"Sequestered from the winds of history": Poetry and Politics beyond 2000.

Chapman, Michael

At the end of his book, How to Read a Poem (2007), Terry Eagleton notes that of all the literary genres, "poetry would seem the one most stubbornly resistant to political criticism, most sequestered from the winds of history" (164). A critic of Marxist persuasion, Eagleton says this not as negative judgment, but as recognition that poetry works its own way, has its own "thickness and density, which are not to be summarily reduced to symptoms of something else"(164). In almost the next sentence he might seem to refute his own recognition when he asks, "What kind of society is it in which poetry feels it has to turn its back? What has happened to the content of social experience when the poem feels compelled to take its own forms as its content, rather than draw from a common fund of meaning?" (164). The questions, however, are rhetorical. Eagleton has provided his own context for recognising the uneasy relationship between poetry and politics. He paraphrases Roland Barthes' observation that a little form in poetry is a dangerous thing (ie, a superficial splitting of form and content; a neglect of what is said for how it is said) while a large amount of form could be salutary (ie, a more comprehensive grasp of form is like grasping the history of the political culture itself). To illustrate, Eagleton turns to Pope's heroic couplets: the balances, inversions and antitheses, disciplined within the paired pentameters as embodying the social ideology--order, harmony--of the 18th-century patrician class, or to Yeats's tone--his mournful resignation or defiant exaltation--as a register of the wider historical context: the decline of the Anglo-Irish governing class of which Yeats was a self-appointed representative (Eagleton 2007: 161-2). The politics of both Pope and Yeats are no doubt anathema to Eagleton's continuing Marxist commitment; yet he is able to appreciate the poetry.

Notwithstanding the distance of these two poets from the current state of British society, it is simpler in contemporary Europe or North America than in the politically over-determined postcolonies of the world to appreciate the poetic medium even when its message is politically unpalatable. The relative value of form and content is an old story in South African literature, according to which we may chart the cultural wars of the 1970s and 80s: Lionel Abrahams's (1987) individual vulnerability versus Jeremy Cronin's (1987) worker nobility; Stephen Watson's (1990[1985])) denunciation of the politicisation of poetry; Michael Chapman's (1988) warning of constraints to the possibilities of imagination in a state of emergency, etc, etc. Closer to today, Kelwyn Sole (2005) grants 'content'-value not to most of the poets who are the subject of my essay (in the spirit of 'class suicide' not even to the formal range of his own poetry, perhaps?), but to what have been described as the "anti-mainstream", "counterpublic" voices of literature collectives, such as Botsotso Jesters, WEAVE, and the Timbila Poetry Project. (2) The question is: has 'post-liberation' in South Africa heralded a significant change in the uneasy relationship between poetry and politics? And, pertinent to the current enquiry, is there a content and a form to the descriptor, "beyond 2000"?

To such questions there are no neat answers. The unbannings of 2 February 1990 came as a jolt. The morally bankrupt National Party government, which had made a tactic of adjusting to crises, had evidently reached its end game. F W de Klerk's unbanning announcement engendered the catchphrase "the new South Africa". Art circles reacted with a sense of new challenges. What to write about after apartheid? Could colours, rhythms, rhyming, the private experience, all replace the dour 'inartistic' speechscapes of political commitment? To those of political commitment, such questions confirmed the bad faith, the trivial moral sensibilities, of many in the South African art world. The language of mutual antagonism produced its own reductiveness: bourgeoisie, Eurocentric, Africanism, the private Western lyric, the African oral voice, white aesthetics, black aesthetics. Peter Horn (1992:5) captured the leftist political response, a nightmare to the so-called bourgeoisie, when in taking issue with the "dominant South African 'canon' of reviewing", he stated that "the debate about what would constitute an aesthetic of a new, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist, non-elitist South Africa has not yet even started in earnest". To which Joan Metelerkamp (1993) in a review of several volumes of poetry replied: "If one is going to talk of 'an' aesthetic at all it cannot be a narrow one: different kinds of poetry appeal to different people and are useful for different ends (surely this is one of the criteria of democracy and fundamental human rights)" (119). And as if to show that she, who lives "in the suburbs, in the white suburbs. I am. Ja, I accept it. Mothering in the white suburbs" (Berold 2003: 14), has remained alert to different kinds of poetry, Metelerkamp praises quite fulsomely Mongane Serote's lengthy, 'un-suburban' Third World Express: "... this is a real poem! ... The complexity of a long poem ... Serote grappling with the meanings of violence which lacks the allure of heroism ... the movement of the lines echoes the development of simplicity to complexity... a symbol of process itself: there is nothing apocalyptic about it, even if it is powerful and noisy" (1993:120).

One might choose to find behind this literary appreciation a certain domestic anxiety, a relief, almost, that Serote does not advocate a takeover of the white suburbs. It is complexity--we are to understand--that lends Third World Express its value; it is a lack of complexity that, in contrast, condemns Sandile Dikeni's Guava Juice (1992) in its unalloyed exhortation to violence ("Murderous advocates of genocide/oppressors of my black blood"). "Surely," says Metelerkamp (121) with just a little condescension towards expression that "eschews the questioning exploring 'I'", that may be rousing at a political rally but that offers nothing new "on the complexity of human experience in the eighties in the Cape . surely, I was not the audience he [Dikeni] had in mind for the poems (a white woman, reading alone in her room in the suburbs)". Unlike Dikeni--Metelerkamp concludes Serote challenges Horn's "parochial aesthetic, formally and thematically, by linking an immediate South African experience to the rest of the world" (1201).

Whether Horn felt suitably chastised to change his "parochial" tune, or whether what he said, he said in the context of'people's literature' (his words were published in Staffrider), his responses to questions put to him, in 1995, deny any parochialism: "I think there are ... three things really--that make great poetry ... having something to say ... a very individualised voice ... [and] we must break loose from preconceptions of what form is" (in Berold 2003: 58). In illustration, Horn points to the content load of struggle poetry, to the distinctive voice of his own European inheritance, and to a poetics sufficiently flexible to be adapted to the haiku, the lyric, and oral praises. Of Serote Horn says, "he became weak in Third World Express ... too influenced by attempting to go back to his African roots," whereas in his earlier work there was a "tension" between his political content and his "speaking to a European [white South African?] audience" (60). Refuting any idea that because of his own commitment to the struggle he is a party ideologue, Horn makes clear that he will not defend the ANC "when it is indefensible" (62); and that any South African aesthetic is likely to invoke "hybrids" of European and African "ways of thinking and experiencing" (60).

The comments of both Metelerkamp and Horn are instructive. Despite each having particular preferences, neither endorses any reduction of the poem to a prescription. (Metelerkamp is at times narrower than Horn in that any poets who present women in ways which she regards as demeaning receive short shrift.) Neither ties categories like Europe and Africa to rigid expectations of individualism or communalism, or closed (Western) lyrical forms or oral (African) expressiveness. Whatever the political talk (poets are citizens, who think and speak not only in the world of poetry), South African poetry talk, to its advantage, has always been and continues to be uneasy about its own threatened politicisation. Here are a few random comments. Tatamkhulu Afrika: "After February 1990, it is still necessary to write a political poetry [as] a protest, not against political dominance but against dominance of wealth of privilege, residual class barriers, which are very much there.... But we must write poetry which is poetry. It mustn't be sloganeering any more" (in Berold 2003: 6-7) Lesego Rampolokeng: "I've always tried to tread the midline between the word in motion, the word free--I mean without bounds--and the WRITTEN word... poetry that would leave a smudge on the page as it would on the stage" (in Berold 2003: 32). Kelwyn Sole: "we'll need a political poetry in the future: but not of the kind that mouths platitudes of praise, or is satisfied supporting politicians or institutionalised positions" (in Berold 2003: 40-1). It is partisanship that might well describe Serote's History Is the Home Address (2004), another of his 'epics', but without the experiential load, the complexity, which Metelerkamp found in the earlier Third World Express. In History Serote displays his ANC colours in his resentment of those who attack then President Mbeki's AIDS-denialism (they don't understand the man, we are told). 'Told' is the operative word: there is little rhythmical justification for the line breaks, cliche abounds, and we are given roll calls of heroes which, it is taken for granted, we will all endorse.

