FROM SOUTH AFRICA: A Brief Word on Poetry 
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Keorapetse Willy Kgositsile 
A Brief Word on Poetry 

No poet creates from nothing. In every culture there is tradition which informs, influences, guides, and inspires the development of artistic expression. The very language that any poet uses was there before that poet was born; it is a product of a people’s collective genius. It achieves the heights and depths of its expressiveness in poetry.

At the risk of trampling on some toes let me point out that there are two major criminals who are a danger to any appreciation of poetry. In the classroom there is the supposed teacher who forces you to endure poetry instead of guiding you to appreciate and enjoy it. Then there is the clown who claims whatever s/he writes and makes you suffer, publicly or privately, is poetry. Perhaps that is even why some people ask what poetry is. I have never heard one person ask what music is; but people appreciate and enjoy it without the help of a single music lesson.

If you are fortunate enough to have survived the obscurantism of your supposed poetry teacher, and liked some poetry enough to want to try your hand at it, you start off by imitating what you have been exposed to and liked. As Lindsay Barrett says, I’ve pointed out elsewhere, “A doll is a child’s first child.” The little girl will re-enact with her “child” the routine activities that she enjoys with her mother. At other times, there will be some improvisations in this role act-playing. She will attribute to the “child”, her doll, what she is critical of in the way her mother actually treats her. She will then criticize her mother, who is now her “child.” This little girl grows up to be a woman and, in this case, let’s say, a mother. In raising her own children, she will utilize the ‘tradition’ of bringing up children, which she was exposed to, socialized into. She will subtract from that tradition what she is critical of and/or add to it her own preference, conviction, feeling and thinking, about how children should be brought up. The imitation that was her initiation and point of departure has now stopped. She is a mother. As would-be poets, we develop like that.

It is important for the would-be poet to read, listen to, study, practisrry and deliver messages; the Post Office, Western Union, or the internet, or the cell phone e, and work hard at poetry. A poem is not an excuse for anything else. A poem does not cawould be more appropriate vehicles for carrying messages. A poem is not an excuse for philosophical, sociological, psychological, political or whatever arguments. Poetry, as Gwen Brooks might say, is life worked with. The poet explores life through expressive language. In this imaginative exploration, the poet worth the label, uses metaphor, the poetic image, poetic logic, dismantling and re-arranging reality to evoke some gesture, some movement of life through the art of eloquence.

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TPB's notes: Keorapetse Willy Kgositsile is South Africa's National
Poet Laureate as well as an Advisor to the Minister
of Arts & Culture in the South African government. Source:http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/kgositsile.htm

AMERICAN POETS: ANNE SEXTON & JUNE JORDAN
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JUNE JORDAN
Apologies to All the People in Lebanon Related Poem Content Details
Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children

But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called      your apartments and gardens      guerrilla
strongholds.
They called      the screaming devastation
that they created       the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?

Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family

But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad

You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV

You see my point;

I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.

__________

TPB's notes:  June Jordan was the author of more than twenty-five major works of poetry, fiction and essays, as well as numerous children's books. Jordan wrote the librettos for the operas Bang Bang Uber Alles with music by Adrienne Torf, and I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, with music by John Adams; she wrote lyrics frequently for other musicians, as well as plays and musicals. Her journalism was published widely in magazines and newspapers around the world, and she was a regular columnist for The Progressive. An electrifying speaker, Jordan collected many of her most influential speeches and addresses in her books of essays. Source: http://www.forharriet.com

ANNE SEXTON
Rumpelstiltskin

Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
No bigger than a two-year-old
whom you'd call lamb chop
yet this one is old and malformed.
His head is okay
but the rest of him wasn't Sanforized?
He is a monster of despair.
He is all decay.
He speaks up as tiny as an earphone
with Truman's asexual voice:
I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy within.
I am the boss of your dreams.
No. I am not the law in your mind,
the grandfather of watchfulness.
I am the law of your members,
the kindred of blackness and impulse.
See. Your hand shakes.
It is not palsy or booze.
It is your Doppelganger
trying to get out.
Beware . . . Beware . . .

There once was a miller
with a daughter as lovely as a grape.
He told the king that she could
spin gold out of common straw.
The king summoned the girl
and locked her in a room full of straw
and told her to spin it into gold
or she would die like a criminal.
Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn.

