1. Reflect on the poetry of Douglas
Livingstone and the title of your volume:
A harmless
passion, surely,
an unobtrusive
vice
this waiting
game of making
small books of
verse.
Douglas Livingstone
These are the last
four lines of Douglas’s thin volume, A
Rosary of Bone. I was taken by the notion of writing poetry as, variously,
a passion, a vice, and a game, all aimed at making small collections of verse.
Whichever noun one might prefer, all three approaches are harmless to other
people. I am reminded of Auden’s assertion that “poetry makes nothing happen.” In
using the word, “vice” in my title, I construe it more
as a bad habit rather than as something wicked or evil. And, of course, having
published my first poems in the mid-1970s, but having my debut volume published
in 2018, there has been considerable waiting! In essence, then, I think these lines
encapsulate my poetry-writing career.
As far as Douglas’s
poetry is concerned, I have an enormous respect and admiration for its
achievement, not least for its exemplary diversity in subject, style, form, and
technical skill. Despite some critics’ views that he was no more than a
“veld-and-vlei” poet, I believe he remains one of South Africa’s major poets in
English.
2. I
see a strong influence of W.H. Auden on your poetry with the references to
Icarus and suffering ("About suffering they were never wrong ...". Is
this an "unobtrusive" influence or a relevant intertext?
Musée des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The myth itself has become something of a harmless passion because it offers so many possibilities to readers. For me, Icarus ceases to be a boy disobeying his father and getting his proper punishment but rather the young rebel daring to risk and challenge, who is, in the words of e.e. cummings, not afraid “to dare to answer ‘no’”, and perhaps dying early for it. He epitomises what the 1960s, the Beat poets, Britain’s Angry Young Men, and Woodstock were all about. As a student in the 1960s, I readily identified with that intellectual counter-culture in many ways.
3. You refer to Joseph Campbell:
‘Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted
as biography, history, or science, it is killed.’
Joseph Campbell
Is this true of poetry as well?
The iconic Campbell could be quite
flamboyant at times in his enthusiasm! I suspect he was warning us about the
possibility of losing myth as myth when we try, as some have done, to
metamorphose it into history or science, et cetera. I believe that his warning
has considerable pertinence to poetry as well.
4. You write sonnets and SENRYU, a darker form of the haiku. You play
with different forms. What are the implications of a form for the meaning of a
poem?
We can lose a poem’s meaning in a welter of
technical trickery, which may well be impressive in a superficial sense but is
little more than that. Concrete poetry is a little like that. There can be an
after-taste of “So what?” Technical flamboyance can never be a substitute for
authentic meaning.
Poems must have some sense of architecture
holding their various elements together to the benefit of the meaning. Whether
that structure is overt, as in the case of the haiku and the sonnet, or covert,
as in free verse, doesn’t matter as long as it is there. What irks me is sloppy,
usually undisciplined writing masquerading as “free verse”. Free verse requires
as much structuring as a haiku or sonnet, if not more.
Douglas Livingstone said about the sonnet:
“It tests skill with word choice –
monosyllabic, polysyllabic, alliteration, assonance. It tests rhythmic control
with variety – the end-stopped line or run-on line. It tests rhyming
capabilities – full, half, internal. If we were to put all who claim to be
poets to such a test, we’d soon identify the poseurs.” I suspect the results
might be quite revealing! Or mortifying!
Another value of
trying to master the technical aspects of poetry’s established forms is that,
one way or another, they all have prescribed endings. Many aspiring free-verse
poets write well beyond their text’s proper end. In The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound said, in his usual melange of
languages, “Dicten = Condensare”, which says it all.
5. I really love your
poems on your "family romance". Was it difficult to write these
portraits? They could also be read as self-portraits: "The Government as
Biographer". Comment.
It was challenging.
First, we went to India when I was seven years old. My parents both came from
families that didn’t talk or discuss matters. And they behaved similarly. As
the only child, I was usually presented with a fait accomplit, concisely phrased: “Anthony, we’re going to India.” My
parents didn’t include me in any discussion of their plans, and that held true
right through their lives. For example, I never knew when or how my parents
met. It was not the sort of thing I could ask. But then my father had no idea
what his grandfather’s Christian name was. And I have no idea why my father
kept taking his wife and child overseas.
Wherever we went –
India, Sudan, Kenya – one or other grandparent died in England. We never
attended any of their funerals. But I had photographs and sketchy recollections
of them. I also have a cousin living in England who has been able to fill me in
or set me right in factual matters. I have grown to understand that the families
on both sides were fucked up in multiple ways. And I wanted to capture some of
that abnormality in lives masquerading as normal. I suppose it was a way of
trying to nurture some prosthetic roots for myself, too. I have always been the
Other, the Outsider, l’étranger as
far as local populations and local languages were concerned, and consequently aware
of a deep-seated feeling of being what Wallace Stevens calls “a most
inappropriate man / In a most unpropitious place”, with a concomitant longing
to feel “at home” at least somewhere.
6. You are a master of
irony and satire. Is this only true of more mature poets?
error
lies in the distance
between the eyes
and the desire
desire
lies in the distance
between the eyes
and the error
I think satire is more
raucous than irony. The poem, “The Bloemfontein Sunday Blues” is, or at least is meant to be read as, a satire. Giving the poem its subtitle, “A Satire”, is
satirical in itself, of course. In the main, it is probably better suited to
the rebellious younger self. Satire usually focuses on issues, major or minor,
in the outside world, and is inclined towards the public and the political.
