some of them – Patrick Cullinan, for example, was a fine poet. Mind you, I was an undergraduate still when Mtshali’s and Serote’s first volumes were published, which shook things up considerably. Black Consciousness had a big effect on me, in ways which it would take too long to describe here. It was the subject of my doctoral thesis; I then became friends with Chris van Wyk as well, whose poetry – along with Mafika Gwala’s – I much admired.

I did read and like Lee Harwood, and have recently gone back to him to look at his long poem ‘Long Black Veil’, in terms of a book-length sequence I am writing. But if there was a British influence on me early on, it was most clearly from an anthology called Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain that Penguin put out in 1969. How times, and Penguin, have changed! Weird as it may seem, I’ve also found John Milton’s ability to make a line of poetry refer both backwards and forwards a tremendous model that frees one up: I try and do this quite a lot.

More recently, other poets have been important to me. My first book was heavily influenced by Philip Levine, after Jeremy Cronin had given me a cassette tape of him reading. And, always, Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In the 1990s I took him around Cape Town for a day, and was reduced to dribbling fandom. He was great. I’ve recently rediscovered Neruda’s poems about birds and the sea, which, rather than being effusive and vague (which is how I viewed him before) are exact in their knowledge and staggering in their effect.

I believe the best poetry has music running through it; you need an ear to be a poet. As Baraka says, “Poetry is speech musick’d.” A lot of South African poetry is bad, in my opinion, because the poet concerned has no ear. In response, some of the poets of my generation tended to try and break up traditional English poetic metre and find new forms. Several of us were, and are, into hard jazz – Berold, Ari Sitas, myself, and more recently Seitlhamo Motsapi and Alan Finlay – you can see it in the experimentation that goes on, with breath phrasing and so on.

Your collection Land Dreaming was all prose poems, some of them closer to short fiction that actual poems. What made you want to focus on prose poems during this time? In an interview in New Contrast, you mentioned by influenced by René Char.

I bought a Selected Char when I was quite young, but only read it many years later, and was blown away – and then I immediately knew I wanted to start a project containing prose poems. Before that I had little interest, past tormenting one of my undergraduate poetry tutors by asking “But what about prose poetry?” every time she tried to make a general point. If you know Char, his poetry is regularly set in landscapes but recreates these landscapes with a highly metaphorical, almost surreal, quality; and often cuts through, or off, narrative. Char has an intensity, a compression, an ability to come at subject matter from an oblique angle, that to my mind is the essence of prose poetry as a form.

Having said this, if you look through my collection you’ll see that not all the poems conform to what Char does.‘Staff’, written first, does, for example; but there are also a lot of narrative poems; these days they would be called ‘flash fiction’ I suppose. There are also dialogues, demented monologues, parodies of various kinds of discourse, especially official and media discourse and so on. It’s a mixed bag.

In writing Land Dreaming I conceived of the idea of using individual poems to create a wider mosaic of poems, partly personal and partly socio-political, within a space – in this case Southern Africa. There was a model I found for this too, despite its very different subject matter: Jacques Réda’s The Ruins of Paris. I’ve travelled widely through South Africa, and a large majority of the poems relate to places I have visited, and I’m trying to be pretty exact, although occasionally I borrowed stories from friends. I wanted to socialise and politicise the landscapes I came up with: they’re full of people talking, thinking, occasionally fighting; but mainly desiring and dreaming, despite at times dire circumstances and lives. Thus, LandDreaming. There are also people in some poems, however, who are pretty delusional about their reality. This is another version of the title.

In your new collection, Absent Tongues, we continue to read the familiar themes in your work – a sense of the everyday activity of work and home, as well as surrounding landscapes, but also, of course, a strong awareness of the socioeconomic and political environment in which we live.

About ten years ago I published an article in the British academic journal new formations which argued that the ordinary – the everyday – was suffused with political and economic determinants, especially so in this stage of late capitalism. All our personal and leisure activities are being drawn further into the ambit of finance and commerce: sport is only the most obvious of these. This has always been my view of the everyday – one in concert with Henry Lefebvre’s theory, I suppose. I hope that my poems reflect this.

Looking back on it, the themes through my six books have remained remarkably similar, without too much intention. To some extent this is to even the case, to be sure, in Land Dreaming. Yet there is one habitual aspect only marginally present in my latest, Absent Tongues. In its original form this manuscript was longer, but I pulled out quite a number of poems. So it’s more in one voice: there’s less of the flat, demotic, slightly mocking tone of voice I sometimes use, and no satires. In this case I thought that a greater usage of my (as it were) ‘poetic’ voice would work better, and give it more coherence. I’m hoping it will give it a focus and strength to which readers will respond.

You work in academia. Do you feel that being involved with literature as a living, as you are, makes one necessarily a more skilled or more perceptive poet? Or can it even make one inhibited? Some great poets have been involved in professions that have had nothing to do with writing – Williams is an obvious example.

I don’t think it will necessarily help one’s poetry, but it could harm it. I tend to agree with Williams in Paterson on this issue: “We go on living, we permit ourselves / to continue – but certainly / not for the university, what they publish / severally or as a group: clerks / got out of hand forgetting for the most part / to whom they are beholden.” But then I come from a generation that got all misty-eyed about Snyder in his firewatch station in a forest, who believed the older poets were stodgy and pompous, who identified with that poem of Neruda’s that acclaims “the poets of our age - / with light clothes and walking shoes.” There’s nothing more depressing than standing in a university bookshop overseas, looking through scores of first volumes by young poets fresh out of creative writing programmes, all more or less the same. I have done a bit of supervision but I have always avoided being in a classroom creative writing situation except once, when I sat in on a class of Martín Espada’s in Amherst.

But perhaps I’m exaggerating – there are good poets who can come out of this, as well as good teachers: for instance, there’s a wonderful essay by Philip Levine, ‘Mine Own John Berryman’, describing the difference between being taught by Lowell and Berryman. Come to think of it, Sylvia Plath didn’t take to Lowell either... one of my favourite quotes about how teachers can miss the uniqueness of a student can be found in her diary: “How few of my superiors do I respect the opinions of anyhow? Lowell a case in point. How few will see what I am working at, overcoming? How ironic that all my work to overcome my easy poeticisms merely convinces them that I am rough, anti-poetic, unpoetic.” Enough said.

What is your view of South African poetry at present? When I look back at the 1990s, there was a tremendous energy in local poetry, and there was an interest in what we were doing. The interest has waned considerably in the past 10 years and at the same time I feel South African poetry has regressed.

I identified quite markedly with some of the more formally experimental, yet still politically suffused poets who emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s – partly because there were so many different styles, voices, opinions. They remain a salutary presence. There was also a greater degree of influence – perhaps it was similarity of intent - between black and white poets, I think, than before or since. Some of the poets who started out in that period are now well-known, such as Cronin, Ingrid de Kok and Lesego Rampolokeng. There are others, though, whose true worth and importance have still not been attended to. I’m thinking of Karen Press, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Joan Metelerkamp, and quite a few others.

I, like you, don’t see quite this adventurous spirit or excitement any more. However, I have recently had cause to look at the South African poetry published in the last two or three years more closely, and it’s not as dismal as I thought. There are a number of younger (relatively speaking) poets who have established a consistent and unique voice, such as Rustum Kozain and Vonani Bila. Gabeba Baderoon and Kobus Moolman are writing with growing power; Kobus is, in my view, possibly the most compelling voice exploring and experimenting with new ways of writing poetry at the moment. I really enjoy watching Creamy Ewok Baggends and the Zimbabwean Comrade Fatso on stage; it seems to me that Genna Gardini, Haidee Kruger and Khadija Heeger have talent that will develop further; and I’ve always liked Kate Kilalea’s poetry – it’s such a pity she’s moved to London.

There are a number of other interesting new poets coming through, mostly those published by the independent publishers such as Modjaji, Botsotso, Deep South and yourself. I have huge admiration for publishers who are doing this, often on a shoestring budget, usually without any help or attention from the media. All in all, the mainstream publishers and media seem to have little interest in poetry, unless it comes from what they regard as a ‘profile’. They have even less interest in serious or experimental poetry: it’s only the small, independent, shoe-string publishers who are keeping poetry’s head above water, bless them.

So there are worrying signs. I can best sum this up by repeating something I heard a mainstream publisher say in praise of a book of poetry at a launch recently ... “Each poem is a perfect work of art” ... and then the audience nodded their heads sagely. Ouch. To my mind, such a view of poetry can only be called pre-modernist: modernist and post-modernist movements have thrown such a notion of the poem out of the window. If some South African publishers have this view of poetry, how can we expect to move forward? I am moreover less than full of enthusiasm about the proliferation of Maya Angelou look-alikes around at the moment, on the ‘spoken word’ circuit. At worst it comes far too close to an identity- and self-obsessed Cosmospeak.

It’s a cliché, but nevertheless true, to say that poetry is the easiest genre to do badly, but the most difficult to do well. In the last decade in particular it’s been hugely undervalued – in some cases, in book fairs, it looks like it’s starting to be seen by organisers as a dollop of light relief between the more urgent tasks of selling genre fiction to make money. Have a look: the topics given poets to talk about in panel discussions are sometimes embarrassingly facile.

What to you is the role of the poet in society, if any, and how do you think society views the role of the poet?

I think the wider South African society at present views poetry as a harmless oddity, only occasionally useful to launch brand names or praise the ‘big men’ – no reference to gender – trundling along our corridors of power. On the other hand, some people take a kind of defensive position, perceiving the poet as a special individual, a prophet and seer. Both of these are wrong, in my opinion.

I think poetry has a variety of roles. Let’s face it, one of these is to entertain. However, poems should also make us think, and, if necessary, make us uncomfortable. I believe readers should be goaded, prodded, and delighted – good poetry does all of these.

Do you think South African writers indulge in self-censorship?

Maybe, but I can’t think of immediate examples. However, I am convinced that there is a form of hidden censorship at the moment. A new hegemony has risen, I believe, taking its cue from the interventions of Ndebele and Sachs many years ago, to cast literature within a seemingly free, but ultimately defined, ambit in society, policed by publishers and reviewers – and it’s certainly far away from anything either Sachs or Ndebele would have wanted, I suspect. Who was the Zen master who said, “to give your cow a wide, open field is the best way to control it?” Everything’s so staid, so conventional, you want to run. In terms of fiction and poetry, I have had a number of young writers come to me and talk about publishers saying to them, off the record, “take out the politics and I’ll publish this.” Though, of course, no one is prepared to have the courage to say it publicly. There’s surely a neurosis about political themes among some publishers and academics, which can only be described as engendered by the fear of a future where the present social and political settlements could be disrupted. It’s a pity: here, today, such a viewpoint can only serve the powerful and rich, and those who want the future South Africa to be a place where they can be lulled to sleep by literary entertainment in their suburbs. Fat chance!

Photo of Kelwyn Sole: Centre for Creative Arts

Haidee Kruger is associate professor in the School of Languages at the Vaal Triangle Campus of North-West University in South Africa. She holds a PhD in translation studies, and is primarily involved in research in descriptive and theoretical translation studies. Her poetry and short stories have been published in, among others, The Common, New Contrast, New Coinand Green Dragon. Her work also appeared in Beauty Came Grovelling Forward, a selection of South African poetry and prose published on Big Bridge. Her debut collection of poetry, lush: poems for four voices, was published in 2007 by Protea Book House. lush was praised in the judges’ statement for the 2006/2007 Ingrid Jonker Prize as an "innovative volume of poems" that was "a close contender for the prize". The reckless sleeper (Modjaji Books, 2012) is her second collection.

Kruger lives in Vereeniging, with her husband and three children. She has a blog called Messy Things With Words.

