Most countries
try at some point to collate and survey their national poetry. Anthologists
read and select, arrange and comment, try to discern and evaluate the poetry’s
take on the national pulse, its history and values. They often quarrel bitterly
with one another behind the scenes, which is fun.
 |
Covers are always interesting:
a Grahamstown cover for New Coin -
Grahamstown-Makhanda of course
being the poetic heart of the universe. |
South
Africa’s English-language anthologists, who have been at it since 1828, have
probably had a tougher time than most. I have a whole bundle of anthologies in
hand – nowhere near complete, but enough to be fascinated by how the editors,
in their Introductions and selections, have grappled with certain perennial
questions. What should the status of such a minority-language collection be?
What should the relationship between artistry and politics be? How should
English white liberalism, arguably the core of this community and of late
increasingly vilified, articulate with other ideologies, races and languages? Are
these anthologies dictating or merely recording taste and quality? To what does
this moniker ‘South Africa’ refer, anyway?
When
you haven’t yourself ploughed through the thousands of poems from which the
anthologists have made their selections, it’s hard to comment validly on those
choices. It’s a big enough job just reading the anthologies themselves! So what
follows are just a few very tentative observations, teasing out what a succession
of editors have said about their projects in their respective introductions.
1959. Guy Butler, A Book of South African Verse. There had been previous anthologies, but we
might as well start in the year of my birth. Butler’s baseline-setting anthology
is dedicated to Roy Campbell, who had just died. Arch-patron Butler has been
periodically critiqued as propping up an outmoded form of white supremacism,
disguised as liberal bonhomie, and for having the gall to ‘set the standards’
for everyone else. But his ‘Introduction’ here is both humble and sharply self-critical. He begins with numbers – a recognition of the paucity of
English-speaking whites in South Africa, then just one million out of some 14
million. This “poetry of a linguistic, political, and cultural minority” could
hardly aspire to the status of a national literature. The narrowness is both
sign and result of an “intellectual apartheid” between groups; moreover, the English
group lacks “cultural awareness and make[s] a very half-hearted and ineffective
contribution to political life.... Our cultural capital is London... We cannot
support a single literary periodical ... Because we are economically safe, we
simply cannot imagine that we are in any other sort of danger.” Scathing satire
of the kinds Campbell and Anthony Delius wrote remained sparse. Nor, Butler
thought, did the poetry have any popular roots, remaining restrictively “an educated man’s affair”. Butler notes a frequent
shiftlessness: many poets were not born in South Africa; many, including 1820
settler Thomas Pringle and, a century later, Campbell, shortly left for other
lands. A sense of exile, dislocation, or instability haunts the selection.
Butler observes the formal and linguistic struggles Pringle had trying to match
inherited poetics to a new landscape; regrettably, Pringle’s influence
dominated a century to come; only in the 1920s, in Butler’s view, does a
diction emerge which really ‘sees’ the landscape. Even this becomes
mythologised as ‘wide open spaces’ that are, however, ultimately figured as indifferent,
even hostile. Equally rapidly, those spaces were “caught under nets of roads,
rails, telegraph poles, survey beacons and stock fences”. Urbanisation and the
dislocation of the “tribesman” into the horror of the townships compels many of
the poets acidly to critique modern technological society and the ills it has
brought. Hence, the South African poet “ends up outside the consolation of any
tradition, with an increased self-knowledge, but stultified by doubts”. There
is a pervasive sense, in short, that the white poetic community feels like a “floating
island” (in Ruth Miller’s poem of that title), freighted with doubts and
anxieties, heading with sickening inevitability towards the precipice of
Victoria Falls.