Irony tends towards reflection on both internal and external realities, at a
more personal level. It is one of the means by which we come to understand our
lives and what happens to us. A developed sense of maturity as well as a
significant body of experience certainly helps to comprehend, and write about,
life’s ironies.
7. You annotate a poem
by Breytenbach. Is this postmodernism-in-action?
In the last two lines
of “Ars Poetica”, Archibald MacLeish asserts: “A poem should not mean/But be.” Breytenbach’s
brief poem seemed to be countering that notion with the idea that the meaning
of the poem is the poem itself. It prompted two responses for me. The first was
that Breytenbach’s poem seemed to strike at the heart of what poetry writing’s function
is all about: to mean. The question arising immediately thereafter – for me at
least – was: For whom? So the
annotations are an attempt at answering that question for me as the poet and
for me as the reader.
I suppose the poem’s
self-consciousness might be said to exemplify postmodernism-in-action. And its
intertextuality.
8. You write exquisite
poems of painters and paintings, for instance, on Judith Mason. How do you see
the so-called ekphrastic poem?
Believe it or not, I
wrote the poems on Judith Mason’s paintings in the mid-1970s, as responses to my
first encounters with them and, later, the artist herself, albeit briefly. It was
almost three decades later before I learnt what the process was called!
Perhaps part of that
interest lies in the fact that my father was an unfulfilled, above-average
artist whose visual skills I wanted to emulate, but couldn’t. So when the
Archive for Research into Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) began a Poetry Portal
devoted to ekphrastic poetry, I began submitting poems. They presented an
artwork to readers every quarter. Ultimately, I published eighteen poems from
the end of 2012 until the first issue of 2017 until they changed their Poetry
Portal format.
The ekphrastic
process, with a poem as its outcome, fascinates me. I look at an artwork and
wonder why it is evoking – perhaps “provoking” is a better word? - the responses I experience. Why should the
depiction of a veil remind me of the mantillas I bought in Pamplona in 1961?
I’m intrigued by the psychological machinations the mind gets up to when it is
confronted by an artwork of some kind.
The essential
challenge of the process lies how the viewer-poet’s responses to the visual may
be transmedialised into the verbal. Some recent ekphrasic poems have little or
nothing to with its original exclusively descriptive purpose, while the
viewer-poet’s responses may have equally little to do with the subject of the
artwork.
Ultimately, the
question is whether an ekphrastic poem can exist without its companion artwork.
9. Comment:
Poetry is a piece of very private
history
which unobtrusively lets us
into the secrets of a man’s life.
Henry David Thoreau
I think Thoreau’s
words pick up on Livingstone’s words which we spoke about earlier, while
focusing on the place of autobiography in one’s poems. I’m one of those who believe
that an individual’s written output, in whatever genres, is always autobiographical
to some extent or another. I mention this because it exemplifies the so-called
“reveal or conceal” dilemma that poets face frequently, a dilemma made more
complex by any intimate materials that they might want to explore poetically.
Like writing about one’s family, one’s relationships or divorces, one’s
illnesses. Putting one’s private life into a public arena, even the small one
of poetry readership, is a matter of subtlety and cautious courage. I’m
thinking here of Beverly Rycroft’s first collection, for instance, or the work
of Jane Kenyon.
Some poets adopt an in-your-face,
stuff-the-consequences approach, perhaps because they have no wish to
compromise their truth, no matter how brash or hurtful, for any sort of harmony,
domestic or otherwise. For my part, however, I feel that writers have an ethical
responsibility not to malign those with whom they have shared private lives at
one time or another. I’m thinking here of the brouhaha surrounding Robert
Lowell’s volume, The Dolphin (1973). It earned him a good deal of negative
criticism, not only because he quoted from his ex-wife’s private letters, which
some critics regarded as a questionable practice in itself, but also because he
had actually altered their content,
which his friend, Elizabeth Bishop, called “infinite mischief” as it was
“violating a trust”. She tells him quite unequivocally: “art just isn’t worth
that much.”
For me, sensitive readers will always be able to detect the secrets of a
poet’s life as much by what his poems do not say as by what they do, and by
what they avoid writing about rather than by the overt subjects of their poems.
Generally speaking, the issue of autobiography in poetry is less about facts,
accuracy, and historical verifiability, and more about a sense of authenticity
through which the poet adds something genuine and, in some way, familiar (even
if imagined) to the boundless reservoir of human experience.
10. You are a well-known translator of
Afrikaans poetry. How do you see the position of Afrikaans poetry?
I believe that Afrikaans has produced an
incredibly impressive body of poetry, and has established a strong tradition as
a consequence. I am always astounded by the number of collections of Afrikaans
poetry that are published annually. And I would say categorically that there
can never be enough good poetry published. Of course, that places emphasis on
the word, “good”, putting the responsibility for quality control on publishers.
Unfortunately, they may well be tempted to publish mediocre manuscripts for a
variety of reasons other than quality. My wife and I come across some of these
lesser works when we are looking for translation material. The responsibility
for the critical negativity that such average publications and their poets
receive must sit squarely with publishers and their manuscript readers. In the
rush for ingenuity or experimentation, superficial cleverness is often
acclaimed at the expense of serious craftsmanship. And I see this as a possible
danger for Afrikaans poetry.