By the time of History, however, the social landscape had registered significant changes, changes even from the first years of freedom in the early 1990s. Disabusing South Africa of any exceptionalism, Alec Russell observes that

   The history of countries throwing off tyrannical regimes tends to
   follow a pattern. In the immediate aftermath there is euphoria,
   accompanied by utopian pledges for the future. Then the new rulers
   find the business of governing more difficult and messier than they
   could ever have imagined. They also find that it is harder to
   overcome their own past than they had appreciated as they plotted
   their takeover in prison or in exile. It is this second stage that
   the true meaning and trajectory of a revolution unfolds. (2009:
   xiii)

Or, as Serote's one-time Black Consciousness Movement colleague, Mamphela Ramphele (2009:8), puts it in the context of the withdrawal on technicalities by the National Prosecuting Authority of corruption charges against then ANC, now South African, president, Jacob Zuma: "The conflation of the ruling party with the government and the state is fuelled by the myth of the ruling party as the liberator of a passive citizenry." To turn the comment to poetry, Sole (with Serote, now government apparatchik, possibly in mind) says, "When some of our older writers start getting comfy jobs as university professors, as members of parliament, at cultural desks, it's time for younger writers to get into the streets and hidden corners and find out how people are really living" (in Berold 2003: 41). As Cronin in relation to Sole cannot be classified as an "older writer", I must assume that Cronin is not being castigated here for having turned poetry into platitudes. That would be an unfair reflection on Cronin's achievement, which bears out in practice, I think, his reply to the question, "so how do you find an aesthetics which will satisfy the lyric poet in you, while you are working in a political milieu?" (A leading figure in the South African Communist Party and, therefore, a member of the "tripartite alliance" of the ANC, SACP and Cosatu, Cronin is currently deputy minister of transport.) To the questioner, Cronin replies:

I suppose aesthetically I want the poems that I write to emerge from that full blast, from the conversation that is going on around all of us, in many registers, whether it be other poems, political debates, literacy classes, soap operas, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission evidence, or the monologic voice of CNN. Poetry has got to take its chances in the midst of all of that; it must emerge from public conversation and return to it. I would like poetry to be a fully-fledged citizen in the midst of our complicated reality. (in Berold 2003: 129)

Language and form are to be eclectic; content, however, is to be directed to the intellectual challenge of our times which, according to Cronin, is "to take on the deadening dogma of market totalitarianism, neo-liberalism" (129). Such a challenge, ironically, may not do justice to the range of Cronin's own poetry, in which he quarrels with the "fatalistic assumptions of much lyrical writing"--poetry should be about the "possibility", not the "impossibility", of "love and marriage, love and rearing kids, love and shopping" (128). Yet, references to family aside, the public sphere retains its primary purchase. It is a public sphere, at least, without Breyten Breytenbach's solipsistic despair ("Breyten ends up by declaring the whole post-1994 situation a sellout", 133), or Serote's denialisms ("Faced with the shortfall between reality and aspiration Serote incants the aspirational, over and over: 'ah/where/ where are those moments which can be magic'", 133). What is required of South African poetry, rather, is that it "force the actual and the desirable into continuous dialogue" (134). Or, "it's between the classicists and the new guys. I'm halfway between the two" (Afrika, in Berold 2003: 7); or, writing poetry is always "being on the edge of falling off the world.... Needing love, needing a kind of home that the universe doesn't offer you--there's all that mysterious human pain that goes beyond just being 'an oppressed member of your class'" (Press, in Berold 2003: 19-20).

The aesthetic, then, has its various impulsions; (3) there are, however, recurrent features, summed up by Cronin as poetry trying to connect different discursive practices ("trying to be a fully-fledged citizen in the midst of our complicated reality", in Berold 2003:129). It is what I have described elsewhere as a poetry of the low mimetic (Chapman 2003[1996]: 414). Such an aesthetic (a post-apartheid aesthetic?) may be identified in distinction--and I am generalising for the sake of mapping a field--from a poetry of the high mimetic, such as we encounter in the work of Douglas Livingstone, or Breyten Breytenbach, or Patrick Cullinan, or Wilma Stockenstrom, to name but four of several representatives of modernist predisposition. Theirs is a poetry that, in its abrupt juxtapositions of self-conscious form and elemental observation (sometimes occurring within a single poem), may be set aside somewhat from a low mimetic subscription to the language, rhythms and routines of ordinary living. Paradoxically, and in a different way, the high mimetic characterised also the Soweto poetry of the pre-1990 years, summarised--again, in a handy generalisation--by Njabulo S Ndebele's (2006[1984]) distinction between the "spectacular" and the "ordinary". In its Fanonist psycho-drama (a new language as constituent of a new social self) Soweto poetry is a poetry of 'high' confrontation: "But what's good, is, I said it in his face,/A thing my father wouldn't dare do. /That's what's in this black 'shit'" (Serote 1972: 8). When women appear in the universe of the high mimetic--to turn again to Metelerkamp's preoccupation (in Berold 2003: 8-14)--their representation is likely to be iconic: Mary or Magdalen; Mother Afrika; sister of the [male] revolutionary hero, etc. The high mimetic is the inheritance also of Don Maclennan's considerable output of philosophical minimalism, in which the objective correlative, whether the bread and wine of existence or the anima-figure of sexual temptation, obeys the imagist tenet of the exact word as the adequate symbol. In short, Nick Meihuizen--one of the more astute commentators of the contemporary poetry scene--would not find it appropriate to apply to Livingstone, or even Maclennan, the critical register that he finds appropriate to the work of Chris Mann:

   Heartlands [2002]... makes it that much easier to live in
   contemporary South Africa. Reading it is something of a lesson in
   living, loving, acknowledging, appreciating .. Consider the
   following from "Carpark Oyster-sellers", where the poor and the
   downtrodden of the earth are a discomfiting, uncomfortable,
   haunting presence ...:

      "Please, my bossie," she says. "Me and my family is hungry." You
      hate the blank-faced demeanour you use to distance her. You wince
      at the obsequious charade she starts to perform. [25]

   Each poem is so well crafted, thought out, and so purely modest in
   its pretensions that it appears to be eternal, central, complete,
   even as it deals with transitory moments in changing history in a
   backward country on the edge of the world. (2003: 75-7)

Not that poets of the high or the low mimetic have necessarily wished to acknowledge their poet-peers who live in this backward country on the edge of the world. Asked which poets have inspired them, which poets they admire, rarely do they acknowledge fellow South Africans. Despite a steady output of slim volumes in the 1990s and 2000s, the local poetry scene is small, somewhat incestuous, certainly not without its jealousies, (4) and the publishing opportunities are beholden to very few outlets. (5) In short, poetry is a minority genre, which does not feature prominently in university literature syllabuses, or in book-prize recognition. (Performance and slam sessions attract enthusiastic, younger audiences.)6 Most reviewers are themselves practising poets; and, as in South African literature since its inception, at least in English expression, the gaze across the waters signals a continuing colonial cringe. Nick Meihuizen, whom I have just quoted--one of the few critics who is not also a publishing poet--usually intersperses his responses to the local scene with little pointers to wider (greater?) traditions. Gail Dendy's associative imagery, we are reminded (Meihuizen 2008:42), has its antecedents in Hartley's influence on Coleridge's theories of the organic imagination, and so on. Refreshingly, black poets are not so predictably 'Eurocentric'. Unfortunately, however, outside of US/Third World rappers, the poet credited as formative by both Rampolokeng and Vonani Bila had limited skill in the linguistic and structural demands of the printed page: like Ingoapele Madingoane before his death, Rampolokeng and Bila are adept at filling the theatre with sound. On the page, again like Madingoane, their lines veer from fire-power attacks on oppressive systems to repetitive, in their case, global cliche (like, fuck the IMF, fuck the World Bank!). It is with some justification that, in referring to Ramplokeng, Sarah Johnson (2003: 70) coins the phrase, "dirty aesthetics ... of the gangsta rapper".