DH: This may sound like a very basic question, but why do you write poetry as opposed to other forms? Why poetry?

HK: I wish I could write fiction, simply because so much of my reading life (as a child and an adult) has been shaped by fiction, and I have a very vivid sense of the way a story can open a door straight into another world. The best stories have gaps into which you can insert yourself and live there for a while. And when you come back from the story, you’re altered by it – in subtle ways it changes your relationship with the world in which you actually exist. It’s something I would like to be able to do. I’ve tried short prose forms – but I am hesitant to call them “stories”, because I’ve come to the realisation that my writing impulse is not driven by narrative, at all; my writing impulse is lyrical, in the sense of attempting to pin something very particular down in language.

Also, for me, the textures, the endless possibilities of language, are a driving force in writing, and I think poetry, by its nature, is the form that allows exploration of this most fully. Language is always two things at once: a social thing which we use to communicate in the world, to convey ideas, to convince people of things, to get what we want; and a personal thing, which sits in our heads and is odd and peculiar and very individual. For language to be a useful social tool, we usually have to make it run in routinised ways, and get rid of some of the more confusing idiosyncracies, so we have consensus about what things mean and the world can keep on working. What poetry allows one to do is to shake language out of the furrows of habit, to see what new meanings emerge if you do unusual things with it. So poetic language is a way of pinioning down some aspect of the singularity of an experience, for yourself and for other people. It is the way that I continue to think about (good) poetry: holding a fascinating, unusual, intriguing language-object in your hands, turning it over, and then having it explode in your face with all kinds of unexpected meanings.

In your first collection, lush, the poems are experimental in form, but the overall structure of the book seems almost retro, with the poems divided into four sections representing four voices, with an opening and closing chorus. It gives the feeling almost of two approaches to poetry operating simultaneously, as in a relationship. Was this intentional?

I don’t think creating this tension between the freer, quite experimental poems and the almost traditional structure happened intentionally – it’s maybe more of a collateral effect of something else I was trying to achieve. Looking at it now, I think the self-conscious structure, the creation of “voices” for the sections of the book was a way of building in a greater sense of “distance” into the book, as a counterweight to the often very personal poems. It was also an attempt at introducing order as a balance for the experimentalism in the poems themselves, to keep the collection balanced on a tightrope between freedom and constraint, between the very personal inside views of the poems and something more objectively interpreted from the outside. The voices, in this sense, impose a sort of thematic structure on the book, with each of the patron saints representing something of thematic importance in the book. So it is probably an attempt to keep the collection as a whole from flying apart into pieces.

But maybe there IS something of these two broader approaches to poetry in the tension between the experimental poems and the more conventional structure. I’ve always been fascinated by how form shapes meaning – how restructuring the same experience into a sonnet or into free verse reframes the experience itself. Maybe some of that is in lush– how the macrostructure alters the interpretation of the poems as micro-entities.

Some of your poems remind me of e.e. cummings. What poets have influenced you?

You’re right about cummings, who I never grow tired of. cummings understood best the idea of making language do new things, sometimes difficult things (for the reader), to chisel away at the accretions of habit in language, and shock the reader into a fresh perception of something. So its not experimentalism for its own sake, but experimentalism in language for the sake of experience.

The question of influence is a difficult one. I think a lot of my influences are unconscious. William Gibson talks about cultivating a kind of personal “micro-culture”, and I think as a child mine was particularly rich in its indiscriminateness, made up pretty much of whatever I could get my hands on. The pleasure of words; the realisation that you can make language do things to make people feel things I think is something that comes from there.

More specific influences: I think Eliot is the first poet I read who made me understand that poetry doesn’t offer emotion straight up on a platter – that the emotion is best when it is a hard, careful, pebbly thing that surprises you inside the language. But then I also for a long time loved Ginsberg, who is all about offering emotion up in big straight unashamed helpings. I have been consistently drawn to the poetry of Diane di Prima, Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton. I am fascinated by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets – Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Ted Greenwald, Robert Grenier. Their emphasis on repossessing the word as word, of experimenting with ways of making meaning that don’t take for granted any of the things we take for granted about language – syntax, sound, pattern, meaning, is something I am drawn to. I recently discovered the work of Marianne Boruch; the way in which she manages to combine a sort of effortless simplicity with the unexpected is something I find creeping into my own more recent work.

In terms of South African poetry it is perhaps not unsurprisingly the poets who (sometimes) work along more experimental lines who appeal to me most – Kelwyn Sole, Kobus Moolman, Alan Finlay, Genna Gardini, Lesego Rampolokeng, Joan Metelerkamp come to mind immediately. But I also admire poets who perhaps work in a less experimental idiom but manage to distil something very pure from language – I think particularly of Gabeba Baderoon and Rustum Kozain.

You have, like many of us, quite a hectic lifestyle – teaching at university, being a wife and a mother to three children. How do you find time to write? What are your writing habits?

I have lately had a voyeuristic obsession with writers’ writing habits and workspaces. I am particularly taken with the idea of a writing life – a daily routine structured around writing. But I’m not at the point where I can give up my day job and structure my life around writing; I probably never will be. I wish I could say that I set aside time especially for writing; that it is a craft which I have allocated time to specifically, because all craft must be practised and honed. At the moment, unfortunately, writing is something that happens in the cracks between other things… But it is also the case that when I have something in my head which wants to be written, I can relegate it to the bottom of a to-do list for only so long before it becomes very insistent. And then the writing schedules me, rather than I it.

Throughout history, society has held divergent views of poets – ranging from regarding them as central, vital players in the community and/or respected dispensers of wisdom to regarding them as outcasts and useless dreamers who do not make any valuable contribution to society. I think at the moment it is very much the second view that is prevalent.

This is such a complicated issue… In our time, it’s a fine line, isn’t it, between being a central, vital player in the community, and being a kind of commodity – because the kind of personality you project, the kind of poetry you write fits in comfortably with current discourses; fits current needs? There is an interesting take on this by Jeanette Winterson, talking about teaching creative writing: “Print media is shrinking, perhaps disappearing. At the same time, festivals and live events have never been more popular. Every tiny town seems to have a literary festival. Writers are out of the study and on the road – and when they are not entertaining readers they are invited to enlighten would-be writers. The most solitary of pursuits has become communal, organised, live, extrovert and competitive. Is this because writing has become a commodity – "cult cargo", as Val Mcdermid puts it?”

I think there is something important in this. We live in a society which values visibility, extroversion, the ability to engage and entertain – and I think poets who are inclined, by temperament or by conscious decision, to leverage these qualities do manage to become “respected dispensers of wisdom” (not that I think that poets are any wiser than anybody else…). It also depends on the kind of writing – I think authors who see their role as social and inspirational find themselves naturally drawn to this socially visible role.

I don’t really know the answer to this question. I know that writers have a very special ability – and I’m going to let Winterson (this time from her biography Why be happy when you could be normal) explain it again (because she does it so much better than I could): “All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.” I think for many readers the recognition of this ability is part of the value or worth that is ascribed to the writer or poet. But this value eventually becomes a commodity, up for sale and fetish, and that’s where things become complicated.

How does your new book, The reckless sleeper, differ from lush? The poems seem to be more personal, such as dealing with the experience of motherhood.

I don’t think the poems in The reckless sleeper are more or less personal than the poems in lush–what is different is that with The reckless sleeperI have felt more willing to take the risk of letting the personal qualities of the poems simply be, instead of trying to build in the kind of dissociating devices I spoke about earlier. So The reckless sleeper is maybe less deliberately dense, more comfortable in its own linguistic skin than lush. But in many ways the books share a set of concerns: language, the body, desire, love, loss, home. Those unbearably human things.

In what direction to do you see your poetry taking?

I have no idea – the words in my head fight it out and eventually decide their own direction; I’m just tagging along for the ride. I do know that for me there is a restlessness, in that there are always new ways of saying waiting to be made. But I am beginning to see that often I need to just cede the impulse to control and direct, and let the language do what it wants to do.

What are your views on SA poetry at the moment? As far as publishing is concerned, we are definitely in a pickle – publishers don’t want to publish poetry, the bookstores don’t want to stock it, and people don’t seem to want to read it.

Yes, I think you are right that poetry (with the possible exception of Afrikaans poetry, maybe) is in a difficult position. I think poetry publishing in South Africa is actually at this point being kept alive by committed, passionate independent publishers like yourself and Colleen Higgs (and others) – who have worked out some pretty effective guerrila tactics to not only keep poetry publishing going, but to try to allow it to develop and expand and include a range of voices.

Despite these efforts, the market for poetry (in the form of books, or journals, or online subscriptions) is small – there is a very small percentage of South Africans who value written poetry enough to buy poetry books or subscribe to poetry journals. So mainstream publishers are careful, and for preference only publish either well known poets, or poets who have the potential to sell well because their work speaks to a readership’s desire to be entertained, comforted or inspired. Publishing new poetry, or experimental poetry, has been relegated properly to the fringes. Because it won’t sell. And so a kind of impoverishment of poetry publishing sets in… But it is also true that poets have many more outlets than just print – Internet access in South Africa is growing, and most of this growth market access the Internet via their cellphones. So there’s a growing platform for poets there – once one is willing to let go of the traditional attachment to the book.

To take this back to your earlier question: There is an odd contradiction here, in that clearly (some) poets are idealised to some degree in South African cultural consciousness, but this does not necessarily translate into actual buyers of poetry books. Which leads me to think that maybe it is not the poetry itself that is valued, but what the poet represents in the popular consciousness – a popularly defined role with which I think many poets do not always feel comfortable.

But I feel one should put this in a larger perspective too: one cannot view these issues as separate from the difficulties that South Africa faces in terms of literacy, reading, education, poverty, etc. These material factors obviously condition the market, so it’s not fair to simply berate readers for not buying books… And while one is at it, one should spare a thought for African-language book publishing, which is (outside the educational sector) miniscule; wholly out of proportion to the potential readership. So the problems are much bigger than people just not buying poetry books…

Photo: Dylan Thompson

Erik Vatne is a poet, visual artist and publisher born in the US. He was educated at the Barnstable Academy, Bard College (BA), and Trinity College Dublin (MA). His books of poetry include Endings (Round Lake Press, 1991), Cartographies of Silence (Station Hill Press, 2009), Don Scotus on his Sickbed (Burning Apple Press, 2011), XXIII Epistles (Graffiti Kolkata, India, 2011), Mormon Heroin (Burning Apple Press, 2012) and the trilogy Words in Search of a Meaning (Burning Apple Press, 2012). He has lived in Mexico, Norway, Iceland, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Ireland. He divides his time between New Jersey, US and Dublin, Ireland.

DH: Music plays a big part in your life – you often post music clips on your Facebook page, and there are references to music throughout your writing. In Words in Search of a Meaning, for example, there is a prose poem about Freddy Mercury and another poem is dedicated to Ian Curtis. In the notes to Mormon Heroin, you include additional poems which you call ‘bonus tracks’.

EV: Yes, music is important. When I began using FB I used the medium as a public online Commonplace Book that would include music/video/art/poetry, etc. My dream job, since I was a kid, was to be a late-night music DJ so I guess it’s my way of playing late-night DJ when I post songs and lyrics. Even as a child of two or three, my parents said I was listening to the lyrics of songs and they were always equally important as the music; whereas I noticed this wasn’t the case for many of my friends. I don’t think most poets of our generation talk about this enough. For our generation rock lyrics were our first ‘poetry’… Or were the fault lines/maps that eventually lead to poetry… In my case, it was Bob Dylan, arguably one of America’s finest poets; so the simple answer is music is vitally important to my life and work … In Pater’s words, “All art aspires to the conditions of music”.