She wept,
of course, huge aquamarine tears.
The door opened and in popped a dwarf.
He was as ugly as a wart.
Little thing, what are you? she cried.
With his tiny no-sex voice he replied:
I am a dwarf.
I have been exhibited on Bond Street
and no child will ever call me Papa.
I have no private life.
If I'm in my cups the whole town knows by breakfast
and no child will ever call me Papa
I am eighteen inches high.
I am no bigger than a partridge.
I am your evil eye
and no child will ever call me Papa.
Stop this Papa foolishness,
she cried. Can you perhaps
spin straw into gold?
Yes indeed, he said,
that I can do.
He spun the straw into gold
and she gave him her necklace
as a small reward.
When the king saw what she had done
he put her in a bigger room of straw
and threatened death once more.
Again she cried.
Again the dwarf came.
Again he spun the straw into gold.
She gave him her ring
as a small reward.
The king put her in an even bigger room
but this time he promised
to marry her if she succeeded.
Again she cried.
Again the dwarf came.
But she had nothing to give him.
Without a reward the dwarf would not spin.
He was on the scent of something bigger.
He was a regular bird dog.
Give me your first-born
and I will spin.
She thought: Piffle!
He is a silly little man.
And so she agreed.
So he did the trick.
Gold as good as Fort Knox.

The king married her
and within a year
a son was born.
He was like most new babies,
as ugly as an artichoke
but the queen thought him in pearl.
She gave him her dumb lactation,
delicate, trembling, hidden,
warm, etc.
And then the dwarf appeared
to claim his prize.
Indeed! I have become a papa!
cried the little man.
She offered him all the kingdom
but he wanted only this -
a living thing
to call his own.
And being mortal
who can blame him?
The queen cried two pails of sea water.
She was as persistent
as a Jehovah's Witness.
And the dwarf took pity.
He said: I will give you
three days to guess my name
and if you cannot do it
I will collect your child.
The queen sent messengers
throughout the land to find names
of the most unusual sort.
When he appeared the next day
she asked: Melchior?
Balthazar?
But each time the dwarf replied:
No! No! That's not my name.
The next day she asked:
Spindleshanks? Spiderlegs?
But it was still no-no.
On the third day the messenger
came back with a strange story.
He told her:
As I came around the corner of the wood
where the fox says good night to the hare
I saw a little house with a fire
burning in front of it.
Around that fire a ridiculous little man
was leaping on one leg and singing:
Today I bake.
Tomorrow I brew my beer.
The next day the queen's only child will be mine.
Not even the census taker knows
that Rumpelstiltskin is my name . . .
The queen was delighted.
She had the name!
Her breath blew bubbles.

When the dwarf returned
she called out:
Is your name by any chance Rumpelstiltskin?
He cried: The devil told you that!
He stamped his right foot into the ground
and sank in up to his waist.
Then he tore himself in two.
Somewhat like a split broiler.
He laid his two sides down on the floor,
one part soft as a woman,
one part a barbed hook,
one part papa,
one part Doppelganger.

__________

TPB's notes: Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die.  Source of bio: wiki

Four Poems about Poetry from three Americans and one Welsh

Four Poems about Poetry from three Americans and one Welsh

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DYLAN THOMAS

Notes on the Art of Poetry

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on

in the world between the covers of books,

such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,,,

such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,

such and so many blinding bright lights,, ,

splashing all over the pages

in a million bits and pieces

all of which were words, words, words,

and each of which were alive forever

in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

WALLACE STEVENS

Poetry is a Destructive Force

That's what misery is,

Nothing to have at heart.

It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,

A lion, an ox in his breast,

To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,

Young ox, bow-legged bear,

He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man

In the body of a violent beast

Its muscles are his own...

The lion sleeps in the sun.

Its nose is on its paws.

It can kill a man.

 

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Poem

As the cat

climbed over

the top of

the jamcloset

first the right

forefoot

carefully

then the hind

stepped down

into the pit of

the empty

flowerpot

FRANK O'HARA

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time

nor shall I laugh all the time,

I don't prefer one "strain" to another.

I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,

not just a sleeper, but also the big,

overproduced first-run kind. I want to be

at least as alive as the vulgar. And if

some aficionado of my mess says "That's

not like Frank!", all to the good! I

don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,

do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,

often. I want my feet to be bare,

I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--

you can't plan on the heart, but

the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

LANGSTON HUGHES & DEREK WALCOTT

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three poems on what on what or what?

LANGSTON HUGHES 
Not What Was

By then the poetry is written
and the wild rose of the world
blooms to last so short a time
before its petals fall.
The air is music
and its melody a spiral
until it widens
beyond the tip of time
and so is lost
to poetry and the rose—
belongs instead to vastness beyond form,
to universe that nothing can contain,
to unexplored space
which sends no answers back
to fill the vase unfilled
or spread in lines
upon another page—
that anyhow was never written
because the thought could not escape
the place in which it bloomed
before the rose had gone.