To return to Barthes' observation on a large amount of form, what might an aesthetic of the post-1990s--an aesthetic which is the opposite of romantic-symbolist modernism--suggest about the political culture? It may be that, whereas the poets of the high mimetic felt compelled to pit the exceptional image or voice against the rigidity of big systems of authority--apartheid, the Cold War--poets of the 1990s, whether in South Africa or, let us say, in the former eastern bloc, have experienced the new gradations of a civil space. Or, perhaps in the aftermath of the big systems there has been hesitancy about what to pursue, what to reject. Botsotso 'collective' pronouncements (if not always the voices of the individual poets), for example, see as the target a "new mainstream" in the new South Africa (government-bourgeois collusion with the Washington consensus) even as they accept the cash offered by the new government's wish--through its National Arts Council--to promote diversity of the cultural voice. At the same time as they insult what they identify as an expanded middle class a majority of whites, increasing numbers of upwardly mobile blacks, a consumer-conscious youth of all colours--Botsotso and the Timbila Poetry Project are not averse to courting the publishing houses of the mainstream that they profess to abhor. (See note 2, on "counterpublic" publishing.)

One turns here to Ingrid de Kok to gain perspective on the challenges of a civil milieu. The times, she believes, call for "historical decorum": "Black people have gone through massive suffering and humiliation and appropriation. It behoves white people to be a little restrained, respectful, suspicious of themselves, as knowers of reality" (De Kok, in Berold 2003: 116). If "decorum" to Botsotso can be a bourgeois swearword, so it is also to the white rapper Ewok (2007), whose undoubted verbal punch has no ear for what might be historical decorum; no ear for moral distinctions between a class that has already risen and a class that now struggles to rise: "I'm sorry they had to Shaik you awake Mr Zuma .../I'm sorry they don make showers like they used ta Mr Zuma" ("Yo Mister", 74). Whereas the trajectory in the era of struggle, De Kok continues, "used to be forwards from suffering to a future utopia ... now there's a reflection on history, the past, whether personal and national, and then individual and national compromise" (117). Without her subtle lyrics ignoring intimate joy and pain ("And grief is one thing nearly personal,/a hairline fracture in an individual skull", "What Everyone Should Know about Grief", 2006: 58) De Kok is able to subject contemporary political enthusiasm for rewriting history (new names for towns, streets and buildings) to ironic contemplation:

   Let's put Verwoerd back
   on a public corner like a blister on the lips;
   let's walk past him and his moulded hat,
   direct traffic through his legs,
   and the legs of his cronies of steel and stone.
   ("Bring Back the Statues", 2006, 124)

We are all, whether poets or citizens, De Kok concludes, in need of some "psychic reckoning, and that's a slow and arduous process" (in Berold 2003: 117).

If the relationship between poetry and politics in the 1990s had its post-liberation unease, then the terrain in 2009 witnesses its own configurations of normalising experience punctuated by events of hyperbolic display. The Zuma debacle--we can grant Ewok the singular 'truth' of his assaults on populism--impinged upon a democratic separation of powers. But perhaps not: voices of conscience, civil institutions, peaceful 2009 elections, the satirist's goading of the powerful, are proving to be resilient. (Cartoonist Zapiro is not cowed by Zuma's threats of libel action; in fact, whatever Zuma's shortcomings, he is not vengeful.) Were I to draw a parallel between the low mimetic and Kelwyn Sole's conception of "quotidian experience ... in postliberation South Africa" (2005: 182) I would grant the quotidian greater superstructural fluidity than is countenanced by Sole's political-economic base. Life for many flows in-between what Sole identifies as the co-existence in people's experience of "utopian expectation and grim reality" (192). As I have outlined it, nonetheless, the poetry/politics question, in various ramifications, remains foregrounded in the commentary of poets who made their mark in the decade of the 1990s, and who since have been granted the authority of their pronouncements: among them, Tatamkhulu Afrika, Joan Metelerkamp, Karen Press, Ari Sitas, Stephen Watson, Ingrid de Kok, Jeremy Cronin, Kelwyn Sole, Lesego Rampolokeng, Chris Mann. All continue to be active beyond 2000; all--Mann's recent turn to spiritual contemplation may be an exception (Levey and Mann 2007; Mann 2008)--continue to develop broadly within a low mimetic. Cronin's third collection, More than a Casual Contact (2006), for example, shows adeptness at connecting his lyrical voice to his project of "normalising" the society:

   It's my friend, on TV, the minister,
   "Now communities must learn
   To package themselves and their cultures"

   I think of poetry--when
   There's a sudden flouncing, knock-kneed
   Holding up of skirts that's neither
   Exotic nor packaged
   As the heron bolts off in pursuit of minnow.
   ("Heron's place", 47-8)

Almost rejecting the lyrical voice, Karen Press in The Little Museum of Working Life (2004) pursues her poetic register to its 'literal' limit as she seeks a language--sometimes in the found poem--that does not detract from, but in its precision of observation accentuates, the burden of most people's daily lives: "Monday is sausages/Tuesday is chops/Wednesday is rissoles.../go to bed, you've got school tomorrow/.../we never went hungry, not one day in twenty years" ("She came home every night and went straight into the kitchen", 46). Distinctions between the poetic and the prosaic are explored, too, in Sole's collection of prose poems, Land Dreaming (2006). This is a series of finely judged, ironically foreshortened perspectives on a post-liberation South Africa, in which 'liberation' has resulted too often in sardonic replays of entrenched racial positions ("we also use leaves and twigs for coughs... My uncle said.../--no, Dick [Mkhomazi Dindi], not actually. Your uncle was thinking of Helichrysum nudifolium" ("Gardening tips", 79). Or, indeed, does liberation promise only greater freedom to be a charlatan?

   ... My friend it's a miracle today that you
   receive this letter and you have to count yourself lucky.
   x Asthma, cancer, blood pressure, diabetes, body pains, x
   epileptic fits, all skin diseases, AIDS symptoms gone!
   ... though if you want to speak to my spirits, that's a special
      arrangement.
   ("This is not a chain letter", 81)

In Sole's several collections, poems of personal or intimate relationship permit the "rough edges of the real world out there to jag against [him]" (Sole, in Berold 2003:36); satires on what he sees as the white, elite South African literary tradition are mildly amusing; at times, a strenuous attention to postliberation failure carries the reader to the bedrock of the poet's economic quotidian; at other times, political conviction overrides verbal and rhythmical adroitness, threatening to shut down the potential of the poem. One asks, in these instances, whether the poet is not a frustrated sociologist.

