Report on Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74 By Finuala Dowling

Transcription

1 1 Report on Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74 By Finuala Dowling In September 2014, over seventy poets, academics, graduate students and poetry aficionados from South Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia gathered at the University of Cape Town to participate in an international poetry colloquium under the provocative heading Craft Wars. Initiated by Jarad Jon Zimbler of the University of Birmingham and Ben Etherington of the University of Western Sydney, and hosted by the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies and the Department of English, Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74 revisited, forty years on, a similar event that shook the South African literary world in Historical Context Poetry 74 was part of the University of Cape Town s Summer School programme in that year. Although billed as the first national conference attended by all of South Africa s leading Black and White poets, Poetry 74 was not to achieve its ideal of non-racialism. An increasingly repressive white government regime had radicalised black workers and intellectuals alike. Thus although Summer School programme of Poetry 74 stored in the University of Cape Town s archive lists the names of almost all the major black poets practising at the time, very few read or spoke, though some attended. Shortly before the conference started, Don Mattera was banned. His poignantly titled lecture, Poem as Art for Liberation, was never delivered. In a 2005 interview Mattera remembers that at about that time he was asked: You are a poet -- are you a black poet or are you...? He replied: I am just a poet, I am a human poet. But when he was pressed to make up his mind Are you with them or are you with us? Mattera states that he chose to be black, meaning not of the skin but of the state of mind. Mongane Serote and Oswald Mtshali s names appear alongside Mattera s on the original programme, but in fact both poets withdrew their active participation. The decision of the Soweto poets to remain on the sidelines was a direct result of the killing, by parcel bomb, on the very eve of the conference, of exiled student activist, Onkgopotse Tiro. Another invitee, Mafika Gwala, had already withdrawn, possibly on Tiro s advice, in line with the principle adopted by the Black Consciousness movement, to boycott white-organised events. Instead of going down in history as a landmark multiracial literary event, Poetry 74 is remembered for Mike Kirkwood s incendiary paper, The Coloniser as Poet: An Anatomy of White South African poetry in English. In his address, which ran well over the allotted time, Kirkwood called for the colonizer-writer to seek out something beyond mere poetic craft. What was required, argued Kirkwood, was a life-technique that would enable the colonizer-writer to achieve self-transcendence. Professor Guy Butler, distinguished poet, academic and doyen of South African poetry, was in the audience as Mike Kirkwood announced in two words the line of argument he would be presenting: Beyond Butlerism. Guy Butler, founder and editor of the poetry magazine New Coin, might have been forgiven for feeling targeted from all sides. That very morning he would have read in the newspaper the following attack by fellow-poet and academic Walter Saunders: Is it not incredible that the poetry in issue after issue of magazines like New Coin should leave the impression that we are living in a tranquil, gentle and wholly civilised land? Nine out of ten white South African poets fail to recognise the need to use their poetry to protest injustice, deprivation and inhumanity. Revisiting Poetry 74 On the morning of Friday 19 September 2014, the English Department common room at UCT was filled to capacity as academics, writers and old comrades from the Cape Town poetry scene of the 1960s and 70s gathered to hear Tony Morphet s recollections of Mike Kirkwood. Morphet co-edited the poetry magazine Bolt with Kirkwood, and his paper, Craft Skirmishes: Nkathazo ka Mnyayiza, Mike Kirkwood, Bolt and Staffrider set