Many of these critiques and perceptions
hold true even today, as English as both a colonially-rooted minority language
and the international lingua franca struggles to position
itself locally without becoming parochial and irrelevant. Butler had almost
inadvertently exacerbated the isolation by distinguishing between ‘poetry’ and
‘verse’, thereby excluding more ‘popular’ forms of expression, such
black-written poetry in English as then existed, and translations. Anthologists
duly set about rectifying these restrictions. In 1968, Jack Cope and Uys Krige edited the first Penguin Book of South African
Verse, which included translations from other South African languages,
thus introducing another strand of debate: to what extent can translations be
included in ‘English’ anthologies? Though departing markedly from the white
liberal collective as delineated by Butler, Cope and Krige would be repeatedly
critiqued for positioning these translations in silos, (Afrikaans, Zulu, etc) almost as if recapitulating apartheid
itself. A decade later Butler himself, in
collaboration with Chris Mann, updated the anthology as A New Book of South African Verse
in English (1979). This collection still began with the obligatory
Pringle, but now included some ‘popular’ verse which departed from ‘poetic’
English, such as A G Bain’s ‘Kaatjie Kekkelbeck’ and Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Ag pleez
Deddy’. Some black poets now appear, including HIE Dhlomo, Sipho Sepamla and
Mongane Wally Serote, who would become increasingly canonised. Chris Mann tells
me that they tried to include Dennis Brutus, but he was a banned writer at the
time; Chris solicited the help of Van Zyl Slabbert, who approached the relevant
minister. When asked why his request failed, Slabbert said it was because the
minister was “a dumb tit with power”. Despite this nod towards resisting
apartheid, the introduction doesn’t mention apartheid explicitly – a diffidence
that characterises subsequent anthologies, too. At the same time, it’s interesting to note
the disproportionate space given to Sydney Clouts, who for some is the acme of
the ‘difficult’, modernist, liberal white poet.
1981. Michael Chapman, A Century
of South African Poetry. If anyone has inherited the
mantle of National Anthologiser from Butler, it is Chapman. A
Century actually covers 150 years, offering 300 poems by 137 poets (where Butler had gone for fewer poets, each
represented by more poems). Chapman carefully distances himself from Butler,
but his introduction is curiously ambivalent. He has to go back to Francis
Carey Slater’s Centenary anthology of
1925 in order to emphasise his ‘new’ valorisation of the modern and the
avant-garde (Slater had averred that “much modern poetry is scarcely a sign of
healthy development and strength”). Butler’s anthology, Chapman points out, is
dominated by the “conciliatory ideals” of English liberal humanism, implying “an
underlying confidence in given moral and literary values”. This seems to me a misreading
of Butler’s commentary. Also a bit unfairly, he quotes Ian Glenn’s remark that
the 1979 Butler/Mann anthology betrayed “an editorial bias against certain
themes or styles ... a dislike of the bloody, the ugly, the vulgar, the sordid,
the apocalyptic, the frightening”. Humanism, claims Chapman, “is not the South African English tradition –
but only one important aspect of it”. In short, he adds, “the liberal humanist
voice is richer and more varied than Butler’s own remarks (‘I cannot detect a
peculiar style, or verse form, or intonation’) might seem to imply” - an oddly
self-contradictory statement. At any rate, Chapman thus justifies his inclusion
of “public and private voices, the familiar and the surreal, the traditional
and the avant garde” extending to “the ‘radical’, to the experimental, the
demythicising stance; to that poetry in which image dominates over statement,
the cryptic over mellifluous syntax”. This included an expanded range of black
poets (notably Peter Abrahams and HIE Dhlomo prior to 1960) “trying to
establish an authentic black voice of protest” and, after 1976, those he called
the “Soweto poets” (Mafika Gwala, Sepamla, Serote and others – a categorisation
those poets themselves subsequently rejected). At the same time, you can feel
Chapman grappling with the same question Butler did: what constitutes good poetry anyway? Chapman doesn’t want
altogether to let go of what the academic humanists would regard as the
necessity of craft, of poetic artistry: his criteria are still “primarily
‘literary’ rather than ‘sociological’.” (These were the hot terms of debate
when I was a student.) Of course, Chapman hedges, “the two are not really separable”.
