Staying Hungry by the ECCA Poets
Hogsback: Ecca, 2019
Staying Hungry is the 2019 anthology published by the ECCA Poets – a
group of mainly Eastern Cape writers who put forward the first of these in July
1989, a good 30 years ago! Originating from an art and writers’ group at Fort
Hare, Alice, the group has since lost members, but also expanded, including
more voices from further afield. Each poet is given a generous portion of the
book and, broadly speaking, shares a sense of keen observation of the world and
their own responses within it and a concern with expression, mostly in the form
of writing itself.
Brian Walter, who recently published a new collection Allegories of the Everyday, opens the
anthology. These poems convey a reflective and somewhat mournful tone. Walter
subtly interchanges free verse elements with formal structures such as stanzas
that echo each other and a quiet rhyme and rhythm, slipping into the concern
with poetry-making within the poems: In ‘Marching’ the speaker smiles fondly at
children’s choices between the simple rhythm of a school drill and “our fine
irony” in poetry. Music and writing poetry are the subject of other poems too;
I am particularly fond of ‘Paganini in Helenvale’, a poem in couplets where the
rough world of the young people waits on rain and words “hanging in the air /
like a fresh sadness” to settle
dripping as the violin bows,
along the gangster pavements
each child here knows.
The poet also
thinks about other forms of representing the world and one’s perceptions – ‘Enfolding’
is a longer poem full of the colours of painting. The everyday world of the
speaker concerns children trying to find their way in the “gun streets, up and
down streets / the old-young men listless streets”, reflections on the past
“leaving long shadows”, visiting his mother, feeling wordless with a stranger
singing his loss at a bar. “I have no easy words”, the poet says, but shapes
his to encounters with others in a dry and gangster world, to bring them “in
the sight / of the poetry eye”.
Olwethu Mxoli brings a fresh and direct voice to the page. Her
poems speak with immediacy about difficult dimensions of experience. Among
these are grief, described as a limb that “just hangs there” and depression.
The latter is particularly vivid in the poems ‘Today’ and ‘Being okay’, setting
up a self-judgment against an expectation of how one should be. In ‘Being okay’
she uses the line spacing effectively to mimic what is contained emotionally
against slipping into spillage when she describes preparing to face the world
in dressing with
… a scrupulous headwrap
tied tightly and high to keep all the darkness
from
spilling
out of my
head
and tainting the sky.
Violence
against women is addressed in, among others, ‘Exhibit A’, a poem that presents a
trial as an orgy, thereby demonstrating the position of the victim as display
case, and ‘Live feed’ that forwards the presence of social media. There is a
rage and helplessness in writing about being young and black, an awareness of
the precariousness of identity in a world where education goes with a different
kind of cultural immersion. In ‘Mother tongue’ she writes about no longer being
fluent enough in isiXhosa to relate comfortably with her parents, repeating the
unease stanza by stanza, until “I don’t say much anymore”. The poem ‘Blackness’
presents itself as an answer to “You ask me what blackness means”. It is not a
comfortable poem, partly because the speaker turns it to interrogate her own
position:
At night, in the quiet comfort of suburbia
in my perfect accent
I wonder how black I am
without suffering.
Blackness is also guilt.
It is also apologizing
for not starving.
It is a hard
thing to hear, to listen into pain so bound into time and others and self and
us as South Africans.
Ed Burle’s contributions are mostly bite-sized observations.
There are a few poems where he works his precise observations into a narrative,
such as ‘Tren a Barcelona’ about two passengers falling asleep together on a
train and ‘Held’, where a moment is stretched into a memory from repeating the
opening line “A man leaning in a doorway” stanza by stanza. The short poems sometimes
take as subject memory or observations of nature. In my opinion, some of them
are so short as to present an image unconnected, almost like seeing a photo
from a stranger’s album without context, some even appear to be grammatically
incomplete. To me it feels as if they could be starting points to something
else, perhaps counter-intuitively given their brevity, to story. ‘Excerpts from
a writer’s museum’ seems to bring together some of the concern with memory, the
given, and gestures to reach out into an eerie narrative – almost a ghost
story. The short poems, close to haikus, work best when they become aphorisms
in their succinct wisdom, for example:
Smiling cashier –
no trace of the visions
that bleed through her dreams.
The everyday
presented in Silke Heiss’ poems spring
from meetings with family, friends, chance encounters, for example a
conversation with a cashier at Pick n Pay, and where she finds herself. Her
world is filled with people and creatures, all presented as selves – blue
cranes “disappeared / their blue selves into the sky”; recovering her health,
her mother finds new dignity in the mirror – “the image now / of her lovely old
/ self” and, finding herself in a home with a boomslang, the poet considers “a
space replete with hideouts / for sleek selves”. To me ‘Lessons in hand’
represents the lively interest in the natural world and spontaneous creation of
meaning from everyday occurrences prevalent in her poems. Moving around
carefully, minding the snake at home, the poet finds the boomslang on a shutter,
from where “he turns, leaps / like a graph of himself”. This turning the snake
into an image of something drawn, written, continues in her reflections:
Let me read this event
as if I were blind.
Let me like him be feeling
my entire length
a sole – the body one extended foot,
feeding on the Braille
of surfaces.
Heiss, too,
recently published a book – Greater
Matter, reading meaning and her experiences in the wake of the illness and
death of her husband, the poet Norman Morrissey.
Lara Kirsten’s poetry has grown in depth since my
previous encounters with her work. She mainly writes in Afrikaans, but there
are two English poems among her contributions in Staying Hungry. Of
these, ‘stridulate’ offers the English reader a taste of her offerings in Afrikaans,
as it also plays a great deal with the visceral experience of sound in writing
and performing poetry. The poem introduces a newly learnt word – relating to
insects producing sounds by rubbing their wings together – and with this the poet flies “with its
sizzling syllables / right into/ the dusky corner of this poem”. She then
expands it into an extended image for the writing of poetry, including
onomatopoeia:
woooshhhhhhhh
with resonant surety
the verses begin to rub
against each other
and a soft vibration begins to
spark the silence
Her poems in this anthology are preoccupied with the need
and techniques of writing poetry. She seems to take joy in in-line rhymes and
alliterative lines of stacked words rushing forward with an energetic sense of ‘do
this!’ Describing her mouth as her tools, her place of industry to make poems,
she states her joy as unmatched:
geen groter digtersjolyt!
met net hierdie enkele mond
maak ek my wêreld rond en bont
However, poems like ‘oëverblindery’ and ‘trekkrag’ also
question the sources and techniques of poetry – as tricks, on the one hand, and
struggle, on the other. Art, Kirsten reflects, does not come from harmony, as
people seem to think, but from resistance. Creativity, she insists “moet
trekkrag hê / vassuigend, vasstekend / vas geanker in `n hittige
halsstarrigheid.”
Jacques Coetzee uses his poetry to reflect on his
life, make “accessible at a moment’s notice” memories and moments of selfhood.
The poems ask questions about the emotional and personal legacy we inherit from
our parents. There are several poems on the deathbed of his father and one can
hear the father in the poet’s recall: “One of the last things you said was:
‘Give that boy a chair, he’s in his own way.’” The poet probes his own sense of
being in the world in relation to his father:
I can never be quite sure
if it’s me who says yes or no,
who keeps faith or breaks it,
trying always to learn
what it means to call you
father in this world,
to call myself your son.
Coetzee’s poems are all in a direct first-person speaker,
telling and thinking about incidents in his life – hospital visits, attending a
class, listening to the experience of a student, remembering going down a
water-slide as a child, facing his graceless response to the man who let him go
for free, commemorating love and friendship. The poet often conflates writing
poetry and music or song to reach for an inner truth and harmony through art.
For example, he holds on to lines from Ingeborg Bachman “as if / they can coax /
my timid, over-educated words / into wildness; can hinge me into song” and ends
his tribute to a friend with this echo – “because of the songs / that still
have to be sung”. The poem ‘Narrow songs’ uses the image of singing to speak
about the value of what making art is about (perhaps one can call it getting
out of one’s own way):
I bring you these long, narrow
songs –
a ladder going inwards and
down
…
the steep, narrow ladder of
words and music
leading down
into the loneliness and
courage
of the body each day.
John van Wyngaard provides a dash of satire, making fun of his ailments
in ‘Geriatric rap’ and putting several twists in the oh-so-sincere sphere of
poetry events in ‘At the poetry reading group’. The poem ‘Addo’ starts out with
a comment on game farm fences – “tall posts, steel cables, electrified / -
built to keep the orchards out”, but takes the subject of elephants with a
gracious beauty: “They’re a dark shadow breathing together / in all the hard
light of this moment” and a respectful acknowledgement of their otherness in
the world:
No. Put down your bag
of words and images, and witness this.
They simply are, here.
Elephants, leaning together.
Living the absolute of their own company.
Look.
Other poems on
making are ‘On writing a poem’ and ‘Making dress’, seeing the person making it
“full of imagining / how this flattened nothing will come to fill out” –
visualizing the act of creation. There is a sense of connection with people in
Van Wyngaard’s work – the amused presentation of the speaker’s endeavors, the
tender ‘To Caro, far away’ on missing his absent beloved in the small details
of a day, such as sharing fruit for their muesli and ‘Skin’, dedicated to
Norman [Morrissey] on the vulnerability of being alive.
Something of
that sense of community between the poets in Staying Hungry is also conveyed in that Heiss gives a poem – ‘Did
not blot’ – on the death of Cathal Lagan’s
son. “I could hurt // with you, and jot this / down”. Lagan’s poem on this
death, ‘You died’, speaks about the presence of the experience of absence:
You died
but the clock still ticks,
mail for you is still delivered
and we half expect
you’re still around
the next corner.
Ending the
line on “still around” allows one to read the absence in this renewed sense of
loss, as if there was some hide-and-seek going on. Lagan’s other poem ‘Quae est
ista?’ uses a liturgical text on Mary to meditate on mystery, on what remains
hidden, sealed. Perhaps much of making, poetry, dresses, art and observation is
to reach past what remains hidden, sealed and perhaps it is a particular quiet
that can also hold what remains sealed before one.
Staying Hungry provides quite a range of poems. Each poet is in
effect given about 15 pages of contributions. It occurred to me that this is
almost a chapbook of poems per poet published annually and I wondered about the
different kinds of affirmation or readings that arise from this mode of
publication. Choosing to share work in an anthology requires more cooperation
in the production side of it and perhaps remains a supportive platform for the
poets who then write and publish as a community. Some of this is suggested by
Van Wyngaard’s poem on the mystery (the waiting and wrestling) of engaging with
a poem, serving as a conclusion:
Neither of you can know what you want to say,
Or be, or become, or whether you ever will,
Until it says itself, so some dialogue can play
And conversation begins, and goes on…
Reviewer: Marike Beyers
Curator: Amazwi South African Museum of Literature
The opinions expressed in this review are the
reviewer’s and should not be taken to represent Amazwi.