2 2 out to show the origins of the ideological shift against Butlerism by tracing key moments in Kirkwood s life from his birth on St Vincent in the Caribbean to his discovery, during an unplanned and unscripted sabbatical of early post-colonial writings by Memmi, Mannoni and Fanon. According to Morphet, Kirkwood s reading led him to begin to see himself as part of the colonised Caribbean and simultaneously as part of the colonising power in South Africa. For Morphet, the establishment of Bolt tiny as that magazine and its readership might have been had huge significance. As we began to receive submissions, said Morphet. we soon realised that we weren t interested in repeating the styles and forms of the established magazines. We were young, iconoclastic and arrogant and in the editing sessions we laughed to scorn what we thought of, and classified as, the Cape lyric (fynbos, landscape and fine feeling) and the Settler lyric of the Eastern Cape (robust fellows among the rocks and aloes, often at Buffels Kop). Instead of repeating the styles and forms of the established magazines, Kirkwood (who later went on to become editor at Ravan Press, and to run Staffrider) guessed at the existence of another kind of poetry: What we don t realise is that out there [ in the townships] they are writing, he announced in a Bolt editorial meeting. Soon afterwards, Morphet and Kirkwood went on to publish the work of Nkathazo ka Mnyayiza, a poet from the Mpumalanga Arts collective. (Kirkwood s legacy and the legacy of small poetry magazines like Bolt in South Africa continue to be felt. In a private tea-time conversation during the colloquium, Mxolosi Nyezwa, himself editor of a small literary journal, Kotaz, and one of the poets in the colloquium s closing poetry reading line-up, explained that his first poems were published in Staffrider. It was in the 1980s, he told me, we were boycotting school. So I wrote poems and sent them to Staffrider. ) One of the features that set Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74 apart from other conferences was its eclectic mix of participants. Present were academics (among others, Meg Samuelson, Tlhalo Raditlhalo, Hedley Twidle, Charne Lavery, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Hermann Wittenberg), writers (including Antjie Krog, Ivan Vladislavić, Rustum Kozain, Philippa Yaa de Villiers), and poet-academics (Kelwyn Sole, Harry Garuba, Yvette Christiansë, Wendy Woodward). The event was given special significance by the presence of guests with a special connection to Poetry 74 and the literary ambience of South Africa at that time Marilyn Honikman, Rose Jackson, Geoffrey Haresnape, Sue Clarke, Tony Voss and Peter Wilhelm. Extra-Mural Studies Also in his opening paper, Morphet reminded the audience of the key role played by the university s Centre for Extra-Mural Studies and James Polley in particular, in providing a platform for both Poetry 74 and an earlier literary conference that had foregrounded a group that became known as die sestigers. Morphet described the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies as a direct inheritor of the free non-disciplinary space with a mandate to design, organise and implement its own limited curricula that had made it possible for Polley to host the sestigers as well as Poetry 74. Like many antagonists in craft wars and skirmishes worldwide, Kirkwood and Butler had much in common. Both were editors of little magazines, both were academics, and both believed in self-transcendence. But for Kirkwood, a central flaw in Butler s liberalism was his belief that English-speakers were somehow less culpable than Afrikaners, and that they occupied an especially privileged place within the contesting South African nationalisms a place of enlightenment and civility which would moderate the Spartan cultures of Afrikaners and Blacks. In Kirkwood s original Poetry 74 address, Morphet went on to say, the Athenian role which Butler endeavoured to establish is mocked as a narcissistic self-indulgence. Given the mode and argument of Kirkwood s address four decades ago, it is small wonder that Peter Wilhelm, in his introduction to Poetry South Africa: Selected Papers from Poetry 74, remarked that some writers went to Cape Town to devour their fathers.

3 3 Kirkwood now lives in retirement in the Caribbean, still visited by scholars interested in Poetry 74. Butler s poetry remains a subject of admiration, though the most celebrated poem of Poetry 74 was doubtless Douglas Livingstone s Gentling a Wild Cat. In a moving tribute at the start of her own Friday-night reading, Ingrid de Kok read aloud Livingstone s famous poem. South African Poetry Today There was no cannibalism or patricide at Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74, held from September The discussion around poetry in South Africa today was collegial, with the emphasis on the academic study of poetry rather than its practice. Denise Newfield, chairing the session, reminded the audience of the recent launch of ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project, started by the University of Cambridge s Education Department), and in particular its Poetry by Heart initiative. This lively intervention will, it is hoped, counterbalance the ever-diminishing role and status of poetry in the South African poetry syllabus. What value does academic study bring to poetry? asked keynote speaker Rustum Kozain, who also reflected on present reviewers complete disregard for South African literary history. Challenged from the floor, Imraan Coovadia defended the importance of academics studying what interested them, and the personal and free choice of research topics. It is fruitless inspecting the academy he declared. Coovadia said that poetry thrives in societies where it has a role and that poets must vary, change, not repeat. Kelwyn Sole described the state of poetry teaching in South Africa as parlous and questioned why literary debates in South Africa tend to attach themselves to big names, like Ndebele or Sachs. In contrast to the outspokenness that characterised Kirkwood s address at Poetry 74, there was very little discussion, during the panel on South African Poetry Today, of the differences and tensions between poets who read their poetry from the printed page and those who perform their poems, often by heart. Global Context Instead of focussing narrowly on South Africa, colloquium organisers Jarad Jon Zimbler of the University of Birmingham and Ben Etherington of the University of Western Sydney, situated Poetry 74 alongside comparable versicides that took place in India, Australia and the Caribbean at roughly the same historical juncture. Zimbler and Etherington have altered the perspective of postcolonial literary studies by foregrounding poetry, not usually a focus of postcolonial and world-literature studies. Zimbler and Etherington, co-founders of the research collective Crafts of World Literature, aim to reorient postcolonial and world literary studies in the direction of technique. Just such a reorientation was provided by Laurence Breiner, Professor in both the English and African Studies departments at Boston University, in the Caribbean session of Craft Wars. Breiner s close readings of the prosody of several Caribbean poems from the 1970s, ranging from Louise Bennett to Derek Walcott, illustrated the polarisation that Breiner finds typical of a craft war. The contrast in the opening lines of Bennett s Dutty Tough, written in Jamaican Patois ( Sun a-shine but tings noh bright ) and Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott s The Schooner Flight ( In idle August, while the sea soft, ) exemplified this polarisation. In his paper, Against Indigenisation: Poetry and Poetics in 1970s India, Peter D. McDonald, Professor of English and Related Literature and Tutorial Fellow of St. Hugh s College, Oxford, found a similar polarisation happening almost simultaneously on another continent. Dilemmas around language the dominance of English and in particular, of its standard varieties and questions of who may use local materials and how are not uniquely South African: these were (and remain) questions faced by poets and critics in all former colonies. Poet Laureate of Jamaica, Mervyn Morris Not only in South Africa did poets calling for a socially committed poetry come up against those defending lyrical introspection. At the colloquium s opening event, newly crowned poet laureate of Jamaica Mervyn Morris read a