‘Sociological’ implied, crudely, viewing poetry as commentary and intervention
in societal struggle, and could thus be conflated with ‘political’, direct
statement on political affairs. If this was not to devolve to mere clichéd
party sloganeering, craft and artistry had to be returned to the equation:
according to Chapman, “the best poetry has fully taken into account the
metaphysics of action and hate”. (No, I don’t know what he means by
‘metaphysics’ either.) Somehow, I suspect, this is connected to the
aforementioned (possibly strategic) diffidence about discussing apartheid:
though Chapman mentions responses to “a system of institutionalised
discrimination” and “a crisis of authority”, the word apartheid appears nowhere in the Introduction. (He also mentions, pointedly, the regrettable
exclusion of Dennis Brutus.) Chapman
further feels ambivalent about the status of English in the first place, and
rather ironically echoes Cope and Krige in concluding: “Until South Africans
are proficiently multilingual, the most satisfactory arrangement would seem to
be separate anthologies catering for different languages.” As others would
later point out, by and large only white English-speakers tend to be
monolingual.
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| Still depicting domesticity? |
1984. Chapman, The Paperbook of
South African English Poetry. Just three years later, Chapman produced the serviceable Paperbook, which I found useful for a
South African poetry course, and which has been reprinted several times. It
still begins with the obligatory Pringle, and the introduction repeats many of
the observations from Century. Yet of
its 238 poems, only 44 appear in Century,
attesting to the intrinsic riches of the available material. Chapman revisited “diverse
sources, including old newspapers, journals and obscure anthologies of the last
century”, and updated the coverage from “the little magazines of the last five
years”. Of the latter, unlike in 1959, quite a few had emerged – not least of
all New Coin, which Butler himself had
inaugurated in 1965, and is still going. Chapman had to ask himself, “Is
another anthology of South African English poetry really necessary?” He cites poet
and academic Stephen Watson’s review of Stephen Gray’s simultaneously published
Modern South African Poetry, suggesting
that there was insufficient local poetry of quality for more than one anthology
at a time: “If most poetry is bad then South African poetry has a badness of
its own”. (Several editors react defensively to Watson’s repeatedly dyspeptic remarks
about South African poetry’s “linguistic deadness” and such like.) Chapman revisits
the aesthetic-vs-sociological debate, trying to “occupy a position between
these two poles”, and valorises a new term, the hybrid, “as a defining
feature, and even a distinctive strength, of our literature”. Against previous
anthologies’ assumption of “middle-class academic values”, derived from the
theories of English doyens Matthew Arnold and FR Leavis, of “‘balance’,
moderation, reasonableness and ‘sanity’, Chapman gives “greater emphasis to the
‘uneducated’ voices ... to voices of ‘modern’ stress, extreme situation, and
political apocalypse.” Again, apartheid per
se is carefully skirted, though it is implicit throughout, and a kind of
pressure-valve is released in the unarguable observation that “the historical
process in which we all live is difficult, morally compromised, messy and
flawed.”
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Cecil Skotnes cover: combining African
and European motifs, or a new style? |
1989. Stephen Gray, The Penguin
Book of Southern African Poetry. Man of letters and general
provocateur Stephen Gray is another assiduous literary surveyor, in several
genres. He begins his introduction to this selection: “The anthologizer’s task
of selecting ... is an over-responsible one.” He is too readily seen as aiming
to dictate taste, and “readers can
all too conveniently take the part for the whole.” Although Chapman had
tentatively included certain Rhodesian-Zimbabwean poets, Gray now deliberately
takes in the whole subcontinent, regarding the ‘nation’ as essentially “arbitrary”.