For Vonani Bila the political is his poetry: in an interview with Robert Berold in 2000 it is as though his poetry is simply an adjunct to his political agenda (Berold 2003: 152-9), and there is a tendency in his Timbila Poetry Project , as in Botsotso manifestoes, to elevate the message stridently over the medium. Considerations of aesthetic value are subsumed by assertions of a correct ideology, the correct ideology being condemnatory of corporate culture and neo-liberal economics. This is a kind of social movement programme, in which the "new mainstream" might be thought of as the bedfellows of the G20 club. (7_ All this is in sharp contrast to Ingrid de Kok's introspection on the responsibilities of tackling big issues. Commenting on her poem, "At the Commission" ("Would it matter to know/the detail called truth/since, fast forwarded,/the ending is the same,/over and over?", 2006, 63), she says:

I think problems arise no matter how you write about the Truth Commission. The appropriating voice that 'shares' unbearable pain and loss is problematic. The omniscient narrator is problematic [but] I don't know how you can write in South Africa and not reference this major revelatory complex mixture of truth and lying in some way. Yet it also seems impossible, invasive, to do so. The only way I can is to acknowledge the moral torment. (De Kok, in Berold 2003: 115)

If 'collective' poets are often too certain of the truth of their own agenda to reflect moral torment, neither is moral torment a phrase I would associate with the several voices which I want to separate from the 1990s in a category beyond 2000: at least, not moral torment fixed upon the big public-political issues; at times moral torment might invade private states, or be experienced in metaphysical dilemma. Yet even here, the term "moral torment" has too heavy a notation. What distinguishes voices beyond 2000 is a tangential shift from art/politics interrogations towards forms of family habitation. An aesthetic of the low mimetic remains apt for ventures into a new content: a content that, under the banners of struggle, would have been derided too easily as "bourgeois". Whether Cronin's colleagues would wish to attach 'middle-class' intonations to his project of "normalising our society" is debatable (see Berold 2003: 128). Nevertheless, the society of which Cronin's own family life is part can no longer be harnessed in its entirety to the demands of the political rally, but has to function increasingly in the routines of the everyday. The priority is no longer the toppling of the state, but the cultivating of myriad interactions between the private and the public domain. The desire for a home, a job, a safe environment for the children, obviously has political ramifications; but such desires impinge, simultaneously, upon a need in all people for human flourishing, for an enriching emotional, imaginative and spiritual life. It is in such intimations that poetry may find a particular and distinctive signature.

Whose voices beyond 2000, accordingly, are contributing to a distinctive style of poetry-making? I confine my discussion to poets writing in English. I hardly know anything of the contemporary African-language poetry scene and am insufficiently abreast of contemporary Afrikaans poetry to do it justice. (Over 100 individual volumes of Afrikaans poetry have appeared in the last decade.) I do not confine myself to poets of first collections, but look at those who to date have not enjoyed the same levels of publication or critical exposure as the poets to whom I have so far referred. The exception, as in the case of Antjie Krog, is when a significantly new development strikes me as characterising a poet's recent work. That the poets who have impressed me are mostly women is not reducible, I trust, to any '(male)public/ (female) private' dichotomy. Rather, I would wish to apply, generally, Sole's observation on Joan Metelerkamp's poetry: in citing Adrienne Rich (her desire to move "out of the realm of men.. .[but] also to move into the realm of the brilliance of men, but on my own terms"--see Cousins 1992: 24, 28) Metelerkamp associates her poetics, Sole says, with attention to "detail and domesticity, but also to intellectual and creative work (spheres traditionally designated male)" (2005: 195).

So, in no particular order, I turn first to the enlivening language, the rhythms accentuated by judicious rhymes, that propel me into Phillippa Yaa de Villiers's (2006) world of tough love with responsibility, in which the flatlands of Jo'burg stretch any single conception of the middle-class life: "[I] set free/all the caged birds of my inner city" ("Connection", 37). Rustum Kozain's (2005) wryly ironic portrait of his coloured family is offset against his own struggles of identity and location: "Kaalvoet, we'd say, as an arm&oer.../Slavetongue become witmanstaal ..." ("Winter 2003", 109). Whereas Mzi Mahola in "In Memoriam Sizwe Kondile" (2006, 12-13) fails to transform the news story to poetic advantage, he succeeds, in "Being Human" (1994), in evoking resonances of thought and feeling that reverberate beyond the simplicity of his actual words: "Raising young ones is lovelier/ And tougher by far./Their easy laughter/Puts a spark in my life,/But each time they break/It kills a part of me"(11). Mxolisi Nyezwa's (2008) is a similar talent to Mahola's, both poets so different in subtle self-interrogation from public exhortation: "for days I looked for my poems in the streets ... and children went for days/without food" ("for days I looked for my poems", 55). Yet the public voice need not follow any manifesto, or be typified by Jacob Zuma's Mshini Wam, his machine-gun song and dance routine (Ewok: "Lend me that machine gun when ye done, Mr Zuma!", 2007: 74). Lebogang Mashile's (2005) oral rhythms, in contrast, sustain argument and self-reflection on home and exile; on the resources required to be a black woman in macho Jo'burg; on what, without narcissism, it is to love one's self:

   I smoked a spliff with Jesus Christ last night.
   But he was Jesus
   And I'm a sister and I've been through more shit
   Because I'm black
   And life is hard in Jozi when you've got tits ...
   He saw me as a spirit lover sister mother
   Friend in arms like no other
   ... And how two spirits got real open
   When the herb was tight.
   ("I smoked a spliff", 39-41)

The value of the self devoid of selfishness, the challenges of relatedness in the family, recur in imaginative forms in several poets, including Megan Hall (2007) (disillusioned love disciplined to startling images), Colleen Higgs (2004) (surviving one's broken, lower middle-class white family), Liesl Jobson (2008) (wry observations on adult frailties) and, particularly impressive, Makhosazana Xaba's (2005; 2008) range from intimate portraits behind the public profile ("I wish to write an epic poem about uMakabayi kaJama Zulu,/one that will be silent on her nephew, Shaka", "Tongues of their Mothers", 2008, 25) to unusual juxtapositions in poems of personal relationship:

   I wished we'd run the Soweto marathon together
   ... Although I knew you wouldn't come
   I still bought two pairs of cotton socks:
   ... Once home, I rested in a warm bath.
   Then I lay naked on my bed,
   The second pair of cotton socks cuddling my feet.
   ("Cotton Socks", 2008, 34)

We are reminded in Xaba's poetry that the middle class is no longer the preserve of white South Africa. It is in the light of such a reminder that Peter Horn, a poet on the barricades in the 1970s and 80s, continues to surprise us with his flexibility of response to the memorable voice. He writes appreciatively of Xaba's "exact rendering of the everyday" and of the "tenderness of real love poems" (2006: 118,119).

A newspaper critic once remarked that, as Douglas Livingstone could make poetry out of the drabness of Durban, he must surely have talent. SallyAnn Murray (2006), in acknowledging Livingstone ("After Douglas", 1), shows that she can make poetry not only out of Durban, but out of almost anything: out of the detritus of the Mbilo river ("The lower reaches float belly-up,/sluggish current slack against silt/si/with algal bloom", "Mbilo", 72); or out of the killing of household rodents, or even pets that multiply beyond their welcome, as lessons not only to her children but, more significantly, to herself, the working mother, wife, and individual person living in the helter-skelter of domesticity:

   Come here then while I hold you tight. Listen:
   Stay away young ones from your mother who
   is exhausted; stay away from her she loves you
   too much so much you must leave her alone.
   ("Vigour Mortis: an interminable domestic epic of life & death",
      83)

Sometimes--says Roy Robins (2006:53)--Murray "isn't afraid to risk a poem over a gag--I am not sure this is a good thing". But that is her daring. It is what gives us poems that, to quote Peter Strauss (2007: 232), "are observant, witty, companionable (but not comfy)".

