Eastern
Cape denizens often speak of the Hogsback with an obvious affection – its humped
dolerite ridges, its forest walks and waterfalls, its eco-shrines and oddball
potters and painters, its famously tiny chapel and soggy leaf beds and quaint
seclusions. It’s one of the special little havens of green high leisure on the
edge of the more gaunt Karoo.
It has
also for decades been the haunt of a unique cabal of productive poets, who call
themselves the Ecca Poets, after the
name of the regional shale that undergirds much of the area, and the pass that
curls through the dramatic hills between Fort Beaufort and Grahamstown. There
isn’t to my knowledge another group quite like it in the country, at least not
in the rural areas. (The Batsotso Jesters may be an urban equivalent.) Over
many years they have produced almost annual collaborative volumes: they started
up in 1989, and I suspect that the National English Literary Museum’s database
is incomplete. NELM’s earliest record is of Cast
(1996), followed by (amongst others) Holdall
(2002), Passover (2003), Dispositions (2004), Keynote (2008), Spaces (2009), Brood
(2010), Gold in Spring (2016). Add to
the collaborative collections a number of
two- or three-partner publications, occasional pamphlets, and a goodly
number of individuals’ volumes. There is a lot of very good poetry in this
steady and devoted stream, amounting I imagine to at least several hundred
poems. Yet the Ecca poets have been almost entirely neglected by the critical
establishment. Even Jeanette Eve, in her sumptuous A Literary Guide to the Eastern Cape, while including some of the
individual poets, makes only a passing mention of the group's earliest manifestation as the “Echo” poets. It’s high time someone did a major study.
I’ve
known many of the poets, more or less tangentially, been to a number of their readings
and launches, occasionally reviewed one of their volumes. Inevitably over the
years the composition of the group has waxed and waned. Steady at the centre
stands the owlish bonhomie of Brian Walter, in whose strongly
ecologically-aware poetry I have taken most interest. Like other Hogsback
residents and writers, he taught at Fort Hare University in Alice in the dry
valley below, before some years ago moving to Port Elizabeth. Another is the
robustly humorous Catholic priest Cathal Lagan, who brings a particular
theological depth to some of the poetry. To judge by the number of poems these
two dedicate to each other, they are especially close comrades. There was
founder member Basil Somihlalo, the only other member of the band, as far as I
know, to have passed away so far (in 1994). Mzi Mahola, once attending Fort
Hare university, later mostly occupied with running a museum in New Brighton, contributed
for a number of years, as well as producing individual volumes. Of roughly the
same generation is Quentin Hogge, who a while ago was (at least by his own
account in his recent volume, More Poems,
Boet) ostracised for publishing a particularly non-PC poem. Hogge has a
uniquely wry, colloquial and forthright – one might say distinctively Eastern
Cape – voice. Norman Morrissey’s voice is not dissimilar: punchy, pithy,
colloquial, at times sardonically wise.
Leavening
the gritty voices of these older gents are some younger voices. Lara Kirsten,
when she isn’t on tour playing the piano, contributes a vigour and theatricality
in Afrikaans. Mariss Stevens (Everitt), on the strength of owning a Hogsback
house, joined in for a while, until (despite having produced a lovely volume of
her own, On Gardening) she decided
she’s a better quilter than a poet. And in recent years Silke Heiss, already an
established poet in the little journals, fell in love with Norman; together
they energetically promoted poetry through readings and workshops, even as she
supported him in his last years. Both their latest productions, including
Norman’s last volume, Strandloop, are
saturated with their love for one another.
Only an
extensive survey could do justice to the range of voices, concerns, ideas,
subjects, forms and settings covered by this vivacious bunch. Few of them do
not ruminate at some point on the purview, power and purposes of poetry itself.
Brian Walter, for example, sets out a succinct manifesto, or methodology, that would
help many a baffled student, in “Memo”:
Try not to say too much,
but with a Keatsian hand of chance
trace with a light touch
a sketched instance;
cut and shade, tone and hue;
close with a Janus glance.
(Bookmark)
Cathal
Lagan ends his poem “Tickler” this way:
I wanted to be a tickler of fish,
catch the sprung muscle of it
with a fearsome grip,
but in that there was no art.
Now it is mine to play with words –
figuring them out.
(Bookmark)
That “sprung
muscle" - lovely. But for now, the story is the celebration of the words and
hefty presence of Norman Morrissey. In a poem dedicated to Norman, Quentin
Hogge touches on a theme common to many Ecca poems – disdainful suspicion of
corrupting urbanism and commercialisation in contrast to the rich organic
belonging of the paradisal Hogsback.
Paradise
Airports respect no dreams:
the taxi terminus
and subway stations stink,
these human sewers,
where canteens serve
soya sossige and acorn coffee.
Machines go berserk.
sensing steel fillings
in obsolete teeth,
while terror climbs aboard unnoticed.
CNN will take you there –
don’t leave your lounge.
Unless,
where you want to be
is where the loerie
floats the synapses of forest,
a scatter of scarlet wings
in the ganglions of light,
where the silent boomslang
rules,
a pause of utter command.
(Borderline 2002)
Perhaps
in belated response to this, Morrissey wrote “Eden”:
My boomslang
would lie hammocked atop the hedge
- thick as my wrist,
two metres and more in the lounging –
and let me get near
as she basked.
Then I got a gardener
and she suddenly
disappeared
- which is a slash ahead of Yahweh,
he left the Serpent at least
at peace in Eden.
There’s
that trademark wry humour, the little sardonic twist of wisdom. So although many
of the Ecca poets might be regarded as modern-day pastoral organicists, they
were hardly oblivious to the serpents in the garden – the technologies and
politics that interpenetrate everything, the ills that bedevil the blood
itself. As he aged (though he was ‘only’ 68 when he died), Norman attended to
the voices of his own body. He wrote in “Just Sound?”:
There was a hip-replacement
then a long, deep pneumonia
that nearly got me – body and soul
- that set me on crutches.
The legs are weak and stiff
and the lungs I must have to walk again
need legs to strengthen them.
Doesn’t it all sound
just like life?
He wasn’t
about to collapse into maundering self-pity, though, reminding himself in the
very next poem in Bookmark, entitled “Bitching”:
Cervantes wrote Don
Quixote
in a dungeon,
Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
came out of a gaol;
and here I am
bitching
about writing
from
a mere sick-bed!
There
was always something of the twinkle-eyed grumble about Norman, as he delivered
his poems with a ponderous gruffness from behind his whitening beard, affecting
something of the air of an oracular sage. At the Grahamstown launch of his last
volume, Strandloop, in May last year,
he read more slowly and gruffly than ever – we were beginning to suspect even
then that the sick-bed was getting the better of him. But so much of his poetry
is about beauty, and love, and the holy delicacy of the natural world and its
denizens. Like so many of his poems, “Wind” is as short and direct as a tossed
pebble:
I once saw the wind
a stream
like crystal water
flowing
You may
be out in the invisible wind now, Norman, but the words flow on, crystalline as
a Hogsback stream.
*****