I constructed Mormon Heroin as a rock opera … Whether I succeed or fail I don’t know but ‒ besides the Epistles ‒it’s the work I am most proud of. Even if I know it fails in places I am happy I was able to release a ‘director’s cut’ of the book. There is some interest from another publisher in bringing out a selection of the poems called Strategies of Desire ‒the title of one of the poems.

One of my teen heroes Pete Townsend’s Quadrophenia and Pink Floyd’s The Wall served as templates for the book, which is why I include so many notes; as well as bonus tracks, which I thought was an interesting idea ‒ and was a private nod to my ex-wife and her thinking my rock/music geek obsession with remastered albums and liner notes, etc was endearing.

This brings me back to my childhood, when buying a much anticipated album was a big event ‒ one I was happy to read Patti Smith write about in Just Kids ‒halcyon pre-teen and teen days spent not just listening to an album over and over but reading the liner notes and looking at photos etc was, for our generation, a magical experience. Finally, maybe I’m just talking about my experience, but I feel many poets of our generation that I’ve met and grew up on rock music are frustrated rock stars because we know how much pop and rock music arguably drained the universal creative energy from the poem-source; so I'm always thinking and feeling musically when I compose poems.

Some of your poetry – I am thinking particularly of Mormon Heroin– comes across as ‘confessional’. You have written about the collapse of your marriage, hospitalisation for breakdowns, as well as alcohol and drug abuse. Poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton have been hailed as ‘confessional poets’, but would you also regard your work as confessional? I imagine you would reject the categorisation.

Yes, I would reject the categorisation of ‘confessional’ poet. This is a term created by critics to define and label what they considered ‘new’ trends in contemporary American poetry. What I find ironic is that in the cases of some of our most ‘confessional’ poets, like Bukowski and Ginsberg ‒ for example, Ginsberg’s ‘Ego Confession’or ‘Please Master’,you can’t get more confessional then that ‒ we don’t call them ‘confessional’ poets. I mean, was the Renaissance poet George Gascoigne a confessional poet? I think one could make that argument; he’s one of my favorite poets ‒ and a bigger influence on The Epistles than Ted Berrigan ‒ even though I owe a big debt to Frank O’Hara for opening up my work to be able to write a book like Mormon Heroin, etc ‒ and, yes, Berrigan is also important because I often employ a cut and paste method in my writing practice; but I didn’t really get into Berrigan until I began writing The Epistles; if anything; I would say the Epistles owe more to Kerouac and Shakespeare and visual artists like Rauschenberg and Basquiat.

The confessional poets I know well are John Berryman, and specifically Robert Lowell. At one time Plath was an important poet to me and Arialremains one of the most important works of the latter half of the 20th century; but I haven’t really looked at her work in years. Ted Hughes, and not Plath, was one of my earliest influences and I imitated him for years when I was a teenager but I didn’t have the experience or maturity to process the archetypes and symbols I received in dreams and visions as Hughes did so brilliantly. As for Sexton, I have to admit I never cared for her work, but I should read her again.

With regard to Mormon Heroin, you’re correct that it contains a wider selection of autobiographical or, if one likes, ‘confessional’ poems: those poems are quite direct, naked and raw, but that’s only a part of the larger apocalyptic vision of book that’s ultimately about technology. Specifically, the collective madness of technology that could also lead to the human machine breaking down and succumbing to our over medicated society.

To give one short example from Mormon Heroin; in the poem, ‘Descending Minor Thirds (Orpheus in The Underworld)’ I write, “America is a self-medicated system/ Organism/ On an eternal IV drip/ Shuffling down the hall/ In hospital gown/ Satori...” In this regard the personal pronoun or speaker becomes a microcosm that mirrors the shadow side of the collective unconscious of American neurosis. On a personal note I’d like to mention that I haven’t had a drink or illegal drug in 20 years, but I believe all drugs, including heroin, should be decriminalised.

Many of your poems employ a short line. Some – such as in Cartographies of Silence– are short in length, while others go onto several pages. Stylistically your work reminds me at times of Robert Creeley, but you have indicated your discomfort with the term ‘minimalism’.

I perceive my work as a poet is to be a conduit in service to the poem. In other words, my responsibility is to get out of the way of the poem and let it speak for itself; to say its own way into the world. Keep in mind Cartographies was composed in 1995-1996 and Mormon Heroin over ten years later. I often struggle with my tendency towards boredom and restlessness and the fear of repeating myself. In short, I have a restless mind and imagination and that’s why disparate influences which would include everything from one-word poems, concrete poetry, to the Romantics and everything in between as long as it speaks to me on a personal level can have an influence on my life and work. I consider my connection to certain poets as serious relationships, love affairs, and marriages; sometimes one-night stands, but for the most part long-term relationships.

Cartographies of Silence was composed when I was about four years into serious Zen Buddhist study and practice. I had taken Buddhist refuge vows with my son Dylan. Prior to Cartographies I composed a chapbook of poems under a different name that I later destroyed. The reason I did this was because the poetry I was writing at that time began to sound more and more like bad translations from Japanese and Chinese Zen poets. Since then I’ve seen many American poets fall into this trap. Cartographies was a way for me to use a short line and write short epiphany-like poems but for the first time break free from what I felt was a consuming Buddhist influence on my poetry.

It’s interesting you should mention Creeley. I might raise eyebrows by making this statement but I’ve been reading Creeley for at least twenty years and sometimes I love his work and think he’s a genius and other times I think his poetry is just awful. I know Creeley is supposed to have one of the best ‘ears in the business’ as we say, but I seem to have a love/ hate relationship with his work at times. I love his very short, ‘minimalist’ poems but sometimes think his rhyming poems amount to little more than bad doggerel. Perhaps it’s me? It took me many years to truly ‘hear’ a poet like Robert Duncan and when I did it was, as these experiences are, ecstatic.

One thing I do admire about poets like Creeley is that they produced a very large prolific body of work that unmistakably never deviates from their voice. To use a rock example, I once wrote an essay about David Bowie’s obsession with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. It was my thesis that Bowie as shape shifter, chameleon, and actor was always searching for the authentic and that’s what he saw and felt in the music of Reed and Iggy Pop. This is not criticism, especially since I love all three artists and Reed and especially Bowie have been just as important as Blake or Shelley or Borges or Jack Spicer. I tend to be very catholic in my tastes. I always hear my voice in everything I write but there’s no doubt I’m also more of a shape shifter and chameleon in my work, which would explain the many influences and changes of style, form, and content in my poems. This is why almost all of my books are intentionally different. Like Lot, I don’t want to look back.

In Words in Search of a Meaning, many of the poems deal with the issue of language ‒ powerful and evocative, but at the same time inadequate and deceptive. This was a problem that deeply preoccupied Artaud most of his life.

I think you’ve summed up the question that’s behind every poem I write and that is: “What is language?” It doesn’t matter what I write. My obsession with language is always at the forefront of every poem and even painting. This is where one would find the influence of Wittgenstein as well as my ongoing interest in speech and language disorders. In some ways I envy poets who don’t appear to ever question language, nor do I understand it. I could give you hundreds of examples of what I’m talking about, but at the moment I’m struck by the words of T. S Eliot that have always stayed with me from his poem ‘East Coker’, from Four Quartets: “So here I am, In the middle way, Having had twenty years/ Largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres ‒./ Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt/ Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure/ Because one has only learnt to get the better of words/ For the thing one no longer has to say, Or the way in which/ One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture/ Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate/ With shabby equipment/ Always deteriorating/ In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, / Undisciplined squads of emotion...”

I don’t think we have enough room for me to get into my love for Artaud; but I can say I feel a very deep connection to Artaud’s work and to what I know of the man. As a student of psychology my personal belief is that his work transcends anything found in the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and yet no one has written more honestly, brutally and tenderly about various states of mental illness. And yet when I read Artaud I feel I’m reading a man who has complete control and command of the language; as well as a penetrating connection and understanding to his illness and the sickness of language ‒ what Burroughs referred to as the ‘language virus’ and the madness of industrial society. I would direct readers to Clayton Eshleman’s essays and translations of Artaud’s work.

You have referred to your creation of action-poems, or word-paintings. You are also planning to publish a book of photographs. Tell us more about your artwork and its relation to your poetry.

I owe a debt to who I consider one of the great geniuses of the century, Brion Gysin and my study of his life and work for being a final guide in destroying my ego-identification with myself as a poet. There is something rather preposterous about a grown man engaged in such work; don’t you think? And yet we don’t seem to have a choice; and as Bukowski said, “it’s still the best game going”. It remains a conundrum.

If anything, I consider myself a maker of things, a creator. I’ve constructed my life in a way that keeps me in a continual state of creative flux so that if I’m not writing poems, but have collected texts that lend themselves to paintings, I apply them to paintings. I work, at this stage ‒ after all these years ‒ almost entirely on instinct, intuition and faith in the process. There is no fear or doubt. If a poem doesn’t work it’s a small loss in the bigger picture; and few will care or notice anyway.

When I’m not painting or writing and need to disengage from those activities I’ll take photographs. This is when photography helps me get distance from language. Poetry, painting and photography are part of the larger creative stew that is my life.

In the near future I would like to show my paintings and photographs; but I am just now ‘coming out of the closet’ as a visual artist and looking for the right gallery or venue to show my work. This year or next year I will be publishing a selection of my works on paper called TheS.B Notebooks as well as a book of photographs called Garage.

Your notes section to Mormon Heroin is quite lengthy. There are also notes to Words in Search of a Meaning but not as much as in Mormon Heroin. I felt that the notes added considerably to the poems. Some people might argue against the use of notes, as they feel poetry should either explain itself or the reader should be free to decide for themselves. I think it depends on how the notes are used, by both writer and reader.

I struggled with this very question. Frankly, I feel notes are not important to the poems and that the poems should speak for themselves. If a poem needs a note to succeed then it has already failed. However, Mormon Heroin was a special and unique project. There are so many arcane and hermetic references in that work so I felt notes were necessary. On a personal level the notes were some of the most fun I’ve had with putting a book together. I feel as obsessive as they were they added a levity at times that helped me cope with the difficult process of putting together such a large collection. The notes are written for anyone who cares to read them but are not necessary but as I mentioned very specifically they were written for my second wife who, if we were together, would have probably asked me those questions. In a way, the notes are a farewell love letter to her memory. Finally, the notes were my secret wink to Eliot’s The Waste Land but I doubt I’ll repeat the experience.

When I look at your books I have three full-length volumes – Cartographies of Silence,Mormon Heroin and Words in Search of a Meaning – and then the two chapbooks, XXIII Epistles and Don Scotus. In the three full-length volumes I had a sense of a trilogy almost, but as you rightly point out, the poems in Mormon Heroin are very different from those in Cartographies and Words… I guess this is related to the history of the writing of the poems, and the history of their being published. For example, in Words…, published last year, there are some poems dating back to the 1980s.

This is a difficult question to answer. I don’t consider the three full-length volumes a trilogy but Words.…is a trilogy in that it contains three full-length books in one collection. For me publishing is a form of exorcism. I don’t feel I can release the poems or books from my body ‒ I would even consider it a somatic experience ‒ until they are published.

Once a poem or book is published I can move on and let go of it. Words.… contains poems from the '90s I chose to preserve. Unfortunately, for personal reasons, there are long gaps in my publishing history so even though Words.… and Mormon Heroin were published in the same year, 2012, they span twenty years of writing. The impetus for this now is almost the exact opposite of my previous ascetic approach to publishing modelled after Cavafy. I now feel a greater sense of urgency to publish and exorcise these ghosts from the past and publish almost ‒ and the operative word is almost ‒ everything I write. I’ll leave the rest to readers, critics and history.