4 4 humorous poem containing a serious warning about the price paid by the poet who chooses audience over the Muse : A Poet of the People by Mervyn Morris The pressure of the public made it smart to turn away from self-indulgent Art. He found immediate applause inviting, and gave himself wholeheartedly to writing poems for the people, loud and clear. When people didn t seem to care much whether he wrote well or not how was nothing, everything was what he changed his mind again. And so, thinking to have another go at self-indulgent Art, he turned towards the woman he had spurned, his ever-loving personal Muse, believing she could not refuse him. But she did. She left him there, writing for the people, loud and clear. The poem s centrally placed line how was nothing, everything was what [my emphasis] neatly sums up the poetic craft wars that postcolonial skirmishes have set off. Marlene van Niekerk The question raised in Morris poem is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s. Can (should?) a politically engaged poetry be, at the same time, well-crafted? To this question, others have been added: What does politically engaged poetry of 2014 look/sound like? Are there poetic taboos? There is no-one better to consider these questions than philosopher-poet Marlene van Niekerk, who gave the colloquium s plenary address. Van Niekerk s paper, Orpheus in the Anthropocene: An Improvisation, imagines the genesis of a poet-hero of the future, one who might help us negotiate the era we live in now, the era of the last mass-extinction. Her ideal poet is attuned to nature prepared to live wild among primates and birds but also scrupulously well-trained in technique, a hater of cliché and of woolly, sentimental, tired, abstract meanderings. Poetry Readings Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74 gave equal attention to poetry as an art form and poetry as a subject for academic study. Each evening of the colloquium saw a different set of poets taking the stage. On Thursday, guests at Wrensch House had a chance to hear Marlene van Niekerk, Rustum Kozain, Yvette Christiansë and Mervyn Morris. Subsequent readings took place in LT3 in the Kramer building, Middle Campus. Friday evening presented a rare multilingual line-up of Gig Ryan, Antjie Krog, Ingrid de Kok, Karen Press and Nunke Khadimo, one of the world s few speakers of Khwedam. Saturday s programme included Harry Garuba, Finuala Dowling, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Donald Parenzee, Ronelda Kamfer, Nathan Trantaal and Kelwyn Sole. Conclusion What the Craft Wars colloquium at the University of Cape Town demonstrated is that far from being an aberration, the generational and craft conflicts that marked Poetry 74 in South Africa were only one current in an ocean of postcolonial literary confluences.

5 5 In a recent article in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature entitled Field, Material, Technique: On Renewing Postcolonial Criticism, Etherington and Zimbler begin their investigation into what they have termed the eclipse of literary technique in postcolonial literary criticism with a fifty-year-old quotation from a newspaper review by Edward Lucie-Smith. Reviewing the performance of a fellow Jamaican poet at the Royal Court, Lucie-Smithfinds that Louise Bennett s unpretentious monologues go a long way towards proving that a large part of the job of poetry in a new nation is not to make or break images, but to tell the truth so that it sounds true. In their craft wars work, Etherington and Zimbler are interested to discover whether there exists a mode or rather a paradigm of postcolonial literary criticism that might yet be recovered and its promise realized, which would offer insights into what it means to tell the truth so that it sounds true. In revisiting a forty-year-old skirmish that still has resonances today, Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74 began working towards just such insights.

6 6 References Argus, The. (6 February 1974) Guerilla Theatre Shocks Crowd. Cape Town: The Argus. Attwell, D. (2006). Rewriting modernity: Studies in Black South African literary history. Athens: Ohio University Press. Etherington, B., & Zimbler, J. (September 08, 2014). Field, material, technique: On renewing postcolonial literary criticism. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 49, 3, Gray, M. (2005). Interview with Don Mattera. Nordic Documentation on the Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa. Morris, Mervyn. Poet of the People Morphet, T. (19 September 2014). Craft Skirmishes: Nkathazo ka Mnyayiza, Mike Kirkwood, Bolt and Staffrider. Unpublished conference paper. Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74, University of Cape Town. Van Niekerk, M. (18 September 2014). Orpheus in the Anthropocene: An Improvisation. Unpublished plenary address. Craft Wars: Comparative Perspectives on Poetry 74, University of Cape Town. Wilhelm,P., & Polley, J., eds. (1976). Poetry South Africa: Selected Papers from Poetry 74. Johannesburg: AD Donker.