___________
TPB's notes: n/a

DEREK WALCOTT
Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat. 
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

_______
TPB's notes: n/a

NEW SOUTH AFRICA WRITING: BESSIE HEAD, & ABIGAIL GEORGE
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TPB's notes: from five found early poems of Bessie Head. JSTOR, an online bunch of criminals, charges exorbitantly for access to these poems - even as they pay no royalty to any Botswana outfit/estate.

ABIGAIL GEORGE
Instinct

The photograph is of my mother. In it she looks like someone else. Perhaps someone else’s mother. Our relationship is fraught with difficulties. I’m a fat cutout or rather the curator of fat cutouts. Dark water inside of my head. I can hear her voice. She is calling me. Yes, I am coming. She’s my sun. A slow word. An open and shut release. She’s a mountain covered with light-green foliage. Her hair is cut in the style younger women wore in those days. The expression on her face is carefree. She is not burdened yet with a brilliant, manic depressive husband, and three spoilt but talented children. She is the storage space where I keep all my childhood treasure. I search for the city language of chronic illness. Find it there, the miracle, staring back at me on the page. My mother is beautiful even though she is the origin of winter to me. She’s taste, and smell. Sight, and sound. My mother is elegant. I feel when I look at that picture, hold the photograph in my hands that I can have a coffee with the girl that my mother is. Perhaps we can even go for lunch. Share a slice of decadent, mouthwatering cheesecake. That’s what girls do. They go out together, and talk, and talk. She will tell me how she met my gentle, and wise father. She will tell me their love story in so many words. She has all that slicked back magical wavy magazine hair. I only exist because of her. She carried me in her womb for nine months. The pregnancy was difficult. I was delivered by Caesarian section. Late at night while the house is asleep I write. I write to reach all of her. I write in code. She’s warmth like a good, hot breakfast of French toast, and oats with cinnamon milk. Syrup and bacon. Eggs and toast. Muesli bird food. I remembered when her  belly was gravid with my sister. Then with my brother. Perhaps I can even remember when she stopped laughing. The cold shore of her love ruined me for life. I’ve become a dangerous woman. Dangerous to love. I had position once, that giddy moment but now I’m marked in some explainable way that everyone who has eyes can see when they look at me they know that something is wrong with me. Outside my bedroom window. There’s the high school Iwent to but never graduated from down the road from where I live. The high school where I was bullied. Teased mercilessly for being too smart, too thin, for being invisible as long division, and dust. There’s the hospital I was born in down Stanford Road. The flat where my parents first lived, played house, settled down to raise a family, have that sunny road, have those kids. The flat opposite the library with the Encyclopedia Britannica that is still there locked in a time machine.

My mother is warm, and sweet but only with people who belong to the same tribe she belongs to. Girls and women.
The smell of clean cut grass is in the air. The scent of my mother’s rinsed hair. Salt and light on the open sandy path at the beach as we make our way to the sea. Curled in the foetal position on the bed listening to music played loud to drown out the other members of the family making their way, marching their way through the order of life in the other rooms of the house. Inside my head are waves. Vibrations of energy. Something snaps. Does it have a sound? A round shape like the shape of this blue planet called Earth. Is it circular like the moon calling the tides down an inquisition through a loophole. Is it the circle of the sun that is causing me this hot, dense, heavy abdominal pain. Knots of butterflies in my stomach. Playful moths in the pit of my stomach. The flame that flickers. Shadows of fingers. The sunlight is considered thin. In the afternoon it hovers against the wall, the comfortable sofa in the family room, after a rain showers fleck. The woman in the photograph is my mother. She is wearing a beautiful dress. She looks very elegant. She is smiling or is she laughing. I do not know this woman. She is a ‘fiance’. She has found herself a husband. She is not tired of life yet. She isn’t not cold towards her daughters. Not yet, anyway. She’s going to be an Eve. Made from Adam’s rib. The world makes me go cool inside. In this photograph she does not have any flaws yet. They haven’t collected her from the hospital with me yet. I wonder if the woman in the photograph knew how to love. I knew she knew about loss. Her brother. The  accident. She is not wearing her glasses in the picture. She looks lovely. She is too thin. Has she not been eating because of the stress of planning the wedding? She does not look like Joyce Carol Oates. My mother looks like she is a model in a catalogue. Damn I, on the other hand, look like Joyce Carol Oates, I think to myself. I think to myself all female writers should look like someone they admire terribly. Alice Munro. Joan Didion. Anita Brookner. Marilyn Monroe, the poetess, and not the actress. Jean Rhys. Harper Lee. I know these things instinctively. It’s my brother’s birthday next month. It’s that time of year again. Easter. ‘Pickled’ fish pickled with onion and lashings of turmeric. White fish flaked with raised forks every year. Buttered toasted hot cross buns with raisins for eyes. Chocolate hollow eggs. Rabbits everywhere the eye can see in the mall. Down the shopping aisle.