A very different, though no less compelling, voice is that of Gabeda Baderoon (2005; 2006), for whom life threatens always to spill beyond her need for security. She evokes her father's experience of apartheid removals, lent poignancy by the fact that with his own hands he had crafted the door of the dwelling which the family was forced to vacate ("How not to stop", 2006, 20). There are, in contrast, the comforting smells of family cooking, as memories to the poet who now lives away from the country of her cultural ties:

   ... I have slow,
   apricot memories ...
   A girl learning to keep from crying
   when she slices an onion, when
   she remembers the country she has left.
   All day I watch to keep from crying.
   ("Hunger", 2005, 24)

Baderoon brings normality to the experience of global citizenry: an experience of 'homelessness' enforced not by politics but, ironically, by the circumstances (love, marriage) of her own fulfilling life.

If delicacy of tone describes Baderoon, then humour, lightness, wit turned to the telling insight, captures the flavour of Finuala Dowling's collections (2002; 2006; 2008): family triumphs in wicked juxtaposition to officialdom ("Census Man", 2002, 8-9); detoxing connected, unexpectedly, to the sickness of the old apartheid state ("Detoxing", 2008, 26); by wacky inversion, worms scoring higher in the polls than teenagers, or politicians: "Parents, when you are sick of your teenagers' sloth-/...greet your better children,/the worms.../who never sigh and give up, even before an avocado pip./...[or, like politicians] never stay in five star hotels at taxpayers' expense" ("Metaphysical uses for worms (apart from death)", 2008, 23). T S Eliot had it that modern poetry should be about both reading Spinoza and cooking: Dowling's suburbia manages to devour both its poetry and its lasagne, for "There is an art to making lasagne while simultaneously/ composing a poem. Lasagnes are quite complicated/ and deep ..." ("Talk, share and listen", 2006, 77).

Images of association--as Meihuizen (2008: 42) has pointed out characterise Gail Dendy's strange, puzzling (the reader is sometimes left grasping for the connection), always challenging, shifts from the mundane to the sublime. In "Nipper" (2007, 43-4), the title referring to the name of the dog portrayed on old "His Master's Voice" record labels, Dendy moves beyond the "old vinyl's familiar scratch and hiss ... [beyond, also] CDs and Dolby surround sound", to end, "Dogstar.Pluto", in planetary transport "fizzing like the future from out of the dark". (Not so much Coleridgean association in this particular poem as an echo of the 17th-century Metaphysicals.) Transportations between physical and metaphysical experience feature also in Wendy Woodward's (2008) struggles to expand the consciousness of our relatedness (human and animal) against the incursions of family life. In a climate of eco-awareness, the not-so-banal desire for a rodent-free home tests the purchase of this poet's humanist and intellectual ideals: "what of the rats we had to poison/after they moved in,/ ...We are not holy, then, neither you nor I,/.../We'll have to share the karma" ("Sharing the Karma/For Chris", 63). Both Chris Mann and Shabbir Banoobhai--poets whose first work appeared in the 1970s--have sought in the last few years to introduce a spiritual resonance to their daily tasks. Mann's conflation of science and Heraclitan philosophy is shaped within poetic contemplation that is never far removed from the reality check of living in South Africa today. (See, for example, "Heraclitan Heresies", Heartlands, 2002, 16.) Banoobhai, who has begun to disseminate this poetry to an online readership, subjects the teasing paradoxes of ancient Islamic teaching to contemporary currents of thought and feeling: "being who we are/.../ absorbed in ourselves we become a shadow/ of light; absorbed in peace we become/ light created from a shadow" ("song of peace", 2004,13). His lyrics remind us that, despite George Bush ("we'll smoke 'em out of their caves!"), the global interactiveness of the 21st century is inescapably about 'translated' selves: "commit us to the suicide of our egos/ fill the caves of our minds with emptiness/ except for the light of your presence" ("Prayer", 2002, 9).

In contrast to the sublime, Ike Mboni Muila (2004) asserts hard-living identities in the mingling of English and isicamtho, or tsotsi-taal, while Aryan Kaganoff (2004)--up yours to the "Previously Dissed"!, "You still getting dissed ... Except for window dressing" (21)--revels in pushing the politically incorrect intrusion into whatever orifice presents itself: "I apply my morning erection to her cinnamon passage" ("Vileness", 85). As these poets rely on rapid-fire energy of words, it is not surprising that there are flaggings to even the most vitriolic (Muila) or deliberately shocking (Kaganoff) lines. Lisa Combrinck (2005), too, has difficulty, paradoxically to the benefit of her poetry, in sustaining a language, in her case, of sex shock as the route (or the root) to a liberation of the mind through the body: "Masturbation is the obsession ... Masturbation is a single candle,/... Above all, masturbation is a monologue,/a soliloquy to the self" ("Masturbation", 48). Is this "dissing" it to South Africa's Afrikaner-Calvinist past? Whether or not, provocation for these poets is unrelenting; bravado is rarely checked by vulnerability. Bravado that acknowledges vulnerability signals the achievement of Tatamkhulu Afrika, whose last collection (2000) before his death at the age of eighty beckons beyond the (Yeatsian?) "mad old man" of its title to the extreme dreams that lurk in the psyche of many of us, extreme dreams probably not identical to Afrika's cross-race, cross-religious, homoerotic daredevilry: (8)

   Then we again mount [the motorcycle],
   slotting in our balls.
   But going where?--I
   but this old man dribbling his piss
   into midnight's sad bowl,
   shedding his as slow tears.
   ("Pillion", 61)

A no less shocking investigation of taboo experience places Antjie Krog almost as a new presence on the contemporary literary scene. Having expanded her reputation beyond that of a distinguished Afrikaans poet in her TRC-inspired 'autobiog/documentary', Country of my Skull (1998), Krog has regarded it as her project of the new millennium to seek connections across language and race divisions: a selection of her poems has appeared in English translation (2000); she has overseen the translation of African-language poems into Afrikaans (2002); like Stephen Watson (1991), Alan James (2001) and others, she has made available to contemporary readers 'recreations' from the Bleek and Lloyd collection of San/Bushman oral expression (2004); and, in both Afrikaans (Verweerskrif, 2006) and English (Body Bereft, 2006), she has approached with uncomfortable honesty the subject of ageing. The impact of these 'ageing' poems lies not in abstractable content, but in unflinching linguistic observation: more unflinching in Afrikaans than in the English equivalent. (9) We encounter a language of 'viscera' reaction: "[M]eanwhile [if] terror lies exactly in how/ one lives with the disintegrating body/.in how one resigns to vaginal atrophy and incontinence" ("God, Death, Love", 20), there are, at least for this poet, female compensations ("you no longer/ use sex for yourself but for me ... into the luxury of experience I stretch myself out") when "at times it seems easier to rage/ against the dying of the light/ than to eke out/ the vocabulary of old age" ("how do you say this", 28-9). You might say, it is a case of a 'Dylan Thomas' grandiloquence punctured by "bedpans...and something/ that looked like a potato peeler" ("it is true", 12).

Not as uncompromising as Krog, but lending substance to any revaluation of the category middle class, or bourgeois, or suburban, we have Isobel Dixon's (2007) moving poems on her father's death (hospitals, wherever located, smell of the unromantic); there is Leon de Kock's (2006) unsparing sequence on the death of a marriage: "so, the gloves are off, now/...a bicycle-spoke between the ribs" ("so, the gloves are off, now", 13); and Kobus Moolman's tentative shifts from his earlier 're-arrangements' of the elements of our observations (2000) to what we might call 'cripple' poems (2007): the world perceived through the disjointed anatomy of a hand separated from a foot, or a foot one good, one game. Not even suburban living is as balanced as any would wish it to be.

