Poets From South Africa

"I remember being read to as a child. I read to my own son every night until he was able to read books for himself. I confess that I enjoyed it as much as he did. I did all the voices."

"They stripped him of the very dignity we had spoken about in discussing Nineteen Eighty-Four, and they did it because, to them, he was 'just another kaffir', and that is what I will never forgive them for."

"The challenge South Africa is having is poverty and unemployment and the biggest barrier to this is the skills gap."

"My whole life has felt like a long deeply unsatisfying love affair with my mother. She is the beloved who doesn't love back."

"I wanted my writing to offer an account of what it was like to take care of my mother, the details of that experience, the feelings, the lived experience. Women often do work like this that is unacknowledged, unseen. So, I guess I wanted to make it visible – not just my work, but this kind of work of taking care of elderly parents, of a child."

"To write was a need; I had to write down messages, to tell apartheid's horrors."

"Rooted in Salt River, Simon’s Town and Ocean View, Gladys Thomas’s narration of the struggle of a nation for freedom challenged the construct of ‘forgotten communities’. She championed the tribulations and triumphs of people who did not have the means to tell their stories in the distinctive and memorable way in which she took up their plight."

"I always imagined poetry is supposed to be beauty, about beauty and pleasant things. Well I sat in a train one day and saw this lorry full of furniture going, coming here... and I wrote a poem about Group Areas ‘Fall tomorrow.’ In the last stanza I wrote, that the government of that time is going to fall [ ]. This was about the anger. Bringing out all the anger of moving and seeing this people moving and seeing people breaking up their wardrobes and their cupboards because it can’tfit through the doors here."

"The problem I have with streaming it is that it doesn't take account of different audiences and markets. It doesn't distinguish between a popular musician whose (millions of) fans are willing to only pay two cents for a stream and a jazz artist whose smaller fan base is willing to pay two dollars to listen to their work. As things stand, the jazz artist can't take advantage of it."

"These days, as an artist, you can tour and if you prove to a brand that your free download attracted thousands of eyeballs, then brand endorsements become an option. These channels open up new income streams. Then you look at streaming platforms and you realize they're not really paying anybody and won't ever be your main revenue source. Streaming is like a business card; it's a way to get people familiar with your music while you take advantage of other channels to make money."

"I tell every 18-year old who wants to rap that if they spend just one hour understanding what music publishing is, what IP is, what royalties are, and what their rights are, they will do more for their music than the three hours they spend on YouTube figuring out how to mix a new drum pattern. The entry barrier to music is virtually nonexistent now because of technology. That makes musicians vulnerable and means they need to be IP savvy."

"And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?"

"I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences."

"It's hard for me to speak, whether in English or Afrikaans. The reason I write is because I cannot speak. I feel blunt."

"By not dealing with past human rights violations, we are not simply protecting the perpetrators' trivial old age ; we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

"Words are such thin shavings of the fractal fruit, tiny scraping of the skin that holds these joyously determined swirls of history inside their juicy turbulence. Talking itself westward after the day's feast, each little word with its meaning strapped to its back falls down the swell of tomorrow like a hiker with hopeful new shoes."

"His most celebrated poems are, of course, the historical-satirical ballads (A or even X certificate) in which a person or period is "hit off", in the sense both of being preserved and hit for six."

"His poetry may be divided into comic extravaganza on the one hand, and more personal work on the other. There is no one like him in the world in the former genre; as a "light poet" he is preferable to John Betjeman – as fluent in traditional forms, his work is never vitiated by refuge in the poetical or high sentimental, and his choice of words is subtler, funnier and altogether sharper. In his other vein Plomer is fastidious, reticent, elegant and the author of some memorable and moving lines."

"Brzeska and Brooke were among those she knew And she lived long enough to meet Lawrences, too, D. H. and T. E. – she who'd known R. L. S., Talked to Hardy of Kim, and to Kipling of Tess!"