You have been studying psychoanalysis for some years, and you also have made references to teachers such as Krishnamurti, and you have also on occasion quoted from the gospels. I get a sense of searching, a quest. Is it a spiritual quest or a psychoanalytical one? Some might argue that those are the same.

I’d say yes, they’re quite closely related. I have been a student of Jungian psychology and studied in Zurich but have had to put my studies on hold as I found it impossible to do so much creative work, run the press and continue my studies. I hope to resume them in the future when and if I achieve more balance in my life.

I’ve had many spiritual teachers including Jesus, Buddha, Krishnamurti, and Thich Nhat Hanh, H.H. the Dalai Lama, Shree Maa and Carl Jung, who I consider very much a surrogate father-figure. I hesitate to use the term ‘spiritual seeker’ because that suggests that one is looking outside of oneself for what has always been present inside the human and divine heart. However, the search for home or the Odyssey quest is probably the trope that speaks most closely to my personal mythos. At the end of the day, though, I always return to reading poetry as a rite or ceremony that one could say is religious or spiritual.

You started up Burning Apple Press, and three of your books have been issued through to this imprint. Why did you start up your own press? What else besides your own work are you publishing through it?

It’s too bad we’re conducting this interview via email because I laughed when I read your question. The short and simple answer is I started Burning Apple Press because no one would publish a 422-page collection of poetry including 50 pages of notes called Mormon Heroin. A friend suggested I publish it myself and thus Burning Apple Press was born.

I also felt I had more freedom and control over my work and also didn’t have to go through the long waiting process and formalities of a very corrupt and cliquish American poetry publishing scene. I don’t see this more different than bands like Radiohead starting their own labels and putting out their own works. Or say Moby producing his own albums. Once I started Burning Apple Press I realised that it was also an opportunity for me to publish a great deal of my back catalogue but the end game was always to begin publishing beautifully designed and highly professional books that would introduce readers to poets whose work is in on the ‘outside’ of the looking glass.

Burning Apple Press is a labor of love and a non-profit company so we don’t have the resources or staff to publish as many titles as we would like but I hope we continue to grow and flourish in the coming years for exceptional ‘outsider’ artists and poets whose work I admire that have yet to be published.

For example, we just published a collection of poems Selling Heaven by the Irish poet Brendan McCormick, which is available through the publisher and Amazon. We plan on bringing out books of poetry and photography by other artists in the next year or two. I’ll probably only publish one or two more books written in 2007 and 2008 with Burning Apple Press and then resume my search for the right publisher of The Epistles.

I probably sound like a Luddite but I’ve never read an e-book on the computer or any kind of device. I know that many say book publishing is dying or almost dead but nothing can equal the feel and tactile, sensory, experience of holding a book in one’s hand.

What are you busy with?

I’m an artist that’s always working on multiple projects. So I’m currently working on a collection of paintings which I call my ‘Italian Verb Series’. This is a series of paintings that use found texts from a book of Italian verbs. I just finished the last poem of 120 Epistles which I’ve been working on for nearly 10 years but like Berryman’s inability to stop writing Dream Songs I’ve written over 25 epistles this year even after completing the book. I consider that my life’s work, so I might be writing Epistles until the end of my writing life.

In between these works I continue to take photographs, make abstract paintings and large scale paintings with handwritten or stenciled texts. I just began writing a new collection of ‘assembled’ poems which are very short and simple based on a textbook I’m studying on ‘Practical Chinese.’ These poems seem to be writing themselves and I am already well into the work and I just started it this month, but the book sat on a shelf for months before it finally ‘spoke’ to me and I took it out and thus the work begins all over again. This book won’t contain any notes.

Khulile Nxumalo was born in Diepkloof, Soweto, in 1971. He finished school at Waterford Kamhlaba, Swaziland, and went to University of Cape Town, University of Natal and Wits University. His first poetry collection, ten flapping elbows, mama, was published by Deep South in 2004. His second
collection, fhedzi, was published by Dye Hard Press in 2013. His work has appeared in several literary journals in South Africa, Canada, the UK and the US. Nxumalo has twice won the DALRO award for poetry. He also participated in the LitNet My Generationproject, with his contribution ‘The train goes on coal’.

An extensive interview with Khulile Nxumalo by Alan Finlay was published in New Coin, and is available here.

DH: When did you start writing poetry?

KN: I started writing, playing around with the poetry we were studying in high school. But it was only when I got to university in Cape Town that I really starting engaging and applying myself to the craft. At school it was people like John Donne, Milton, the sonnets of Shakespeare and Wordsworth. I think it was being exposed to poetry other than classical English that ignited interest in trying to write. At university as part of English we studied Eliot, Blake, Frost, ee cummings, Sylvia Plath etc. I also took courses by Prof Kelwyn Sole on Oral Literature and in African Literature, but by then I had been exposed to Okigbo, Soyinka, Jack Mapanje, Sipho Sephamla, Serote, Kgositsile and Mattera.

What poets have been your main influences? What South African poets do you particularly like?

Mongane Serote has been the most impactful influence. I try to read South African poetry widely, mostly in the journals that still exist. The poets I like are too numerous to mention. Also, one tends to be touched or affected by a poem, and it can even be from a lesser-known poet or writer. Seitlhamo Motsapi introduced me to the work of Kamau Brathwaite, and that has been another long-standing line of influence.

In the blurb to your first collection, ten flapping elbows, mama, you wrote: “I what I call psycho-narration, I try to write beyond the understanding that ‘inside of one’s head’ and ‘the objective world’ are distinct worlds. This is a form I have grown to love more since I started preferring the long poem format that sits on a conversational tone. It’s a multi-vocal way of writing or telling stories in a less authoritative way, a kinda voice democracy in the poem.” For me, the long psycho-narration poems have a montage effect and I am reminded of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Can you tell us more about how you came to psycho-narration?

The poetry I was trying to write at high school reflected and imitated stuff like rhyming schemes of Petrachan sonnets, and the tight barriers of language in the form. When I started to work in the long form, the writing achieved a conversational tone. In another phrase, the poetry loosened. Psycho-narration is about writing as of you are narrating your own psychology. It becomes interesting when you try to imagine a fluid barrier between the objective and the subjective, in that the stability of the “I” persona becomes affected, and voice takes on more interesting dimensions. Our generation of writers has to contend with a less certain country and world, that is if you are thinking of the post-apartheid era, and that is part of the context that makes for searching for new ways to say things.

I find the voice of your new collection, fhedzi, to be more singular, more unified. There is a sense of one, personal voice.

I think fhedzi is influenced by jazz and other musical rhythms more than ten flapping elbows, mama and that tends to unify how poems are elaborated, and creates unity of emotion. Even though I had set out to write an angry book about the ghost of my absent Venda father, I ended up with material that has a stronger sense of self in it, and I imagine this is what you mean by “personal voice”. I think the strong application that Alan Finlay brought to the editing also makes the book more unified, as we cut out quite a lot of stuff, and we were open to new versions of poems that might have appeared differently at another time.

Going back briefly to the blurb for ten flapping elbows, mama, you wrote: “If we can go beyond rational thought – or even the idea that rational thought is a reflection of reality – then anything can happen.” Do you still have such a view of the potential of poetry, or has it modified in the past nine years?

Yes I still do. It is not just for poetry but for the act of imagination itself. Some of my concerns at the time of making that statement were from realising that there is richness in that I, for a number of years, had imagined, conceived, created and uttered realities in languages other than English. At the time, discourse analysis and deconstruction were in vogue in literary studies, and I guess some of that filtered into how I theorised about my writing.

Ten flapping elbows, mama contains a “proemdrama” called “Craftin’”, and fhedzi contains the choreo-poem “The Melville Plenoptic”. These are not plays in the accepted sense, and not quite dramatic poems either. What is your experience with the theatre?

Well, you will not believe, but I acted in plays like Noddy, Pinocchio, Aladdin as part of Johannesburg Children’s Theatre. That was at the time when experiments of integration between black children in the townships and white kids in the suburbs were increasingly taking place. Almost around the time of the scrapping of the Group Areas Act. I developed a deep interest in the theatre from then, and went to see a lot of plays at the Market Theatre. Currently I am studying for a master’s in dramatic arts, where as part of my practical examination I will stage a piece that is a mixture of both “Craftin’” and “The Melville Plenoptic”.

You have also done some work in film I remember seeing a short documentary about Staffrider that you made with artist Tracey Rose. Have you ever been involved in music?

I listen to music ‒ all kinds really. I do wish I had learnt to play the cello. I mess around on the guitar, for the simple three-chord type of tunes. Before working at the SABC, I was directing documentaries. Among others, I directed a documentary following the daughter of Credo Mutwa in a search to find out why their house was burnt in 1976, and collaborated with Tracey Rose as part of the Chimurenga Digital library where I reminisce about the time when the Market Precinct was buzzing with activity, and poetry and writing were driven by COSAW initiatives, while bemoaning that I never got a chance to be published in Staffrider.

What is your opinion of contemporary South African poetry? Are you optimistic about the future of poetry in South Africa?

I think the journals must continue to exist for South African poetry to maintain a sense of being alive. That is how I have also kept going in between collections. I think we need a radio programme that focuses on poetry,that could also have a digital existence. I am optimistic as most of the poets, even those from the generations older than us, still continue to publish. I remember the last issue of Kotaz where Mxolisi Nyezwa focused on a number of poems in isiXhosa. As a country with so many languages, these must be reflected in the written and published poetry.

Catfish McDaris’s most infamous chapbook is Prying,with Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski. His best readings were in Paris at the Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore and with Jimmy ‘the ghost of Hendrix’ Spencer in NYC on 42nd St. He’s done over 20 chaps in the last 25 years. He’s been published by New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Pearl, Main St. Rag, Café Review, Chiron Review, Zen Tattoo, Wormwood Review, Great Weather For Media, Silver Birch Press, and Graffiti Kolkata. He’s been nominated for 15 Pushcarts, the Best of Net in 2010 and 2013, he won the Uprising Award in 1999 and won the Flash Fiction Contest judged by the US Poet Laureate in 2009. He’s recently been translated into French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Bengali, Tagalog, and Esperanto. His 25 years of published material is in the Special Archives Collection at Marquette Univ. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has also recently been published in New Coin, South Africa. His latest collection is Thieves of the Wind, with Kolkata poet and publisher Subhankar Das.

DH: Perhaps an obvious first question revolves around your first name – Catfish. For me it conjures up images of the Mississippi, of delta blues and Mark Twain characters – so, how did you get the name Catfish?

CM: Dave (Low Dog) Reeve, editor of Zen Tattoo took some of my poems, I told him I’d like to quit working for the Post Office in Milwaukee and start a catfish farm. He knew Bukowski slightly. This was about 94 and the name stuck. My sincere study of aquatic farming became just another unfulfilled dream. I started writing protest letters to newspapers, then I wrote a western novel (unpublished). I went to a poetry read and thought why not. I had lots of crazy fun reading and getting printed and meeting new people.

You have published quite a few titles, over 20, mainly chapbooks rather than full collections. I prefer chapbooks of poetry over thick volumes, there is a sense of intimacy or even of immediacy to a chapbook than a full collection doesn’t have. Did you go the chapbook route by choice?

I’m not exactly sure how many chapbooks I’ve done. I’ve always mixed poems with fiction, to me it’s all about storytelling. I have no academic credentials to get some big publishing house to print me. If Black Sparrow or City Lights would’ve come along and said let’s do it, I would have. On the other hand I’ve never self-published my own work. I figure if you can’t find a small press publisher, then your work must suck. I wouldn’t even venture a guess at how many small press publishers exist in US because they start and fold so quickly. There are university presses mostly from their English Dept. If you have no talent you won’t make it no matter where you live. With the web everything is international and in the blink of an eye.