To turn to suburbia--I use the term as a metaphor--is not fashionable. The objections of the politically and ethically engaged will remind us that in this country the suburb remains the preserve of a leafy few, who are still mainly white. (As Kaganoff says to the "previously dissed", "you still getting dissed".) From suburbia, in a country in which suburbia is the preserve of a leafy few, some among the leafy few might wish to divert their commitments to other communities. (It is never comfortable to scrutinise oneself.) Perhaps to divert attention to the homeless, as in this extract--chopped up here by me into a found poem--by the columnist Helen Walne:

The couple arrived six months ago,/his face framed by a grey beard;/hers exposed beneath cropped hair./They sit on the bench with their belongings around them...

I wanted to know their story -/how they had ended up there,/huddling against a concrete wall at night,/a patch of grass their mattress ... ... one day, he arrived for work/and they had closed down and gone ... He thanked me when I handed him R20.

And then I walked away, feeling like a fraud/towards my house,/with its backdoor and kettle/and an oven/which will blister red peppers for dinner./The two-ply toilet paper,/the bath surrounded by bottles of stuff.../My home./My inside./I didn't even ask his name. ("Human League", Cape Argus, 14/4/09, 11)

Yes, some in suburbia do live like this; many do not. Some may be classified as the "privileged white upper-middle class" and, like this columnist, feel the need to let their guilt hang out; most, whether white, Indian, coloured or African, live more humbly. Some whites, like Sole (he introduces the fact), grew up in "lower middle-class...families" (in Berold 2003: 34). Old-age pensioner, Afrika, always the 'other', lived both by choice and necessity in an outhouse in decidedly 'unleafy' surrounds. Despite Es'kia Mphahlele's (1981[1967]) much-anthologised long story, "Mrs Plum", the pampered white madam languishing in bed at 10 in the morning is the stuff of caricature. So, I imagine, is the Mrs Plum who, as in Mphahlele's story, is dependent for sexual gratification on her pet pooch! My point is that the challenge, after apartheid, is to rehabilitate a more nuanced society; the challenge for the person of words is to break out of caricature, stereotype, simplification. Ja, Joan Metelerkamp, you are entitled to find fulfilment, or frustration, or whatever emotions move you to write poetry while "mothering in the white suburbs". It is not your fault that, in 2009, the suburbs can still be categorised as white or Indian or coloured, or that townships are still poor and black. What Metelerkamp, like any other poet, should avoid in her poetry is an absorption in an experience that is too painful to open itself to the reader's own field of emotional empathy. That is the difficulty with the volume Requiem (2003): ajourney into self, provoked by her mother's self-inflicted death. What, to a degree, redeems Requiem is that it is not about blame.

Not only is there a kind of liberation in going beyond blame, but in the poetry I have discussed here there is also a pointer as to why Eagleton, whom I quoted at the beginning of this essay, is able to identify poetry as the literary genre most resistant to political criticism. It is that the verbal invention most of us associate with a poem, whether in shorter or longer form, leans towards lyricism. And lyricism, even of the low mimetic, favours the personal, expressive register, what Charles Altieri (2002: 24) calls "an excess beyond denotation". (This holds good even for the deliberately flattened anti-poem, its short-line shape signalling its contrast to the palimpsest of its opposite, the lyric.) The poem does not ask the reader, immediately, for ethical consideration, but for imaginative participation. The difference between the oral expressiveness of Dikeni and the oral expressiveness of Mashile, for example, is that the former parades prescriptions for our endorsement while the latter pulls us into the poet's state of mind, persuading us to extend our sympathetic understanding. To turn again to Altieri (2002: 41-3), such states of mind touch our affective lives and, in consequence, we may (or, indeed, may not) be compelled by our participation to adapt or modify our ethical stance. If we are so compelled, it is because, to paraphrase Wittgenstein's dictum, there are dimensions to experience in which ethics and aesthetics are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It is to the value of such experience that, in a politically demanding society, poetry--the minority genre most sequestered from the winds of history--may help delineate the potential of everyday life. That such potential, if it is to be realised for the majority of South Africans, requires more than poetry is a fact that poets would be among the first to acknowledge.

References

Abrahams, Lionel. 1987. Reply to Cronin's "Poetry: An Elite Pastime Finds Mass Roots." Weekly Mail (3-9 April).

Afrika, Tatamkhulu. 2000. Mad Old Man under the Morning Star. Cape Town: Snailpress.

Altieri, Charles. 2002. "The Literary and the Ethical: Difference as Definition." In: Bissell, E B (ed.). The Question of Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 19-43.

Baderoon, Gabeda. 2005. The Dream in the Next Body: Poems. Cape Town: Kwela Books (in association with Snailpress).

--. 2006. A Hundred Silences. Cape Town: Kwela Books (in association with Snailpress).

Berold, Robert (ed.). 2003. South African Poets on Poetry: Interviews from New Coin 1992- 2001. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Breytenbach, Breyten. 1988. Judas Eye. London: Faber and Faber.

Bila, Vonani. 2007. Handsome Jita: Selected Poems. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Bleek, W H I and Lucy C Lloyd. 1968 [1911]. Specimens of Bushman Folklore. Cape Town: C T Struik.

Chapman, Michael. 1988. "The Liberated Zone: The Possibilities of Imaginative Expression in a State of Emergency." English Academy Review 5: 23-53.

--. 2003 [1996]. Southern African Literatures. Pietermaritzburg:

University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Combrinck, Lisa. 2005. An Infinite Longingfor Love. Pretoria: Skotaville Media Publications.

Cousins, Colleen Crawford. 1992. "Interview: Joan Metelerkamp." New Coin 28(2): 24-8.

Cronin, Jeremy. 1987. "Poetry: An Elitist Pastime Finds Mass Roots." Weekly Mail (13-19 March).

--. 2006. More than a Casual Contact. Cape Town: Umuzi.

Cullinan, Patrick. 2008. Escarpments: Poems 1973-2007. Cape Town: Umuzi.

De Kok, Ingrid. 2006. Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems. Cape Town: Umuzi.

De Kock, Leon. 2006. gone to the edges. Pretoria: Protea Book House.

Dendy, Gail. 2007. The Lady Missionary: Poetry. Cape Town: Kwela Books (in association with Snailpress).

De Villiers, Phillippa Yaa. 2006. Taller than Buildings. Johannesburg: Phillippa de Villiers.

Dikeni, Sandile. 1992. Guava Juice. Cape Town: Mayibuye Books.

--. 2007. Planting Water. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Dixon, Isobel. 2007. A Fold in the Map. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

Dowling, Finuala. 2002. IFlying. Cape Town: Carapace (an imprint of Snailpress).

--. 2006. Doo-Wop Girls ofthe Universe: A Collection of Poems. Johannesburg: Penguin.

--. 2008. Notes from the Dementia Ward. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

Eagleton, Terry. 2007. How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwells.

Ewok (Iain Gregory Robinson). 2007. Word: Customized Hype. Empangeni: Echoing Green Press.

Finlay, Alan W. 2009. Making Space: The Counterpublics of Post-Apartheid Independent Publishing Activities (1994--2004). Masters Degree. University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg.

Hall, Megan. 2007. Fourth Child. Athlone: Modjaji Books.

Higgs, Colleen. 2004. Halfborn Woman. Cape Town: Hands-On Books.

Horn, Peter. 1992. "Comment." Staffrider 10(3): 5.

--. 2006. "Review: Makhosazana Xaba." New Contrast 34 (1&2):116-19.

James, Allan. 2001. The First Bushman's Path: Stories, Songs and

Testimonies ofthe Xam ofthe Northern Cape. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Jobson, Liesel. 2008. View from an Escalator. Johannesburg: Botsotso Publishing.

Johnson, Sarah. 2003. "Review: It All Begins: Poems from Postliberation South Africa." New Contrast 31(3): 68-73.