The writer Anne Lamott taught me style. Technique. Jean Le Roux, a distant relative taught me that you must marry for love. That to be addicted to silences is that most feminine of journeys. The writer Anne Lamott taught me that if I follow her writing instructions as if I was following an ingredient list for a recipe will it only be then that I can call myself a writer in the rod of the mist. This sublimity. This cool sumptuous balancing act of vowels and consonants in ink. The proof of language translated onto the page. Her books with their magnificent, stooping tumult. Then I think about Susan Sontag’s cancer. Nothing seems to matter to me now in this world. Only chronic illness. Only this city that I live in. My mother tongue. Only the kerfuffle of cancer. Cancer cells growing, growing, and growing with no end in sight. The black sheep of disease. Ah, the bittersweet art. Promises of it all. Life in writing. Life resurrected in writing. Anne Lamott. My mother. Jean Le Roux. Susan Sontag. The search for a self help kind of calm inner peace has taken over all my brain cells like a duck takes to water. My brain cells part lofty cargo/part meat country. The craft of my writing is novel to me. The wings of the entire establishment of the camp system inside my head like the proof of a heatwave. I am the free artist. An androgynous artist with the mystique of bipolarity. There is a link. Timing to the kinks, the links in the chain. Always has been. All my life. I have sought feminist writing. Art in language. A spacious museum that I could visit anytime by opening the pages of journals. Black Croxley notebooks. My mother gave that to me. The sun. There was an ocean behind Sontag’s ‘illness as a metaphor’ and a baptism of sorts for me. I longed to copy her. Write brilliantly without any superhuman effort at all. With the death in the family, with the onset of that came stereophonics of cancer in my head. Once I had a beautiful aunt, Jean Le Roux. A distant relative that passed from breast cancer. Life is not just kerfuffle or an endless stream of traffic. Life is hungry for streets, alleys, theater, for musical comedy, and the drama, voice, the speech of tragedy, I am quiet. The day is quiet. The body is a flower. So beautiful even with the words ‘chronic illness’ onyour lips. Even in the throes of death. My mother was the first woman I knew. My first love. Daughters love their mothers even though we might not admit it all the time. She taught me of humility. What she didn’t teach me was how to love others. Was she selfish? Did she want me for herself for all of her life? She did not teach me how to love a man, and keep him. Cook, and clean for him. How to get him to marry you, to love you. She did not teach me to be soft. This paradise to be doe-eyed. She did not teach my lips to be loved. My hands to feel creamy. There was always this flightless distance between us. This song. This dance. Madness on my part that once illuminated, and shaped my young adolescence, and adultworld. All I want to tell her is this. That I admire her. I have always admired her. Her stylish flesh. Her power, and drive.

She’s lived all of her life while I am frightened of everything to death of the feats of the universe around me. The environment I live in. I am tired. Coping is a half-mechanism. I think of him in Joburg. Director. Winner of international awards. The sweetness of the memory of him is ‘killing me softly’ like the song.

There is always this struggle for creativity in every bit of dust and air. For the ray of light, the driftwood that the beach spits out that is imagination. Their is always the order and the routine of the day. Make dad’s breakfast. Take medication. Hide the pharmaceuticals away from my small nephew’s inquiring gaze. The day is always the same. As fresh and new as rain. I find myself in tall grass. Hair windswept. I find myself standing in front of a mocking sea.

Insomnia. Fleck. Wavelength. Photosynthesis. Mitochondria. Photoelectric cell. Handsome words that comfort me like time’s place in the world. It travels like a nomad. They taste like sugar on my tongue. There’s no struggle that awaits them. Internal or external. No winter. Nothing objectified. All too soon adolescence was gone. Then the blues began. I didn’t know what to call it back then. I can hear my mother’s voice inside my head.

She’s talking about my brother. How he’s never going to marry that girl.

__________

TPB's notes:

Though the above was published as a short story, it is here because it lives too in the realm of poetry.  Source link: https://vigilpubmag.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/instinct-by-abigail-george/