The Cope-Krige strategy of dividing the several languages “seems outdated, even
offensive”. Hence “our indebtedness to translators becomes substantial ...
unblocking channels of communication to insist on the reciprocity of human
feelings”. He engages in the unavoidable but dulling quarrel between the
aesthetes and the politicos (there is always a whiff of straw-man argumentation
in this): “The comparative approach is usually more sociological and historical
than aesthetic’’ but many poems are both. Gray wisely adds: “To expect poets to
give systematic testimony of their times, at the one extreme, is as unjust as
to expect them always to be superb technicians on the other.” So a 1974
anthology of Freedom Poems by Barry Feinberg
he finds “hyper-activist and technically banal”, while conversely DJ Opperman’s
perennial Groot Verseboek is “an
utterly gutless trove of the finest writing.” Gray’s own selection is idiosyncratic and
energising, and he makes no apology for his “obstinacy in avoiding most of the
chestnuts”. For almost the first time, this breed of chronological survey
begins not with Pringle but with a long extract from Luis de Camoens’ epic Lusiads, and with some early San and
other ‘traditional’ material, challenging the very notion of what a ‘poem’ is. Also
for the first time, Gray alludes to the gender imbalance, though finds that the
available material doesn’t allow for much redress. In sum, Gray goes for poems “that
I admire, find memorable, and for many reasons feel are irreplaceably valuable.
... [N]ot many of these poets feel library-bound – elitist, privileged and
effete. ... poetry is still felt to be living communication rather than bookish
exercise.”
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Soweto boy on trampoline:
bourgeoisification? |
1997. Denis Hirson, The Lava of
this Land: South African poetry 1960-1996. Gray’s subcontinental purview further
blurred the everyday pre-eminence of apartheid in the South African experience
– these compilers tend to characterise the 1948-1994 era as a period of
dreadful “transition”, or “Interregnum” in Chapman’s odd term, perhaps hoping
it would end long before it did. But the advent of constitutional democracy in
1994 threw anthologists into a fresh set of transitional dynamics. So Hirson
opens his introduction to this more restricted collection: “’South African poetry’ meant something quite specific to many
readers not so very long ago: a momentary flame of words in the sombre
confinement of apartheid, a sign that not everyone had been snuffed out by the
pig-iron hand and airless language of oppression. Yet South African poetry has
always been highly diverse, rooted in both African and European traditions,
reflecting what has until recently been a ruthlessly divided society.” (Which
also seems to me self-contradictory; only at the end of this period do poets
begin to mix languages in a single poem.) Now there are ever more new poets and
magazines in view, and Hirson’s criteria are almost anti-poetic. His 54
contributors produce “poems whose raw music throbs at the edge of change. ... They
dispense with any regular metre or form, breaking through the deliberate,
finely controlled, and ultimately defensive gauze of words which characterized
the poetry written by whites up to (and even beyond) this period. White poets
like Breytenbach and Jensma jettison the guilt and ‘polite cowardice’
associated with this poetry; black poets, on the other hand, often avoid the
belittling stance of the victim.” He cites Robert Berold, then incoming editor
of New Coin: “It feels like an
exciting movement is happening in English poetry in this country ... The
English language, the language of settlerdom, power and commerce is being
shaped by African sensibilities and forms – African not necessarily meaning
black. Increasingly since the 1970s and particularly since the unbanning of the
ANC and the demythologization of Mandela, poets are more and more using the
living language, breaking the grids of formal political or literary orthodoxy.”
Oddly, the highly personalised or meditative poetry that always existed but
that was in some circles vilified for avoiding, if not betraying, the struggle
for democratic freedom, is now itself liberated. Hirson writes, in terms more
poetic than explanatory: “the exploration of extreme, personalized
vulnerability would seem to correspond to a time when the straightjacket has
been removed from South African society, the wind of change stinging against
newly exposed skin.”
There are also collections of even narrower
scope as well as different principles of organisation. In 1989 David Bunyan, one of the succession of editors of New Coin, had gathered a selection from
the magazine’s previous quarter-century, 25/25, supplying in my view the most
insightful of all these introductions.
He organised the poems under 25 notional themes, provoking some
interesting juxtapositions. In that year Robert Berold took over the
editorship, and ten years later compiled an equivalent selection from his
decade, it all begins (1999). In the same year Adam Schwartzmann
decided on Ten South African Poets, according each between ten and twenty
poems and a more detailed biographical note than customary. And there are many more. Still, Chapman for
one wasn’t about to relinquish the grand survey, arranged in notional periods.