You had a chapbook published with Bukowski and Jack Micheline, called Prying. Bukowski is clearly an influence on your work – did you ever meet him? Did you ever meet Micheline?

I never met Bukowski, I’m sort of glad I didn’t. I consider him and Micheline geniuses, but I’ve seen films where Buk was mean to women and that behaviour pisses me off. I never met Jack either, except we became great pen-pals. I bought some of his paintings and chapbooks. He sent me poems of his and 4 unpublished poems from Buk from 74. Jack told me to write some nasty stories and find a publisher. That’s how Prying was born. Buk was dead by then and Mich died soon after.

I first encountered your name when you interviewed the poet Charles Plymell. Plymell is usually associated with the Beats but he doesn’t like being given that label and is quite critical of the Beats. There has been a bit of a Beat industry on the go – a Kerouac industry, a Burroughs industry, a Ginsberg industry. Would I be right in saying there is also a Bukowski industry? What are your feelings about these industries?

I met Plymell through being published together in the small press scene. The extensive interview I did with him was for the Chiron Review, it sort of opened my door to the Beatniks. Plymell stayed with us in Milwaukee in 96 on his way to meet Ginsberg and Burroughs. He introduced me to them through the mail and I got signed books from them. Two years later, in 98, I went to a 3-day Beatnik read in Cherry Valley, NY where Plymell lives and Ginsberg had a farm. I read with Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, Ray Bremser, Janine Pommy Vega, Andy Clausen, David Amram, David Church, Claude Pelieu, Charles Plymell, Gordon Ball, and lots of other Beatniks and musicians such as Grant Hart. I think the Bukowski industry may overshadow all the Beatniks put together, but who really knows. The Beatniks and Bukowski are being overexposed. I prefer Buk over Kerouac any day. We need to create the next big move; we have the talent and technology. We don’t have to go on the road or live in a cardboard box, unless we feel like it. Caves are great; I spent almost three months in one.

There is another label being used – outlaw poet. Do you consider yourself an outlaw poet? Do we need labels?

I don’t think we need labels, but I think we will never get around them. I have broken many laws in my 60 years. I’ve been in jail, never prison. If being an outlaw poet means you can write about things outside the law, then hell yea I’m an outlaw. I wasn’t in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry unfortunately. That was fat anthology from 1999 put out by Thunder’s Mouth Press, dedicated to Jack Micheline. I was told to send work to it by Tommy Tucker from Bum Rush in NY in 98, I forgot. Alan Kaufman edited it with SA Griffin, it has all the outlaws except Bukowski. I have been to Billy the Kid’s grave, though. Since I grew up in Clovis, New Mexico, that wasn’t far from Billy the Kid country. He supposedly killed 21 men before he was 21. Billy is buried in Fort Sumner, New Mexico where they kept Geronimo prisoner. Watch Sam Peckinpah’s movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Bob Dylan is in it, he’s a knife-throwing expert and he does the soundtrack, notably Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.

Apart from poetry you also write flash fiction. When did you start writing flash fiction and why? Is flash fiction not in some ways a variation/extension of the prose poem?

It is all a story or a tale. Some mags want flash fiction some want poetry. It’s the same animal to me.

What music do you like?

I like Hendrix, Prince, Satriani, Buddy Guy, Bonnie Raitt, Jeff Beck, Clapton, Santana. I listen to lots of Mexican and French music from my lady. The funny thing is I don’t hardly ever listen to music while I’m alone or writing.

You live in Milwaukee – that’s a city I have always associated with the TV sitcom Happy Days. What is the poetry and arts scene like in Milwaukee?

There are lots of breweries here. After the big Chicago fire, 1871, all the beer barons moved to Milwaukee because of Lake Michigan and fresh river water. We have a bronze Fonz statue, every few years the Happy Days folks come here. There are lots of good poets here. Antler and lots of academic poets, there are lots of reading venues. Also slams and rap contests. The art scene is super, lots of bohemians and a world-class art museum. Chicago is 90 minutes away and it is a great art and poetry city. In Milwaukee our art museum is right on Lake Michigan, It was designed by a Spaniard and opens its wings like the one in Sydney, Australia. I prefer paintings, but there are sculptures by Rodin. I like Bonnard, Caillebotte, Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Monet, O’Keeffe, and Renoir - just to name a few in the permanent collection. Some of the local artists are great, there are many galleries and exhibits. I love Frida Kahlo, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, I also like Robert De Niro Sr.

What is the state of poetry publishing in the US as a whole? I should imagine that, like elsewhere in the world, sales are pretty bad. Here in South Africa fewer publishers are willing to take on poetry. Is it the same in the US? I see a lot of poets are now turning to self-publishing through print on demand initiatives such as Lulu.com.

Sales are terrible for poetry. People would rather buy a beer or tasteless hamburger than a chapbook. The market is so flooded (not just in the US, but worldwide) the old 'you buy mine, I’ll buy yours' is murder. I just mailed a chapbook to Quebec and it was almost $9.00 postage. I don’t understand print on demand, how can a publishing company give you a free ISBN(they usually cost $50) and print a perfect-bound or even hard-bound book and then put them for sale online and you just buy a few, or however many you feel like? I haven’t self-published any of my stuff, but friends with more computer knowledge than me have. This is crazy. I am old school, we used to send our work out with SASEs and wait by the mailbox with crossed fingers. Now you meet people all over the world in the blink of an eye. Maybe the Kindle will abolish printed books. I hope I don’t live to see that.

You started up a blog-based journal, ppigpenn, which contains mainly interviews and poetry. I think it is important that poets start up these initiatives, to create a creator awareness of what is happening in poetry, whether locally or internationally. What are your thoughts on this?

In some ways I think it’s cool to connect with so many people all over the world. On the other hand what makes me so special that I should be able to judge other writers’ work and decide if they are worthy to be published on ppigpenn. I try never to reject anyone, I may ask them to hit me with something harder, but I turn no one away. I’m lucky now that I have a partner watching my back, Michy McDannold from the Literary Underground.

You have just published a joint volume of poetry with Kolkata poet and publisher Subhankar Das, called Thieves of the Wind. A couple of years back you published another collaborative volume, with the Australian poet Ben John Smith, called Dancing Naked on Bukowski’s Grave. There was also the earlier collaborative volume with Bukowski and Micheline. Some publishers here in SA have done collective volumes of poetry – say, four or six poets in one volume – rather than single collections. What is the advantage of collaborative works, other than the sharing of resources?

I consider Subhankar and Ben John top-notch writers from a totally different background and country. With the dismal sales in the small press world maybe having a brother along might help. Being printed with Bukowski and Micheline never hurt, but it sure never put a dime in my pocket. If you have to depend on writing for a living, I suggest go the Outlaw Poetry route. Rob a few banks now and then.

Joan Metelerkamp reading in Grahamstown, July 2014

Joan Metelerkamp is the author of several books of poems, including Stone No More, Requiem, carrying the fire and Burnt Offering. Her poems have been widely published in local and international anthologies, and she has taken part in readings and literary festivals in South Africa, Europe and America. She edited the South African poetry journal New Coin for some years and has also written poetry reviews and essays. She lives on a farm near Knysna.

Joan’s eighth collection of poetry, Now the World Takes These Breaths, was published by Modjaji Books in 2014. She was interviewed by Alan Finlay.

AF: I said I would do an interview with you for the Dye Hard Interviews blog. So here are my questions or statements that I hope you find okay-enough to respond to....

JM: Fine – I woke this morning after horrific dreams (I don’t think connected with this) but with a whole long essay worked out with my responses. Now, after doing this and that, mainly house-work and procrastination of other tasks, I’ve forgotten everything! Can’t even remember what track I was on. I think this happens in writing of poems all the time – “it’s okay/ it can go”. Obviously one can’t live with an obsessive anxious holding on to everything. An “irritable reaching after fact and reason” …But unless the poem is made it doesn’t exist (obviously); all those unwritten wonders are NOTHING.

Well, we had this discussion before. I don't think I agree entirely. Sometimes I can feel happy that I “wrote” a poem, but I don't get to write it down. I think that poem exists too. Maybe just for me. It's a bit like playing piano for yourself – there is a sense of audience, even a strong sense of imagined audience, but nothing is getting recorded, and no-one is listening.

For me there really is a distinction between a crafted object, a work that stands, and the composition in the mind. (Maybe this has to do with my being a woman and a materialist! Maybe it feels like this to me because my imaginary audience is so demanding?) And about playing the piano to connect with yourself – isn’t that more like writing a poem and putting it away? Or writing versions of poems? Or reading a poem aloud once and destroying it?

It's really the process that I find reassuring, I think. In a way it reminds me, or re-connects me: I can do this! But yes, the question of audience – or even the complex or neurosis of audience. I was thinking of how to describe your writing, and I thought of a “folding outwards”. You write: “not so much that I've wasted my life but that it unfolds”. I feel like there is a tension in the emotional spaces your poems create, of a letting go, but also of a turning back. Like paper being folded, but outwards. The paper in that sense can go on forever, the “unreaming” can go on forever, even though it is being folded. I think this can also be felt in your style of writing, its strong sense of thinking in the immediate. At the level of narrative, the book is about letting go of your children, your space as a mother, as it was, and who you are left with when that happens.

Yes, though I hope that the book is only “about” the most obvious narrative. Except in the sense of cycle – round and round “about”. There are narrative elements, but the poems make a formal cycle, as in an old ritualistic dance-circle; so this would be the in and out, folding unfolding, forward and back that you pick up. So the “story” is an old old story! It refers back and forward. The folding, relating to death, extinction, is also in the rhinoceros image – “like folded rhinoceros we collapse/ in what’s left of the shade”. Of course, Persephone went to the kingdom of death and back again…in that myth of cycle, which is a central referent in my book, there is the hope that Earth continues, will continue. It’s not just about a journey to individual not being. But this is the central terror – that everything will disappear into nothing. Even the sun dies etc.

Would it have helped knowing it

was all a story as ancient as ever? I forgot

I didn’t know. I still had to live it.

I still had to have it all crushed out.

I still had to find women to turn to, to laugh about it…..

I am curious – thinking of Sharon Olds, and her personal poems about her children or family, and what she said about writing them – how do others in your family receive your poetry? Because you are not the centre of everything, of course, and they have their lives too.

Yes, of course! But the lyric poet very often speaks from her “centre” her own “interior” – her feelings, thoughts are made in poems – it’s how a poet thinks best, isn’t it? Even a novel, although the socio-political, character-based construction that it is, often refers to particular people…I’m thinking much further back than Olds, or before her Plath, but of Virginia Woolf …and now I’m jumping forward again - do you know the Stevie Smith “story of a story”?

No, I don't think so. Can you share it?

I think it may be in her volume Me Again – but basically it’s a story about having written a story based on friends who took umbrage; as far as I remember Stevie Smith said “but this is as true as I can make it even if you don’t feel flattered”... The people closest to me in this book knew that I was writing it for them so I think they were ok with it. They know that part of me, at least, is a poet. Poetry may seem central in the book, but I think the book is also quite clear that it isn’t the only thing that matters! They also know that I know “there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle” (Marianne Moore). In other words, I would hope that the book opens out as much as it closes in. I would hope that it might speak to other people, including those close, rather than exposing them.

Yes, I like this idea. This is something I find difficult when it comes to publishing. I want to speak to people close to me, but in a public way. I think your poetry pulls the reader into the personal in such a vigorous way it makes it necessarily public.

