What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

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СКАЧАТЬ stay for tea or drinks or supper after handing in a chapter. My mother and sister both being committed feminists, my father having lived off a tray and then died, I was in many ways the ideal partner for Monica. Because male sexual aggression was so strongly criticised in our house, and because I had been weakened by what happened to me in the Eighties, my only hope was that a woman would make the first move on me. Which Monica did.

      Her thesis was very well received, and she was offered work in Johannesburg. I wasn’t doing much – some temporary shifts in the university library and packing books for a local publisher – so I went with her. I wasn’t planning on being her long-term partner – I wasn’t planning on anything at all. I had a vague idea that life began when one left home. Things still seemed pretty unreal to me, after the army stint and all that. I was lucky to find work, being so unambitious. At Karoo Books, as I say, I just plodded along, lost in my own thoughts.

      My thoughts were mostly about words. I’d hear or read a new and unusual one, and it would occupy me for days. “Segue”, for example, gave a lot of pleasure.

      Monica, on the other hand, lived in the cut and thrust. She was always being flown around the country, put up in top hotels. I’d fetch her from the airport and in between look up recipes to surprise her. She liked complicated food like roulades and terrines. You mustn’t think I was an ace chef or anything. I was – am – just capable of following a method. And I no longer believe in roulades.

      I’d try to tell Monica about my words – riparian, egregious – but her vocabulary had been almost completely colonised by the jargon of ballparks, playing fields and nouns made verbs. We talked past each other, took no joy in one another’s discoveries.

      But she was appreciative of the food. “Don’t you want to be a TV chef?” she’d ask. “I’ve got contacts I could use.” In Monica’s world, you always acted for an advantage; you never did simple, homely things for local good. It only occurs to me now that my low-level gastronomy was a sublimated creative urge.

      Although I always made a big fuss of Monica’s homecomings, I secretly loved being left alone in the house. I never brought work stress home with me because even though Karoo Books hovered on the edge of bankruptcy through the entire time of my employ there, I knew I wouldn’t starve or be homeless if it collapsed. I also didn’t have to do housework, as we had a maid. So I’d come home to the quiet, clean house in the ominous silence that precedes a Highveld thunderstorm, with a clutch of new or uncommon words – animadversion, atavistic, fizgig, recidivist, conurbation, rugose, sacerdotal, caryatid, wayzgoose – and I’d rejoice at my solitude. As night fell, I’d make myself something delicious like a toasted tomato sandwich or a bacon omelette and, without Monica peering inquisitively over my shoulder, I was able to begin work on what was to become The Secret Life of Things.

      The Secret Life of Things was a series of poems about everyday objects and the arcane or clandestine stories they hold within themselves. The French clock with its tiny key Monica had inherited from her grandmother, a piece of driftwood I’d picked up on Noordhoek beach as a teenager, an antique Cape Dutch pestle and mortar Mrs Cloete gave me when I graduated, a bicycle bell from my childhood. All these things we did not use, or pray to, or even look at much, yet we kept them because they exerted a power over us. In the fading light I’d sit and stare at each one of them until, myself disappearing, they rendered their account. Those are my best moments, when the lines start to dictate themselves, and I become merely the amanuensis of thoughts that present themselves to me.

      I remember a poem by the American Charles Wright, which ends with the lines:

      I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear

      Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.

      It’s phrases like “the upper right-hand corner of things” that we poets live for.

      My life felt very small and private compared to Monica’s large and public existence. She was quoted in newspapers, pictured coming out of high-level meetings in fetching suits bought for her by a professional dresser. Colleagues at Karoo Books jokingly referred to my salary cheque as “pin money”.

      It seemed less and less appropriate to tell Monica what I was thinking about or engaged in. She accepted with mild interest the few snippets of publishing industry gossip I was able to muster, heard my news from home as relayed in my sister’s letters, and then offloaded about her own troubles. In Monica’s version of events, she was always long-suffering, hard done by, conspired against, maligned, underrated, yet ultimately triumphant and vindicated.

      My mother followed Monica’s career in the press. She observed Monica’s increasing bullishness. Eventually she told me that she had “disfellowshipped” Monica from the feminist movement.

      When I had about twenty-six poems, I approached the publishing director at Karoo Books for advice. Harry Botha-Reid was kind enough not to laugh out loud. He pointed out that publishing poetry was the most risky venture imaginable. “Now if you’d brought me a nice solid textbook on business management, prescribed at five technical colleges, we would be talking,” he joked.

      There were two or three tiny presses which put out poetry collections and I might try them, Harry said. He wrote the names for me: Tertium Quid, Cadmus, Finch. “There’s a whole art to naming publishing houses,” observed Harry drily. “But before you approach them, there are some questions I’d like you to consider. Do you ever buy volumes of local poetry? Do you subscribe to any of the little poetry magazines? Do you go to poetry readings?” I shook my head. “Well, I suggest you start,” said Harry. “You know what I’m saying?”

      I knew what he was saying. That I hoped to plant myself in a literary scene that had painstakingly been feeding and tilling a little ground for itself. I put my twenty-six poems away in a drawer and started to haunt the poetry section of Exclusive Books in Hillbrow. I used my “pin money” to buy new poets’ work. I subscribed to Thalia, Night Attack, Sub Divo and even an overseas journal, despite the exchange rate. I attended one public reading at Wits where they passed around a register, after which I happily found myself on the mailing list for poetry launches and the poetry circuit.

      At poetry readings I was often bored, yet even the boredom was fascinating. I would sit quietly in small rooms while other introverts whispered their minute observations of lichen on rocks or droned in slow monotones imagined histories of shipwrecks they hadn’t actually been present at themselves. I was engaged in a hopeless struggle to reach someone else’s meaning. I couldn’t seem to connect with the other poets on a simple, conversational level either. I’d stand in the foyer afterwards eating funny little cocktail sticks of cheddar cheese blocks and olives, sipping a glass of bad wine, hoping someone would talk to me.

      Then one day at a bookshop reading in Berea, a poet from Cape Town was introduced, Red Moffat. His reading was natural. I mean, you didn’t feel he had a special, portentous voice he reserved for poetry. His topics were immediate, funny, poignant. Best of all, his poems were short. I went up to him afterwards to tell him how marvellous I thought his poetry was. His sunburnt face and washed-out eyes made me homesick.

      Red wasn’t staying long in Johannesburg, but he took me to Soweto Stadium to hear Mzwakhe Mbuli. I was completely blown away. The man’s voice was a double bass; his presence on stage – he must be well over six foot five – was utterly commanding. To stand there in a packed stadium and to hear the audience chanting the powerful refrains from memory was to return to the very origin of poetry. “Who is in Lusaka?” he demanded to know. At that stage, who was north of the border, negotiating with the ANC, was practically everyone.

      In poetry journals, in threes and fives I published all the poems in The Secret Life of Things, but I didn’t show them to Monica till Finch Press accepted СКАЧАТЬ