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| Race relations at the centre of our poetry? |
2002. Michael Chapman, The New
Century of South African Poetry. Yet again attesting to the variety
available, Chapman’s update of A Century
has remarkably little overlap with its predecessor. Even as this indicates some
desire to continually reinvent the field, he wants to implement some sort of overarching structure, “a
common field of consideration.” A “key
aesthetic criterion,” he writes, is “the power of functionality”. Odd: if 'functionality' implies a move away from old art-for-art’s-sake, it’s not an
aesthetic criterion at all. It feels like another incarnation of that
literary-sociological hedging. So in effect we fall back on something more
fluid and personal. Chapman cites Adam Schwartzmann as liking it “when poets do
something fascinating and invigorating through language”; and Robert Berold
(another emergent, strong arbiter of taste) as valorising the “risk-taking”
poem, “even when its articulation is clumsy”. That raw clumsiness is then
excused, even validated, as “at times a deliberate ploy to undermine the high
imagination of the modernist’’, somehow authentic in its honest revelation of “human
fallibility”, and thereby achieving “an immediacy of communication”. Ironically, the convention-breaking
rebelliousness of modernist poetry of a century ago, is now itself considered
over-poetic. Despite the bewildering diversity of responses, Chapman wants to
see them as mirrors of each other, coming from “a single society shaped by a
multiplicity of impositions and influences.” More than ever, then, translation across
languages and cultures is crucial, involving “numerous and necessary crossings
of borders”: “The social equivalent is equality and respect.” It’s a sweetly
utopian notion; it would be hard to argue that the country has matched up to it.
And Chapman has indefatigably updated the volume yet again, with his 2018 Third Edition. It follows roughly the same pattern, making most of the same points in the introduction. But he takes out a hundred poems, includes 107 new ones, and adds a fifth section for poems from the post-2000 period. So he subtly coveys yet another kind of take on South African society and its concerns. There are new concerns, for example the environmental, which cast new light on old and new poems alike. But as he wisely says, we can't expect poets always to directly reflect their times, and we can't expect a necessarily choosy anthology to do that either. Different choices from an ever vaster field would convey a different trajectory. At any rate, one cannot doubt the inestimable value of Chapman's decades of work and criticism.
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| Does abstraction escape ideology? |
2014. I’ll
end with Denis Hirson’s follow-up to
Lava of this Land, his selection of
poems from the small magazines of 1996-2013, In the Heat of Shadows. He opens his introduction: “Anyone who
followed the development of South African poetry through the darkest of the
apartheid years, and was aware of its constantly recurring themes of guilt and
victimization, rage and denial, identity and dispossession, might be surprised
by its current reach and range. South African poets today find themselves
writing in the midst of uneasy political transformation, some of it neither
planned nor hoped for, while spinning outwards from the casing of isolation to
join the bustle and complexity of the turning world.” The TRC had “allowed for
the emergence of hidden, unspeakable apartheid-era stories”, and “if the
language is sometimes purposefully crude, this only serves to fuel more
intensely the energies needed to move beyond the discourse of dependence, to a
point where the poem becomes part of the dialogue between poet and community.”
How to delineate that ‘community’ or intended readership is surely still problematic and evolving,
precisely because the many black poets included are “reclaiming a history and
sense of ancestry denied for centuries by successive white regimes”, and there
are more poems than ever translated from other languages. Still Hirson wonders “if it is really
justifiable to assemble ‘an anthology of South African poetry’ consisting of
poems all written originally in the same single language”.
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African Sun Press has produced a series of
thematic anthologies; the latest on ecological affairs |
Still, more than ever now there is surely
room for everyone. I can almost hear Guy Butler, as alert to these issues as anyone
since, urging, Come on, get over your ideological selves; English in its many,
mutating forms is here to stay – and there are so many riches here.
******
Visit Dan Wylie at www.netsoka.co.za