This is a complex question of course that I’ve wrestled with. This is what “no wonder” deals with – Woolf’s “angel in the house”, the internal voice that urges her to speak and behave as those around her expect and whom Woolf advises the woman writer to kill... but it’s not only writers who deal with this angel’s voice I was saying... We hurt other people even while we are trying to do what is best for them – everyone does. We hurt those me most love – but surely it’s the definition of psychopathy to try to hurt those you supposedly love? (I don’t see suicide as an aggressive action against anyone, by the way). Also, I don’t believe that old adage “what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you”…that’s bullshit in my experience. If you have won the Pulitzer Prize and published many tens of thousands of copies of your books (as Olds has done) does this make a difference? I don’t know.

I suspect with that kind of “publicity”, at some level they will have to reject (or kill) the parent-poet...

I’ll give you a concrete example: at the launch of the book I read the title poem. I was anxious. The poem as you know is about an horrific unnatural natural death. Some of the people involved in that incident were at the launch, but others had already read the book and given me confidence in their responses. I hoped it would be received as a tribute, and it was! What do you do about the earth or sea that swallows those close to you first and then eventually you. Sometimes there is literally nothing to be done. You can only do everything you can do. Sometimes you literally have to save your own life. What can a poem do?

Since your first book you have been negotiating the burdened or “over-weightiness” of the patriarchal voice in poetry, of deciding what was okay, which stopped so much from being written in South African poetry.

Yes. I could go on at great length about this. There are many different approaches – I think we’ve covered a few of the issues. But behind this is the figure of the judge who is also the critic and authority and who says “how could you!” in the voices of the book-club women or “gossip girls” you live amongst, the contemporary “angel in the house”, instead of “how could you” as in the real teacher who looks for new ways or at least ways to break old crippling habits. The negative side; as opposed to the positive prototype. And it goes back to the point about hurting others…well. I’m not an historian nor sociologist nor... jurist nor philosopher nor psychologist…nor scholar! I’d have to go by way of the poet and talk about my own experience/ feelings/ intuitions/ thoughts … If you want another example from the book of wrestling directly with the issue of authority its “Confession”. Is it the poet/speaker who has to “hold her eyes open” however hard this is and “give” and “forgive” and confess” and ask for forgiveness? Or does she say no, the choice (whatever the choice is) is “for giving”.

Do you paint?

I don’t paint. I wish I did.

I though at some point you said you did. Maybe you said you wanted to...

Probably. And this goes back to the first point – you can do a drawing course and come home all fired up seeing horizontals, verticals, diagonals, tripping on the curves and moving lines outside, the colours and planes of the wheat free fields you drive through, experiencing in a new way…but if you don’t make that drawing, where is it? But I suppose I don’t wish it enough to have done it! I did wish to be an actor – but I failed at that – I worked for three years when I was young but I couldn’t take one of the central aspects of acting at the start of a career – sitting around in the dressing-room, and doing very small roles. Also I couldn’t take Pretoria and the performing arts council who employed me, nor, in the early eighties, the alternative world of Joburg and touting myself to an agent. The other “medium” or “form” I’ve flirted with but haven’t cracked at all because I haven’t spent enough time and/or energy on it is the essay. And this also has to do with being scared off of that by academe. Another failed career… another story.

Do you feel South African poets could bring more of other disciplines into their poetry? So poets are busy with poets and words – and someone like Willem Boshoff pulls the carpet from under our feet, because no-one who is a “poet” is looking at concrete or visual poetry – at least not at that level. Why not? Is the idea of being a poet in this country too narrow? Sometimes it feels that the problem lies in poetry as the starting point. Start with another art, and lead into poetry to make poetry alive. I am thinking of a couple of things here, but also a comment Robert [Berold] made about Kobus Moolman's latest book, that he has introduced dramatic elements into it.

I think it probably depends on temperament, and changes of life, don’t you think? I think there are many and varied kinds of poem in South Africa. I don’t know if it’s a matter of where you start, but at some point you have to keep going, practicing poems. If you don’t develop as a poet you may as well stop – and I think that’s more of the issue. What’s the incentive to keep going?

In the last part of the book, I felt a sense of boredom, of you expressing boredom with your poetic project. It might be exhaustion. I am thinking of moments like: “all my lack of clarity. irritability./depressiveness./forgetfulness/what the fuck/ we're ok”. Perhaps this is resignation? To loss, to life. I am thinking here of your mother's suicide too. Of how difficult it must be for someone to leave.

I don’t understand the last part of this comment. Difficult for who to leave? (Are you saying it must be difficult for my daughter to leave because my mother committed suicide? – but then my mother’s mother did too…)

Sorry, Joan. Here I am reading into your work I think...

Well, I think you’re maybe intuiting something important, and anyway we always read from our own lives. But maybe you could spell out exactly what you mean – what specifically in the poem/s are referring to? I think your suggestion is that the very fierce holding of the mother, seen from the daughter’s perspective, could be crippling. Very difficult to leave because of that feeling of responsibility to the mother? Of being the mother’s emotional centre and so it’s scary in case the mother falls apart – ultimately kills herself? I think that’s the shadow of your question, and it is really that shadow that I hope the poem is taking on squarely. That is part of the Demeter/ Persephone myth. In fact it’s the centre of the myth, and of every mother/daughter relationship. But I do think the poem is taking on these issues and coming through to acceptance – (also boredom and exhaustion). The poem “Daughter” maybe clarifies:

Now that I see

how in her own life

she is, in immanence, not about

to be,

in being

on the other side of the earth

she is

married to her own life

as only she can be

my daughter –

how could I have loved her

too closely –

how could I ever have loved

my mother too closely.

I’m not saying the poem makes one statement: there is ambiguity about statement and question in the last lines. (The reader will know from, or find out from “No wonder” that the speaker’s mother and grandmother “took the gun …put in their hands and fired it”). That’s if you have to limit the speaker. But there’s ambiguity about who the speaker is – is she daughter or mother? Perhaps both. The poem, like all the others in the sequence/cycle is a sonnet – one of the effects is to set up an expectation of some “conclusion’ to each poem, which is subverted. Now you have it, now you don’t. Of course sons have to leave too, as the Ur poems remind us, and as the poem that follows “Daughter” in my book acknowledges. I mean “Son”. As for exhaustion and boredom – I think they’re fairly typical sensations or feelings for late-fifty-somethings. In my case it certainly does have to do with that eternal question which can’t be separated from a depressive syndrome: what for? In “Burnt Offering” I had to remind myself that isn’t the question, the only real question is “how”. But I think this part of the poem is saying too that what I’m exhausted with is self-admonishment and caring about lack of perfection. It’s boring. So yes I’m depressive forgetful irritable – so what? (– “but now/ even the things that irritate me/I have begun to forget” – for me the poem is also a bit playful and light! )

Kyle Allan is a poet, performer, writer, recording artist and literary festival organiser living in Himeville in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. He released a CD of poetry, Influences, in 2013 and his debut print collection of poetry, House without walls, was published by Sibali Media in 2016.

His poems have been published in South African literary journals such as Fidelities, New Coin, New Contrast, Carapace, Kotaz, and Botsotso, and in literary journals in India and the USA.

He has contributed writing to a variety of publications, including the Natal Witness, LitNet, Mindmapsa and potholesandpadkos.

DH: Kyle, I first encountered you a few years ago on Facebook, when you contacted me saying you were planning to start a literary journal. I didn’t know who you were, but at the same time felt that I did know you – I just couldn’t think from where! Where are you from originally, and how did you come to poetry?

KA: I was born at Addington Hospital in Durban in 1987. In the 90s we moved between various places in Durban and the Midlands. From 1999 onwards we were permanently there, living outside Pietermaritzburg, in small towns: Wartburg, New Hanover and Dalton.

My poetry started with encountering the work of Wopko Jensma. It was in October 2002. I was interested in being a writer, perhaps a short story writer and novelist. I was always a voracious reader. However, I had no interest in poetry. I opened a book, A century of South African poetry by Micheal Chapman, which had belonged to my grandmother. In fact, I remember seeing this book, even as a kid in primary school, in my grandparents’ house, and nobody seemed to ever read it. It was one of those books whose role seemed to be to stay there in the bookcase, waiting. Then one day I opened it. The page that opened was near the end, with Jensma’s poems. I read the poems and the words struck me, they came out of the page into me with the way they conveyed life and its actuality. The rhythms and energy of what was being said. From there I read more poems in the book, and it took hold in me, the way a poem is put together, the continual search for what makes it work, it’s like a puzzle but so different, it’s a puzzle that forever comes with new permutations if you are willing to search. I began to write poems, which is what I am still doing fourteen years later. My first published poem appeared in Fidelities in 2005, I wrote it a few months before my sixteenth birthday, and there are a few poems in House without walls that I wrote when I was seventeen. I threw a lot of my teenage poems away, and I always get very irritated when I hear people being embarrassed about their early work. How do you learn to walk? By crawling, first. I am very proud of my crawling. I have never been the kind of person to be embarrassed about my humanity.

There is the influence of the Spanish modernists in your poetry; you have specifically mentioned Vallejo and Lorca. But there is also, of course, the tremendous influence of South African poets, particularly black South African poets, such as Mxolisi Nyezwa, Khulile Nxumalo and Seitlhamo Motsapi. There is also the influence of kwaito− in fact some of your poems have been performed to kwaito.

In my first year of reading poetry, I got any poetry books I could get my hand on, particularly at second-hand stores or book sales. For example, I bought Motsapi’s earthstepper/the ocean is very shallow for only R15 at a book sale because it couldn’t sell. I was 15. I bought two copies of Kobus Moolman’s Feet of the sky, one when it came out, and one two years later. I don’t know why two, maybe I felt bad that they wouldn’t sell, and I thought I could give one as a gift to someone. I ended up losing one copy. I bought an early edition of Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali’s Sounds of a Cowhide Drum at a second-hand shop. I loaned it to someone and never got it back. I also got the anthology Voices from Within at a second-hand bookstore. In these early days I bought books like The Bavino Sermons (Lesego Rampolokeng), ten flapping elbows, mama (Nxumalo), Rain across a paper field (Robert Berold), the girl who then feared to sleep (Angifi Dladla), Gova (Ike Mboneni Muila), Echo Location (Karen Press), The other city (Stephen Watson), to name just a few titles.

I read a lot of TS Eliot as well, and despite a contemporary drawing away from him, I find him extremely vital and direct as a writer. We mustn’t ever confuse simplicity and directness. The most direct writers are not often simple. I think his weakest poems are the most anthologised. His early poems, also the quatrains, and The Waste Land are all highly potent. Ash Wednesday is popular because it fits into the gentility mode of English poetry. I have struggled with a lot of English poetry because there seems to be so much pressure on English poets not to be too bold, experimental, not be too different. The sin of English poetry is an obsession with a moderate tone. That seeped over into our poetry a lot, and is slowly wearing out. It’s the kind of thing that held back writers such as Campbell and Livingstone. In the past, many of our writers were either writing in the English tradition or trying to react against its influence. To me it’s irrelevant in many ways. I am a South African, but I also feel really like a stranger to all lands, estranged alike from all the surface symbolism of nations. I’m just not into borders and all the attached baggage. I belong to whatever nationality of words remains authentic.

I didn’t get to the French and Spanish poets immediately, so my development was slightly delayed in that way. Then towards 2007/2008 I got books by Rimbaud, Lorca, Rilke, Leonard Cohen, some US writers, the Nigerian poet Uche Nduka, also Ingrid Jonker, Kelwyn Sole, Gabeba Baderoon. A book with all Dylan’s lyrics. Reading Kafka’s short stories also inspired me. But 2011 was where everything got capped off to a new level when I encountered Vallejo, and it the same time reviewed Malikanye by Nyezwa. Reading the two in combination is what released the energy to write most of the poems in House without walls. Most of them were completed or drafted in November/December 2011.