"So never say to D'Arcy, 'Be your age!' — He'd shrivel up at once or turn to stone."

"'Look who's here! Do come and help us fiddle while Rome burns!'"

"A rose-red sissy half as old as time."

"When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin: An abstemious man would reel at her look As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book."

"A pleasant old duffer, nephew to a lord, Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword, And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad: Just like an old liberal Between the wars."

"With first-rate sherry flowing into second-rate whores, And third-rate conversation without one single pause: Just like a young couple Between the wars."

"Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designed Than other times when blind men into ditches led the blind, When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind, And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind."

"A family portrait not too stale to record Of a pleasant old buffer, nephew to a lord, Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword, And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad: Just like an old liberal Between the wars."

"On a sofa upholstered in panther skin Mona did researches in ."

"Out of that bungled, unwise war An alp of unforgiveness grew."

"It's so utterly out of the world! So fearfully wide of the mark! A Robinson Crusoe existence will pall On that unexplored side of the Park — Not a soul will be likely to call!"

"The commonplace needs no defence, Dullness is in the critic’s eyes, Without a licence life evolves From some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms, Behind these hedges trimly shorn, As in a stable once, so here It may be born, it may be born."

"Who strolls so late, for mugs a bait, In the mists of Maida Vale, Sauntering past a stucco gate Fallen, but hardly frail?"

"We hear a great deal about sex nowadays; it is possible to overestimate its importance, because there are always people who pay it little attention or who apparently manage, like Sir Isaac Newton, to get along, without giving it a thought."

"Mappe del corpo (A cura di Paola Splendore, Donzelli Poesia, Rome, 2008)"

"Transfer (Snailpress, Cape Town, 1997)"

"Familiar Ground (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1988)"

"Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (Seven Stories Press, NYC, 2006); also published as Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (Umuzi, Random House, South Africa, 2006)"

"Map age genes place of origin and love's lineaments.For mapped onto each body is love.Carthography of one's own country or the contours of a foreign land"

"Terrestrial Things (Kwela/Snailpress, Cape Town, 2002)"

"Campbell has not any regulation political bias, I think. He may incline to Franco because he is a catholic, and to the Old Spain rather than the New Spain because he likes bullfights and all the romantic things. But of politics he has none, unless they are such as go with a great antipathy for the English "gentleman" in all his clubmanesque varieties; a great attachment to the back-Veldt of his native South Africa; and a constant desire to identify himself with the roughest and simplest of his fellow-creatures in pub, farm, and bullring. Such politics as go with those predilections and antipathies he has, but it would be difficult to give them a name. He certainly is neither a communist nor a fascist."

"He made enemies. He was held up as a Fascist by the poets of the Left but since they had already decreed that Plato was a Fascist, this too was something of a compliment. I once heard this wicked Fascist calmly recall that he had to leave South Africa because of the hostility he had aroused by seriously defending the cause of the Blacks in his writings...His reactions were those of a pastoral world in opposition to the industrial capital – the Tentacular City with its literary intrigues devised by the Intellect."

"South Africa, renowned both far and wide For politics and little else beside."

"You praise the firm restraint with which they write – I'm with you there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?"

"Of all the clever people round me here I most delight in Me – Mine is the only voice I care to hear, And mine the only face I like to see."

"With white tails smoking free, Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show Their kinship to their sisters of the sea – And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow. Still out of hardships bred, Spirits of power and beauty and delight Have ever on such frugal pastures fed And loved to course with tempests through the night."

"We shall not meet again: over the wave Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless – But mine is short and crooked to the grave: Yet what of these dark crowds, amid whose flow I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless – Are not their generations, vague and endless, The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?"

"The timeless, surly patience of the serf That moves the nearest to the naked earth And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers."

"The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss As intimate as love, as cold as death."

"I love to see, when leaves depart, The clear anatomy arrive, Winter, the paragon of art, That kills all forms of life and feeling Save what is pure and will survive."

"Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction, Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire."