The roll-back

Four launch/ reading events -
1. Hogsback (The Edge Mountain Retreat), 12/10/19;
2. Grahamstown (Reddits, Cafe D'Vine), 25/10/19;
3. Cape Town: Tokai (The Book Shoppe), 4/11/19;
4. Cape Town: Claremont (Exclusive Books, Cavendish), 5/11/19

Now, at my laptop at my parents' dining room table, I sit opposite my mother, quietly reading in her wheelchair. Her entire left side is paralysed and her body has as good as no independence anymore. She holds her lapidary brochure in her right hand. Flash photos of cut and labelled gems, displayed on royal red backgrounds, gaze at me.

My parents' presence at the Cape launch of Greater Matter at Exclusive Books, Cavendish, Claremont, on Tuesday was one of the most precious gifts to me personally.
"If I could, I would have got up and embraced you," my mother said.

Having had to have been so publicly present, both online and off, for the sake of marketing and selling my book, has felt unnatural, even stressful.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading aloud to people, I love intimate public events, which poetry readings mostly are. I love the microphone, which allows for whisper-soft words to slink into listener's hearts. And I love the fact that readers have bought Greater Matter and are being nourished by it.

But the tide is rolling back now.

I look forward to being in the arms of my beloved. I look forward to composing poems again, applauded by the stars and grasses. Perhaps more people will come towards me, who have felt themselves privately heard, or who are questing for more of the chime they sense hums in my book. 

There'll be further books, further readings, to build and nurture the "good/ By quiet natures understood" (W.B.Yeats, Prayer for my Daughter).

I thank Exclusive Books, Cavendish, and Eva van Belle for the photographs from Tuesday's launch.

"Without you, this book would not be"

The stretch between writing, publicly reading and launching a book is extensive. It mirrors the very differing states of being pregnant, talking about being pregnant, and actually giving birth.

And then.
Then there is the advertising, the marketing, the work of selling your book. This mirrors breastfeeding, burping, nappy-changing and generally doing all those things that your darling needs, in order to keep thriving.

If you had known exactly what was coming at you, you might not have chosen this route. Well, I should probably rather change that sentence into the first person. I might not have chosen this route.

But I had an ulterior motive: I badly wanted this baby. I wanted a beautiful, fat Heffalump. Did I know she would start walking the moment she was out? No.

Well - it has been a steep learning curve, giving birth to a herbivore: they really do stand on their own legs immediately. I have held for dear life onto her tail, as she has galumphed happily into the world, reminding me that I am merely human, while she ... is of another order altogether.

It's a beautiful thing. My wildest expectations have been exceeded. The Hogsback launch could not have gone better, my reading in Grahamstown was well-received, and next week there will be a launch at Exclusive Books in Cape Town.

However, the dramatic increase in social buzz, organising, online communications, meeting lovely people, autographing with special messages - all this boon has robbed me of sleep and of peace even during the daytime, as my mind sprints through the to-do list and my neglected creative soul sits and sulks.

Busyness has caused me to re-tick the boxes with my basic priorities: SOLITUDE, QUIET, DOMESTIC BLISS, LOVE/ INTIMACY, PERSONAL FREEDOM.

That is all very well. Yet I am responsible for my Heffalump, and I am responsible to the good people listening, reading, buying her.

So I have no choice but to balance the responsibilities, patiently and wisely.

As Walter Benjamin said, the work of art gives birth to the artist, who must reinvent herself.

And Norman? Where are you in all of this? You, whose face is represented now in the homes of all who've got the book, and whose spirit and quirks and moments with me are being perused and pondered?

Why do these questions bring a strange peace into me?

Something has been fulfilled that was waiting. It has all been worth it. Like Strandloop, which you inscribed for me as something that you could not have put together without me, Greater Matter could and would not be without you.

Norman's inscription in my copy of Strandloop

Learning to stand!

"...

those last months' refrain
is still in my head,
you tied to the bed:
"I can't get well
if they won't let me get up
on my feet."

..."

- extract from What never was (After 'Five Pinecones' by Arja Salafranca), in Section 8 of Greater Matter - Facts of Blood

Gearing up for tonight's reading at Off The Wall at Roxy's in Woodstock, Cape Town, I'm looking forward to seeing my dear friends and brave editors, fellow Ecca poets Ed Burle and Jacques Coetzee, as well as OTW veteran Hugh Hodge: whose poetic midwifery started and nurtured me on the first leg of my journey 13 years back, as my poems slowly traipsed their way into more and more public readings. I'm also looking forward to greeting people I've not met before ...

I'll confess it here: it feels like a part of the journey of becoming me, as if my feathers were losing fluffiness, growing by some inner secret programme into sleekness and I'm learning to oil them by fluids I did not know before were there.   

It's a journey taken before by a million others, but, like any baby born, it's the first of its kind and will never be again. Learning to stand!