I drew to kwaito as a teenager. I liked Mapaputsi, Mzekezeke, Zola, Mdu, Brown Dash, Dr Mageu, I liked the way their content tasted of something very grainy, there was a type of static you felt growing in you, the restlessness of the actual. The feeling you have of something breaking open, the way you felt listening to, for example, going slightly off kwaito into hip hop, Skwattakamp “Umoya”. That feeling of wow, what is this? My life could change here. I don’t think I would feel the same way if I had been a teenager now, the type of music coming out, it feels very baroque, it’s baroque kwaito, baroque hip hop, baroque house, full of secondhand emotions and ideas and not the thing itself. There are obviously exceptions.

The job of a poet or singer is not to tell you what to do, but to tell you what is, and by implication what can be. I was also very struck by people like Simphiwe Dana. If I had to nominate any public figure to become the muse, I would nominate her. It’s become a popular trend among many of our intellectuals to criticise her because of the perception she is some kind of a sellout. That’s why I hate celebrity-hood. It’s a form of rape. People think you owe it to them to keep up to their expectations. In reality, as the saying goes, sometimes the best way to serve your age is to betray it.

You place a strong emphasis on poetry performance, on the oral delivery of poetry, and direct engagement with a physical audience. But you also place strong attention to poetry as ‘word on a page’. There has been a lot said and written about page vs. stage poetry for some time now, but of course it does not have to be an either/or scenario.

I am very comfortable in both, though I started from the written word mostly. I wrote for ten years before I really performed live. I wanted to come with something different, plus I am somewhat of either a perfectionist or perhaps self-conscious of errors, I am more self-conscious than people may realise.

I like direct communication. A lot of writers and performers say that, but what they really mean is crowd-pleasing. Rather what I like is to give the audience that moment of spontaneity, of something totally new and different, I want to give them clarity, energy, wakefulness.

The poem is the poem on both stage and page. Obviously in a weaker writer there are vocalisations and gestures and certain emotional appeals that can hide the weakness in the eyes of many. And on the other hand, you can take a really good poem and perform it to an audience that has been bought up to a certain type of poetry and expectation, and it will miss them, they will justify that on intellectual grounds, and the same poem you will perform to a rural high school where English is not a first language and the kids will have that look in their eyes, they will feel it, they won’t say it’s abstract or whatever, they will just say that it’s good.

It’s a human tendency to like to get into packs and share common denominators. I always have been different. I don’t get too close to people, but also I am open to everyone. There are a lot of other writers out there who transcend scenes as well, I must emphasise.

Ideally, there shouldn’t be any page vs. stage situation. Separately both have their limitations, both have their dangers. Just as you can fall into the tendency of writing to please a particular audience, so as a performer you can have a tendency to perform a particular type of poem to please you audience. Both scenes have their cliques and their objects of mediocrity. But art has always been like that. I can see at a glance if a poem on the page grabs me. I can feel if the performer has duende or not. And there are a lot of overhyped performers and writers, and a lot of underrated of the same.

I will repeat − both the written and spoken scene have their cliques. The spoken scene likes to posture itself as all forward thinking and radical, but many in the scene have got their own boxed ways of thinking sometimes, you will hear the pronouncements and legislations of the “this and that scene” and it’s extremely upsetting when people call themselves poets and legislate for others and yet know nothing of Motsapi, Nyezwa, Muila, Dladla and so on. They have created their own little world, carrying on as if poetry started with them.

You can’t win a war using the enemy’s weapon. You have to look at the structures of language. It’s ironic so often that people who project themselves as the most radical in political outlook, are often so conservative artistically. And that’s ultimately a contradiction that reveals itself. Watch in decades to come the real faces come out, see how many bios will get tweaked and rewritten.

And to the written cliques, we have our own “Georgian poets”.

In 2013 you released a poetry CD called influences. How was it put together, what was the poetry on the CD like, and what your experience of releasing such a CD?

It was a good CD and experience, but I will never record that way again. I will do things organically. It’s also that I like having a large creative control over what I do, and with this album I was signed to a label and there were certain constraints in terms of song length and album length, which was defined according to what is commercially possible. And I understand it’s a business, so they have their own motivations, which is why I know now I must do it my own way totally, no label. That’s why the last creative field I will enter is the film industry, as that is the most expensive to produce, and when I want to make a film, I want to produce it with no compromises.

I will return with everything completely composed, as pieces that have been performed live regularly. With the previous album, basically I would recite a poem and the producer would compose music around that. So we would create work in the studio and months later it would be performed live. And the two producers did a great job. But in future I will do it organically. Live takes of musicians in the studio. I want it to be performed live first then put in the studio.

You were a participant at Poetry Africa in 2014 and have also been active organising poetry festivals of your own – firstly in Swellendam and now in Underberg. Can you tell us more about these events?

What I like about Poetry Africa is how it brings poets from different countries and experiences and backgrounds together, and the unity and encouragement it gives you. I like that it reminds you that we can live a world without borders. I like that it has a strong focus on poets from around the continent.

One night when I performed, I said, "I am representing South Africa, but first and foremost I am representing the USA – United States of Africa".

At the Swellendam events, I hosted mostly poets from Cape Town, people like Croc E Moses, Nazlee Arbee and Ziphozakhe Hlobo, to name a few, along with some diverse local talent. They were predominantly poetry-centred but we accommodated all genres, featuring local hip hop, classical piano, R&B, among others. With my events, the focus will always be poetry, but at the same time I struggle to organise purely poetry events − this is because of my own interest in a diversity of arts and genres, and I have to be true to myself. I greatly enjoyed the town, but for various factors left, including health and lack of opportunities.

In Underberg, I organised the Underberg Himeville Arts Festival in partnership with the Family Literacy Project. We hosted poets such as Muila, Frank Meintjies, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Kwazi Ndlangisa, as well as other writers and theatre and poetry groups and people in the arts and media world, people like Zuki Vutela (known as Zookey), and local talent. There were also regular poetry workshops, where many kids started writing poetry, and began to develop.

Prior to these events, around 2010- 2012, I did a few small-scale events in kwaSwayimane and New Hanover. In future I will do something there again.

My focus in organising these types of festivals is the act of encounter, which is central to the word and all communication. What happens in a good festival is that you establish a place for people to encounter each other in authenticity. Audience encounters a diversity of performers and ideas. Poets encounter musicians, musicians encounter theatre, and so on. Performance poets encounter poets who focus on the written word. They share ideas. Performance poets learn about poetry magazines and meet poets they might never have heard of. Written poets take their work beyond the normal places. It leads to sharing and the discussing of ideas, which is what our society needs. We need more festivals.

Next year I am organising the Inter Fest in Pietermaritzburg. Similar recipe, but adding more interesting conversations.

In 2016 you published your first collection, House without walls, through your imprint Sibali Media. What was your experience of this? You seem to be managing your own distribution. What has been the attitude of bookstores? Have they been helpful?

I expected it to be difficult, but I have managed to clear without major bookstores, on my own, around a hundred books. I have contacted and spoken to major players, no positive response. I’m also not going to run after them. I think long term we can’t always depend on a relationship with major bookshops if they are not the ones who come to us. A long-term solution could be some type of writer’s cooperative owned bookshops. Obviously the bookshops say poetry doesn’t sell so they have to look at economic realities. Well, let us then be innovative and look at more ways to distribute without them. It’s 2016. I’m brainstorming on this now.

Some people asked why I didn’t just publish electronically. I think the book must come in print first. Anyone can publish electronically. After about April, I will probably put an electronic version of my poems up, or else distribute it to those who cannot for various reasons get the print version. There are many people out there who have immediate priorities than buying books, and I don’t want to create a situation where people are excluded from knowledge. It’s not going to be a lost sale. They were not going to be able to buy anyway. I will probably try and encourage it to be downloaded and distributed heavily among school goers. I have a school that will be teaching with some of my poems this year.

It’s why I also question the obsession of a war against piracy. Piracy wouldn’t exist in this country without there being great economic divides. People buy pirated CDs because they cannot afford genuine CDs. So now, must we criminalise people for being poor? It’s absurd. That’s why I also prefer to be in complete control of my work. So that in future, when I see my work being pirated, I know that the people who read it will benefit. I will never prosecute people for their poverty. We need to recognise the real crime, and act against it.

That is why, writers and artists, if serious about decolonisation, long term need to consider a direct relationship to the public. They also need to consider, particularly musicians, the greed of big music labels. To save the music industry, we need to destroy it first. If you can sell your music direct to the public, you can sell it more affordably. This is the 21^st century. We don’t need to depend on middlemen, and neither on big music labels. We can’t speak decolonisation and then walk past this.

Do you have further plans for Sibali Media? You mentioned wanting to start up a literary journal. What are your feelings about publishing poetry in South Africa?

Publishing poetry is not easy in South Africa, but extremely necessary. The publishing of a book is a very potent act of activism in society, not just to the general structure of society, but even in our relationship to other literary endeavours. I think our biggest challenge is to go beyond what we conceive of as “poetry audiences”. Obviously it doesn’t help that many institutions do not buy into this vision, which means we have to be proactive. I want to publish a poetry magazine in the form of a newspaper that should be available for R5. A paper that you will see sold at robots and at taxi ranks and in tearooms. I want all our poets, from spoken and written backgrounds, those from both backgrounds, to reach an audience of thousands. And then poetry will counter the dominance of rhetoric and slogans and facile symbolism of our times.

It’s not difficult to be creative with the book, and its meaning, that it expands beyond the pages and onto the streets, onto walls, on street signs, in our clothing, in everyday things we use, so that this authentic communication is everywhere.

Because poetry also is intensely physical for me, like my skin.

What are the challenges facing South African poetry?

I think every poetry landscape has layers. There are poets and there are poets. Even in some of the best periods of poetry, not everyone will be a poet. There are a lot of poets who may have a few good poems, but only a few who can put a strong oeuvre together.

With regards to the South African poetry scene, it is a scene and many scenes and directions. I spoke earlier of how its important how cross current must meet each other. This is not to be one type of literature, but rather that diversity can flourish but at a high level of excellence. As we know, iron sharpens iron.

There will obviously be more good writers emerging, if they are able to encounter a diversity of work like I encountered, and not be boxed in by a certain teaching of poetry or by becoming controlled by a “scene”.

I also think it a pity that there is still this kind of fear or marginalisation of more dynamic work by those in various establishment roles. You know in a sense you are being marginalised when people use words like experimental, they define you as an otherness to what is assumed as literary normality. But in terms of you yourself as a writer, if you want to write, you will write, whether you get recognition or not, whether people label you or don’t label you. The act of writing is between you and the page ultimately, a time when you are least of all the person society defines you as, a space where you as a writer are free to be completely honest with yourself. In fact, sometimes recognition can be the worst thing for a writer, he then gets absorbed into the bigger society gestalt, when it would be better to be always on the edge of things.

What would be good nevertheless, are more poetry magazines that reach out to a larger amount of people, because this is a counter to all the clichés and slogans and news stories with their subtle salience towards the interests of those in power. I think more South African poetry needs to be in libraries, especially schools libraries. There are a lot of gifted young writers who have been given a start by being able to access a wide range of novels, including novels written in the last decade or so. So we need the same thing for poetry books, everywhere.

The poems 'You have no notebook' and 'Your silent tongue' are from House without walls, which is available at select bookstores in KwaZulu-Natal or directly from Sibali Media at kyleallanpoet@gmail.com. If ordered directly from Sibali Media, the price is R100 including postage and packaging.