Kaganoff, Aryan. 2004. Post Mortemist Poems. Bryanston (Johannesburg): Pine Slope Publications.

Kozain, Rustum. 2005. This Carting Life. Cape Town: Kwela Books (in association with Snailpress).

Krog, Antjie. 1998. Country of my Skull. Johannesburg: Random House.

--. 2000. Down to the Last Skin. Johannesburg: Random House.

--. 2002. Met woorde soos met kerse: Inheemse verse uitgesoek en vertaal deur Antjie Krog en ander. Cape Town. Kwela Books.

--. 2004. The Stars Say, "Tsau"./Xam Poetry of Dia!Kwain,

Kweiten-ta-//ken, A!Kunta, Hankass'o and//Kabbo. Selected and Adapted by Antjie Krog. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

--. [2004. Die sterre se, "tsau ...". Cape Town: Kwela Books.]

--. 2006. Body Bereft. Cape Town: Umuzi.

--. [2006. Verweerskrif. Cape Town: Umuzi.]

--. 2006. "Stephen Watson and the Annuls of Plagiarism." New Contrast 34(5): 72-7.

Levey, David and Chris Mann. 2007. "Environmentally Aware Art, Poetry, Music and Spirituality." Alternation. 14(2): 218-37.

Livingstone, Douglas. 2004. Selected Poems. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker.

Maclennan, Don. 2006. Selected Poems. Johannesburg: Quartz Press (in association with Snailpress).

Madingoane, Ingoapele. 1979. Africa My Beginning. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Mahola, Mzi. 2000. When Rains Come. Cape Town: Carapace Poets (in association with Snailpress).

--. 2006. Dancing in the Rain. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Mann, Chris. 2002. Heartlands. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu Natal Press.

--. 2008. "Seeing the Cosmos in a Grain of Sand." Current Writing 20(2): 108-26.

Marshall, Christine. 2007. "A Change of Tongue: Antjie Krog's Poetry in English." Scrutiny 2 12(1): 72-92.

Mashile, Lebogang. 2005. In a Ribbon of Rhythm. Johannesburg: Mutloatse Arts Heritage Trust and Oshun Books.

Meihuizen, Nick. 2003. Review. Scrutiny2 8(1): 75-8.

--. 2008. "Review: Gail Dendy". New Contrast 36(4): 41-5.

Metelerkamp, Joan. 1993. Review. Current Writing 5(1): 119-27.

--. 2001. Review. Current Writing 13(1): 108-29.

--. 2003. Requiem. Grahamstown: Deep South.

Moolman, Kobus. 2000. Time Like Stone. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.

--. 2007. Separating Seas. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Mphahlele, Es'kia. 1981 [1967]. "Mrs Plum." The Unbroken Song: Selected Writings. Johannesburg: Ravan Press: 216-61.

Muila, Ike Mboni. 2004. Gova. Johannesburg: Botsotso Publishing.

Murray, Sally-Ann. 2006. Open Season: Poems. Durban: HardPressed.

Ndebele, Njabulo S. 2006 [1984]. "The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa." Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: 31-54.

Nyezwa, Mxolisi. 2000. Song Trials. Pietermaritzburg: Gecko Poetry (in association with University of Natal Press).

--. 2008. New Country. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Press, Karen. 2004. The Little Museum of Working Life. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Ramphele, Mamphela. 2009. "Comment." Mail & Guardian. (9-16 April): 8.

Robins, Roy. 2006. "Review: Sally-Ann Murray". New Contrast 34(4): 51-3.

Russell, Alec. 2009. After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa. London: Hutchinson.

Serote, Mongane Wally.1972. Yakhal'inkomo. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker: 8.

--. 1992. Third World Express. Cape Town: David Philip.

--. 2004. History Is the Home Address: A Poem. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

Sole, Kelwyn. 2005. "The Deep Thoughts the One in Need Falls Into: Quotidian Experience and the Perspective of Poetry in Postliberation South Africa." In: Loomba, A, et al. (eds). Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press: 182-205.

--. 2006. Land Dreaming: Prose Poems. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Strauss, Peter. 2007. "Review: Sally-Ann Murray". Current Writing 19(2): 231-2.

Stobie, Cheryl. 2007. "Shedding Skins: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in the Writing of Tatamkhulu Afrika." Journal of Literary Studies 23(2): 148-65.

Stockenstrom, Wilma. 2007. The Wisdom of Water. Trans. from the Afrikaans by Johann de Lange. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau.

Walne, Helen. 2009. "Human League." Cape Argus (14 April): 11.

Watson, Stephen. 1990 [1985]. "Poetry and Politicisation." Selected Essays 1980-1990. Cape Town: The Carrefour Press: 9-20.

--. 1991. The Return ofthe Moon. Versions from the /Xam. Cape Town: The Carrefour Press.

--. 2005. "Annals of Plagiarism: Antjie Krog and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection." New Contrast 32(2): 48-61.

Xaba, Makhosazana. 2005. These Hands. Elim: Timbila Poetry Project.

--. 2008. Tongues of their Mothers. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Notes

(1.) Apart from the collections listed in the References, the reader is referred to the earlier collections of the poets who are discussed, as well as to the following publications, which appeared in 2000 or beyond:

Lionel Abrahams (Chaos Theory of the Heart and Other Poems, Jacana Media, 2005); Mike Alfred (Poetic Licence, Botsotso Publishing, 2007); P R Anderson (Foundling's Island, Centre for Creative Arts, UCT, 2007); Tyrone Appollis (Train to Mitchell's Plain, Tyrone Appollis, n.d.); Shabbir Banoobhai (inward moon outward sun, Gecko Poetry, 2002); Lyrics in Paradise, author, 2009); Robert Berold (All the Days, Deep South, 2008); Vonani Bila (In the Name of AMANDLA, Timbila Poetry Project, 2004; Magicstan Fires, Timbila Poetry Project, 2006); Dennis Brutus (Poetry and Protest, Haymarket Books, 2006); Michael Cope (Ghaap: Sonnets from the Northern Cape, Kwela/Snailpress, 2005); Gary Cumminskey (today is their creator, Dye Hard Press, 2008); Sandile Dikeni (Telegraph to the Sky, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2000); Mark Espin (Falling from Sleep, Botsotso Publishing, 2007); Gus Ferguson (Stressed-Unstressed, David Philip, 2000); Stephen Gray (Shelley Cinema and Other Poems, Protea Book House, 2006); Robert Greig (Rule of Cadence, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005); Dorian Haarhoff (Tortoise Voices, Mercer Books, 2001); Denis Hirson (Gardening in the Dark, Jacana Media, 2007); Allan Kolski Horwitz (Saving Water,, Botsotso Publishing, n.d.); Liesl Jobson (100 Papers: A Collection of Prose Poems and Flash Fiction, Botsotso Publishing, 2008); Sarah Johnson (Personae, UCT/ Snailpress, 2004); Deela Khan (Engaging the Shades of Robben Island, Realities, 2002); Bernat Kruger (Never, Deep South, 2008); Haidee Kruger (Lush: Poems for Four Voices, Protea Book House, 2007); Kgafela oa Magogodi (Thy Condom Come, New Leaf, 2000); Sindiwe Magona (Please, Take Photographs, Modjaji Books, 2009); Chris Mann, Adrian Craig and Julia Skeen (Lifelines, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006); Goodenough Mashengo (Journey with Me, Timbila Poetry Project, 2005); Mzwandile Matiwane (I lost a poem, Deep South, 2004); Bongekile Joyce Mbanjwa (Izinhlungu Zamphefumula/Emotional Pain, trans. Siphiwe ka Ngwenya, Botsotso Publishing, n.d.); Eric Miyeni (O' Mandingo! A Poetic Journey, Jacana Media, 2008); Joan Metelerkamp (Into the Day Breaking, Gecko Poetry, 2000; Burnt Offering, Modjaji Books, 2009); Norman Morrissey (Triptych, Echoing Green Press, 2008); Phaswane Mpe (Brooding Clouds, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008); Lionel Murcott (A Private Part: Poems and Drawings, Botsotso Publishing, 2007); Charl-Pierre Naude (Against the Light, trans. from Afrikaans, Protea Boekhuis, 2008); Siphiwe ka Ngwenya (Soulfire Experience, Botsotso Publishing, 2005); Malika Lueen Ndlovu (Born in Africa But, Educall, 2000); Khulile Nxumalo (Ten Flapping Elbows, Mama, Deep South, 2004); Marl Pete (Amytis, umSinsi Press, 2007); Karen Press (Home, Carcanet Press, 2000); Mpho Ramaano, Talks with the Sun, Timbila Poetry Project, 2005); Arja Salafranca (The Fire in which We Burn, Dye Hard Press, 2000); Ari Sitas (Slave Trades and an Artist's Notebook, Deep South, 2000; The RDP Poems, Injula Co-operative, 2004); Kelwyn Sole (Mirror and Water Glazing, Gecko Poetry, 2001); Stephen Watson (The Light Echo and Other Poems, Penguin, 2007); Dan Wylie (Road Work, Echoing Green Press, 2007); Fiona Zerbst (Oleander, Modjaji Books, 2009). The following anthologies were consulted:

Robert Berold (ed.), It All Begins: Poems from Post Liberation South Africa (University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, n.d. [2002?]; Michael Chapman (ed.), The New Century of South African Poetry (Ad. Donker/Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2003); Allan Kolski Horwitz (ed.), Isis X (Botsotso Publishing, 2005); Rose Mokhosi (ed.), Basadzi Voices: An Anthology of Poetic Writing by Young South African Women (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006); Natalia Molebatsi (ed.), We Are...: A Poetry Anthology (Penguin, 2008).

(2.) Botsotso Jesters--a multilingual performance poetry collective--was formed in 1994. Several of its early members were practising poets including Allan Kolski Horwitz, Anna Varney, Siphiwe ka Ngwenya, Ike Muila, the late Isabella Motadinyane, and Roy Blumenthal. The name Botsotso--it refers to a style of jeans popular in the townships in the 1950s--was given also to a magazine on contemporary culture (Number 1, 1994). Besides the magazine, the collective has published several books of poetry including the A-4 format of their 'collective' poems, we jive like this (1996); the first book bearing the Botsotso imprint, No Free Sleeping (1998), featuring Donald Parenzee, Vonani Bila and Alan Finlay; and, edited by Michael Gardiner, Throbbing Ink: Six South African Poets: Lilinda ha Ndlovu, Wisani Nghalaluma, Vonani wa ka Bila, Mbongeni Khumalo, Phomelelo Machika, Allan Kolski Horwitz (2003). See Kolski Horwitz, ka Ngwenya, Muila et al. "What Is BOTSOTSO?", Botsotso 1 (1994), and the interview, "Botsotso Jesters" (1998), with Robert Berold (2003): 118-126. Vonani Bila's Timbila Poetry Project--based at Elim in the Limpopo province--has published, among other collections, Timbila 2001: A Journal of Onion Skin Poetry (2001) and Insight: Nosipho Kota, Alex Mohlabeng, Myesha Jenkins, Ayanda Billie, Themba ka Mathe, Righteous Common Man (2003), edited by Alan Finlay and Siphiwe ka Ngwenya. A selection of Bila's poetry has been published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. So has UKZN Press published Makhosazana Xaba, her first collection having appeared under the Timbila imprint. The WEAVE Collective, in Cape Town, published ink@boilingpoint: A Selection of 21st Century Black Women's Writing from the Tip of Africa (2000), edited by Malika Ndlovu, Shelley Barry and Deela Khan. Joanna Helmsley and Roy Blumenthal edited for SANGOCO/ Homeless Talk, Of Money, Mandarins, and Peasants: A Collection of South African Poems about Poverty (2000). Ari Sitas's The RDP Poems (2004) was published by the Durban-based Injula Co-operative. For information on 'counterpublic' publishing activities, see the unpublished Masters dissertation by Alan Finlay (2009).

(3.) Referring to poems of the 1970s and 80s Denis Hirson, editor of the anthology of South African poetry, The Lava of this Land (1997), suggests that what runs through the poetry "is that South Africans carry on singing through everything... if one begins to talk of a South African aesthetic, that quality of a transcendent song must be a key part of it" (in Berold 2003: 81). While this is an interesting observation, it is too generalised to help us understand the range of the poetry, whether of the previous two or three decades, or of the contemporary scene.

(4.) As a single 'high profile' poetry squabble we had Stephen Watson (2005) accusing Antjie Krog (2006) of plagiarism. Both had followed a South African 'tradition' of offering to contemporary readers versions of Bleek and Lloyd's 19th-century transcriptions and translations of San/Bushman oral expression.

(5.) The level of funding from abroad which, in the 1970s and 80s, subsidised 'antiapartheid' literary publishing diminished after the first democratic elections. Poetry publishing in the 1990s and 2000s has relied upon 'home industry' operations like Gus Ferguson's Snailpress and Robert Berold's Deep South, sometimes in association with new post-apartheid publishers such as Kwela and Umuzi (the latter a local imprint of Random House). Both Ferguson and Berold have encouraged a generous, wide-ranging view of poetry's potential. Poetry collectives have a more restricted focus on what they deem to be 'use' value. (See note 2.) Funds from the state National Arts Council and the National Lottery seek to enhance local cultural diversity with the priority on 'redress', particularly in the case of African-language publications. When the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press ventured into poetry, it was inundated with manuscripts and has now suspended its poetry publishing programme. In an age of desktop publishing, several poets have simply published their own work.

(6.) The annual Poetry Africa Festival (Centre for Creative Arts, University of KwaZulu-Natal), for example, has moved increasingly to performance poetry. Of the 2009 Cape Town-based Badilisha Poetry X-Change (Africa Centre, 2225 May) the curators, Malika Ndlovu and Lorelle Viegi, say, "Badilisha [a kiSwahili expression meaning to transform/to exchange] is a powerful collection of voices in a space that has been created to nurture multi-layered, authentic exchange. We invite people to savour the delicious digest of word, sound and charismatic delivery that is poetry" (Cape Times, 28/4/09, 13). Among the local participants were Emile Jansen of Black Noise, Megan Hall, Loftus Marais, the duo of Kai Lossgott and Mbali Vilakazi, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Eric Minyeni, iBushwomen (the sister collective of Tereska Muishond and Lavene da Silva), Jessica Mbangeni, and the father and daughter collaboration of Ntokozo and Bhekimpi Madlala. On the programme were also poet-performers from Zimbabwe, the DRC, the UK and the USA.

(7.) Yet, in apparent contradistinction to 'manifesto talk', editor of the journal Botsotso, Allan Kolski Horwitz, says, "The political and aesthetic openness we practise enables diverse writers and artists to work under our umbrella" (Mail & Guardian, 15-21/8/08, 5).

(8.) Of unusually pale-skin pigmentation Afrika, under apartheid legislation, had himself reclassified to his own social disadvantage as a 'non-white'; his bi-/ homosexual predilections were in conflict with his turning to the Muslim faith. (See Stobie 2007)

(9.) Although her argument is not focused on Body Bereft, see Marshall (2007) for illuminating comparisons of Krog's Afrikaans and English poetic language. See also Van Vuuren in this publication.