Adrian Manning is an English poet and micro-publisher. He has had a number of chapbooks published, including Wretched Songs For Out of Tune Musicians, Down At The Laundromat, Bring Down The Sun (with Henry Denander), These Days, Days Like This(with John Dorsey) and 13 Poems from the Edge of Extinction. His poems have been published around the world and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the founder of Concrete Meat Press, a micro-press that publishes poetry broadsides and chapbooks.

He lives in Leicester, England.

DH: How and when did you start writing poetry? I am curious about the contemporary poetry scene in England. I regard most English poetry as conservative. Is there a strong ‘alternative’ poetry/literary culture there?

AM: I started writing when I was a teenager, about 17 or 18. I had a notebook in which I used to record my thoughts about my confused worldview at the time. It was sort of like a diary but the thoughts took on a poetic prose form. I became more serious about writing poems when I was studying for my degree and I borrowed a housemate’s electric typer. I have a collection of strange and probably not particularly good poems, but it was a start. I continued until my first poem was published in 1997 in a small magazine called Mudvein in the USA. Coincidentally, the poem was called "The First Poem" and that was really the start of what I would consider my serious writing. In those early days I submitted to magazines, this was before I had access to the internet, in the USA and New Zealand, purely because I was reading poets from outside the UK and corresponding with some poets from outside the UK as a fan. I bought the first two issues of Mudveinbecause one of them had a poem by Charles Bukowski in it. When I received it, I thought I'd give it a shot myself. Getting that acceptance was one of the major points in my writing career and always will be. The poem was published and Bukowski was in the same issue. I thought that was it! What more did I want? Of course, I continued writing and the goals got bigger.

I have always been interested mostly in American poetry ‒ certainly I was at that time. British poetry was not on my radar. As I have widened my reading over the years I can appreciate more British poetry but I'm still of the opinion that most writing that interests me is from outside of the UK. I don't really know about alternative poetry scenes in Britain. I have never been part of one. I know only a few English poets, amazingly. A lot of British poetry is conservative. There are some magazines around that are striking more of an alternative note, but I don't seem to have got involved with them ‒ so far!

There are poetry readings in England but I have limited experience of them. The first reading I ever went to was Allen Ginsberg in Wales! There are festivals, open-mic nights and so on as you would expect, but I notice that my fellow poets in the USA are more involved in group poetry readings of like-minded poets and visiting other cities. This is not something that I am aware of here. I have done a limited number of readings – my first was in London at a magazine launch. I then had a large gap between readings. My next was an event I organised called Beat and Beyond featuring Jim Burns, editor and poet Michael Curran from London and myself. We also showed films of various poets from outside the UK reading their poetry. This was held at a local venue – The Musician in Leicester, which I love and I have read there since. I'm still limited in the number of live readings I have done but I am hoping to do more soon. As for selling poetry at events– my experience is that you can sell a small number of books. That's just my experience – other poets may have different stories to tell. There is a small scene gathering just outside of Leicester in a town called Corby and I'm hoping to get involved in that sometime soon.

You have cited elsewhere poets such as William Wantling and Charles Bukowski as being influences. You have also spoken of your poetry as being ‘Meat Poetry’. What is that?

I had no real interest in poetry until I read Bukowski back in the 1980s. He wrote about the reality of his life and it was appealing to me. I started buying more Bukowski and completely fell for the man, the myth and the legend, whether it was ugly or beautiful. Reading Bukowski led me to other poets. I corresponded with A.D. Winans from that point on and Jim Burns, a British poet that I rate very highly, and they helped me to learn more about the poetry of the 1960s and 70s, including William Wantling. I started to investigate and collect works by these poets. Some of these are called Meat Poets and to me it meant that they wrote about the gritty and real issues of life without unnecessary flowery and overcomplicated language. I liked that and I hoped that my poems would be similar. I certainly started that way and still feel some of my poems reflect this. However, I am aware as time has passed different elements, including a more surrealistic style, have developed as well.

You are also a publisher, and run Concrete Meat Press. When and why did you decide to start up your own press?

I started Concrete Meat Press in 2004. I had a small collection of poems under the title Down At The Laundromat which I wanted to publish and give to some friends. So, I printed them myself on my computer and hand-painted washing machines on the covers in watercolours and sent them out under the Concrete Meat Press name. I only published ten numbered copies and then it was gone. I didn't really intend to publish much more until I did a joint broadside with David Barker and a chapbook called Too Much Me by David also. Since then I have published a few broadsides, some chapbooks of varying sizes and the Concrete Meat Sheet both in print and online.

Concrete Meat Press publishes chapbooks , micro-books and broadsides, with very small print runs. This is in the small press tradition. How receptive are English poets to such formats? In South Africa, poets generally want to be published in perfect-bound books.

I publish in very small runs for a few reasons. Personally, I always like having one of a limited number of an item ‒it's the collector in me. Secondly, I'm not a businessman and selling poetry seems very difficult so I don't want to make hundreds and be left with them! I like to give away a lot of what I publish, so the less I have the quicker it goes! I've described Concrete Meat as a micro-press; smaller than the small press. Again, I mostly publish folks from outside the UK for the reasons explained before. The English poets I have published have been happy with the small runs. I still get so much pleasure looking at a small chapbook from the 60s onwards as opposed to perfect-bound books. It does seem now that most poets are publishing their early works, even their first collection, in perfect-bound paperback form. I haven't had a collection of my own published in paperback yet! I take chapbooks seriously but others may not. I'm happy to swim against the tide on that one.

I love print publications – you can't beat receiving and holding the work in your hands and taking it off the shelf. I have been published online and have published other poets online. The appeal of this is that it's more immediate and obviously has the potential to be much wider-reaching in its audience. But I still prefer print.

Do you find your role as poet and publisher compatible or do they sometimes conflict?

They are fairly compatible in that I enjoy reading new poems and publishing them ‒ it's pretty special to get poems from great poets that are not generally available. I also find seeing the poems an inspiration at times. Obviously, I also pursue my own writing too. I only publish what I like. I keep writing in my own way regardless of what I have published or plan to publish. I'm pretty slow at publishing, I have to admit, which is why I only do small runs of small books. I'm probably not the best role model as a publisher! That is another reason why I call Concrete Meat Press a micro-press. This is also why I end up giving a lot of publications away! I reiterate ‒ I'm a lousy businessman! My main focus is writing and getting my own poems into the world, so that takes priority overall.

You have published poems about the 1960s Cleveland poet d.a.levy, and also published poets who were associated with him – D.R. Wagner, Kent Taylor and Tom Kryss. Has levy – in his dual role as poet and publisher – had an influence on you?

Yes. There have been some very important poet influences on me. Bukowski and Burns I've mentioned. d.a. levy is another. I admire his stance ‒ write and publish poetry and give it away! I know he sold publications ‒ he had to eat ‒ but so much was handed out and sent in the mail to people. I admire the works he and his associates published ‒ how they look, feel ‒ the guts they had inside them. Kryss, rjs, Taylor and Wagner were so important in that regard. I love his productivity (even though I cannot match it) When I started thinking of authors to publish in my Solid Flesh For Food series I wanted to have all these poets included. Kent Taylor is one of my favourite poets and everyone should read his poems, Wagner and Kryss are legends too. I contacted rjs but he doesn't write anymore and said he would rather give his slot to a newer poet. This whole Cleveland group has influenced me on so many ways.

You have published and/or are associated with poets who are also accomplished artists, such as D.R. Wagner, Tom Kryss and Henry Denander. And you are also an artist. Are you particularly attracted to the work of poets who are also artists – as was levy and others – including Bukowski.

I've always loved the artwork of Bukowski and really liked the idea of putting art into poetry books as Black Sparrow did with his first editions. When I published David Barker's Too Much Me I did 26 lettered copies with an original watercolour painting tipped in. levy's art is always interesting ‒ his methods, materials and variety are really fascinating. I like the silkscreen printed covers and Kryss was very involved in this. My link with Henry Denander came when Bill Roberts of Bottle of Smoke Press published my first book, Wretched Songs for Out of Tune Musicians, and he suggested Henry do the cover. I loved his idea, became good friends with him and began to collect his poetry and publications. He is an all-round great fellow. I've been honoured to publish a split chap with him, my photos adorned the cover, and he supplied the cover painting for my split chapbook with John Dorsey, These Days, Days Like This.

I am keen on adding something more to my chapbooks, so if I can I like to add some art. I painted the cover of Repeating The Mantra (Bottle of Smoke Press), the aforementioned first Concrete Meat Press book, provided the cover photo for my chapbook All This I See Before Me, All This I Cannot Resist (Alternating Current Press), have hand-painted covers to the reissue of These Hands of Mine (Concrete Meat Press) and I did hand-crayoned abstracts in each of the first 50 copies of These Days… so yes, I guess I have been very influenced by the poet/painters that I have come across! I like word and images mixed together at times. Levy, Kenneth Patchen, William Blake and others have done this well. I've been very fortunate to have the extremely talented Janne Karlsson illustrate several of my poems and my chapbook Wide Asleep, Fast Awake, which I am very proud of. It's something that works for me in the right conditions.

What is your opinion of the industries that have grown up around some of the US beat writers, such as Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg? There also seems to be an industry around Bukowski.

I like the fact that the interest around them ensures that we keep seeing new publications of their work or writing about them. What does make me sad is that the prices of the older books are so high that average collectors cannot afford them! For example, the Bukowski books with paintings!! These writers/poets became very well known and I admire and read them all so I guess where popularity leads to money there is always going to be those who seek to capitalise on it. I get saddened when I read of people other than the writers themselves making vast amounts of money out of their reputation and work. I'm not a capitalist, so anything like that does sadden me.

What projects do you have on the go?

I've recently published two short chapbooks ‒ Dreams from Under a Rock through my press and 13 Poems from the Edge of Extinction, published by the wonderful John Burroughs at Crisis Chronicles Press. I have some poems coming up in publications and I am looking at a poetry reading coming up later in the year. I am also hoping to jump on stage with the incredible Mountaintop Junkshop ‒ I read a poem of mine in one of their songs ‒ soon.

I have been working on a joint chapbook with an American poet that I hope will be out before the year-end and I have some collections of poems that I would like to get out sometime. I am turning 50 late this year, so I would like to get a selected poems volume from the last 20 years together to mark the occasion ‒I may even go for a paperback publication!

I will be completing publication of further Solid Flesh For Food chapbooks ‒ Neeli Cherkovski, Linda King, Catfish McDaris, Jake St John and the guitarist from an America alternative rock band who I can't name just yet ‒ if it comes together! There will be one more slot as I'll end on number 10 and that's undecided as yet.

I also contribute to a local Leicester culture magazine called Great Central‒ I have a couple of interviews ‒ one with a local band and one with a legend, and some reviews I'm working on and whatever comes up with that ‒ so there's plenty going on!

Philip Hammial: Outsider poet and artist

Vonani Bila:no brand-puppet poet

Arja Salafranca: embracing short fiction

Alan Finlay: poetry as intervention

Subhankar Das: an independent path

Ingrid Andersen: the literary shift from print to pixel

Yannis Livadas: The margins of a central man

Kobus Moolman: defending the value of poetry

Pravasan Pillay: humour me

Gail Dendy: dancing in verse

Mxolisi Nyezwa: a new dawn for poetry

Dawn Garisch: observing the patterns

Kelwyn Sole: Dreaming the everyday

Haidee Kruger: shaking language out of the furrows of habit

Erik Vatne: In service to the poem

Khulile Nxumalo: Seeking new ways of saying

Catfish McDaris: an old-school outlaw

How: An interview with Joan Metelerkamp

Kyle Allan: Poetry as physical intensity

Adrian Manning: A poetic microcosm