Pearlie Theron chats to Patricia Schonstein following the launch of Africa! My Africa!

The encounter took place in the former premises of Clarke’s Bookshop in Long Street. This followed the removal of all shelves, books and furnishings to the shop’s new premises at 211 Long Street.

The conversation happened a few hours after the launch of Africa! My Africa! By then all guests had left so Miss Theron and Ms Schonstein cut recessive figures in the vacant shop, which was illuminated by a single strip of neon light.

Miss Theron was dressed in her iconic bridal gown and Ms Schonstein wore a black silk dress, with a beaded collar fashioned by Thuliswa Kraai of Khayalitsha.

PearlieTheron: Well, that was quite a launch! You must be thrilled. Were you expecting such a turn out? Who’d imagine a crowd like that, spilling out onto Long Street, for a poetry launch? What a guest list! Even Hakeem Kae-Kazim and Oliver Munnik were there. David Lurie and Sheila Fugard too. And how tenderly Sheila reminded us of Don McLennan’s magnificence by reading his poem.

Of course, I had a head-start coming early, and opening one of those bottles of Dragonridge Sangiovese, so my mood was already well-in-the-mood, as they say, all nice and mellow and ready for pathos and beauty. When everyone started arriving, I was rather overwhelmed to see so many of the poets themselves; and to hear them later read their own words. I loved heairng Philippa Namutebi Kabali-Kagwa sing that amazing Ugandan song before reading her poem. Fantastic! I believe Jonty Driver came out from England especially for the launch and to read his poems.

You’ve created quite a kaleidoscope of settings and images with this anthology. So many voices. Such a mix. Such a range. The poem by Patrick Cullinan, The Billiard Room, with all its rage, contrasted with the tenderness of Kerry Hammerton’s One Minute Lover and Ethelwyn Rebelo’s Who. And I must say those Found Poems are extraordinary. What a concept – poems being uttered by one person and then rendered by another. They deserve a book on their own, as probably do Hugh Hodge’s concise but bold text verses. By the way, I didn’t know that Mike Nicol and Consuelo Roland were poets as well as being novelists. And I loved your telling of meeting Tatamkhulu Afrika. Fancy him living in such humble circumstances in a wendy-house in someone’s yard. I agree with you, that he should have been cherished in his late years and given all sorts of awards.

And how fitting that you should launch here in Mr Clarke’s shop.  You mentioned meeting him in 1975 shortly after arriving in Cape Town from the old Rhodesia, and how he was prompted to tell you his amazing story when he learnt that your mother was Italian. I had a quick peek at Henrietta’s poster, in her office, just now, of The Resurrection. Yes, I’d agree with Aldous Huxley’s crediting it as being the most beautiful painting in the world. How wonderful that Mr Clarke allowed it to live on for us. Aah, Mr Clarke, one can still sense him here in his old shop, even though the books and shelves have gone next door to the new place. You were smart to launch here, in the shop-shell, this cavern, and then filling it with poetry.

Now, these poems all touched me in one way or another. Either for their poignancy, or for their simple beauty, or for their innocence, or for their courage. I wondered what you had in mind, and whether you had conceptualised the anthology right from the start, or whether it just grew organically. I see you’ve dedicated it to Stephen Watson and Patrick Cullinan. Yes, two giants of South African poetry, without doubt.

By the way, does former President de Klerk know he is now a published poet? I heard you read his words when Nancy Richards interviewed you on radio the other day. Strong words … life-changing words.

May I add one more thing? I like what you said about using poetry to heal society. To touch people’s hearts with it. To inspire with it.

Are you uncorking another bottle? You sweet-heart. I raise my glass to sonnets and odes and all the rest.

Photograph of the launch before the interview: Gaelen Pinnock
Miss Pearlie Theron declined to be photographed

Africa! My Africa! launched at Clarke’s Bookshop

The Cape Town launch of Africa! My Africa! was magnificent.

Held in the empty, former premises of Clarkes Bookshop in Long Street, there was hardly standing room and guests spilled out onto the pavement.
Poets featured in the anthology read their own works. Hugh Hodge of Off-the-Wall-Live-Poetry fame and the former editor of New Contrast, read poems by Stephen Watson and Patrick Cullinan, to whom the anthology is dedicated.

We drank wine and feasted on yummy finger foods.

Mr Anthony Clarke, the founder of the shop way back in 1956, was remembered for his heroic stand during World War 2. As a gunner officer, he had held back from firing at the Italian town of Sansepolcro, where German soldiers were thought to be hiding. By not firing into the town, Anthony Clarke saved from destruction the magnificent fresco by Piero de la Francesca, The Resurrection. It was appropriate to launch Africa! My Africa! in his shop, now empty of books, and to fill it with live poetry. (The books and the old atmosphere of Clarkes Bookshop have moved down the road to 199 Long Street)

The launch proved again that poetry is good for the soul. It should be read at bus stops and in taxis. Politicians should definitely be given books of verse to move their minds and hearts toward deep and inspiring things.

Yay! For the launch. Thanks to everyone involved. Three cheers for Henrietta and Isabel of Clarkes for hosting us and for the excellent wine!

Comment by Pearlie Theron: “This was such a fun launch. I was there early, coming in with the wine delivery, but before the chairs and snacks and mircrophone arrived. It felt poignant, walking about the empty shop, with its walls devoid of shelves and books. What a mercy that Henrietta Dax & Isabel Essery managed to score Number 199 Long Street and to take the entire atmosphere of Clarkes with them, lock-stock-and-a-billion-books, so to speak.

“I opened a bottle of Dragonridge Sangiovese and drank a few glasses on my own, toasting these two fine ladies and the visionary Anthony Clarke while waiting for Patricia & Hugh to arrive with all the launch paraphernalia.

“Africa! My Africa! is a definitive collection: Evocative. Real. Pulsing. Resonant. I recommend that you keep a copy to dip into at all hours of the day and night.”

Photos by Gaelen Pinnock

Reading Hugh Hodge aloud on the London Underground

People were going by at a fast pace. Some were running to catch their trains. There was a sense of migration, of determined, instinct-driven movement. They had no time to stop, no time to focus on what was being read to them as they descended on escalators that plunged to the depths of underground London.

A long poem would have been lost. So short Text Messages were read. A commuter, pushing by, might have heard only a single line. Another might have heard only one word. But these would have been words like: Love. Honey. Light. Longing. You.  Mirror.  And they would have stuck like black-jacks to winter coats, determined to be noticed at home, later, and pondered.

On the escalator, a young boy was alerted to the word “galaxy” and looked enchanted. And a young man glanced across when he heard “each moment of eternity, my love” as though he thought it was the voice of a lost sweetheart lamenting him.

Ten text messages
Hugh Hodge

give oranges to sweet hearts
honey to lovers
pare fruit and dice
eat at passion’s table
drink deeply
hold your love’s gaze
lick your lips
remember to kiss

☼

talk me down
O Icarus
I close the light
so heated I
wax and wane
flow and ebb
search your body
with my poet’s tongue
to articulate this
word unknown to
any man

☼

a poet combs the horizon
at the edge of his longing
no distance is closer
than his heart or further
from his voice
so he sings his lullaby
to the morning light

☼

even the wind knows nothing
of love how it is
nowhere and everywhere
how it speaks
in caress and roughness
how I turn to you
in this weather
this season’s quiet

☼

filled with thoughts of you
almost pure
a joy I knew I had
carefully parcelled behind the hearth
waiting for the day
to bring out
and show you
who I am

☼

could I count the ways
each pebble each powdered
galaxy each beat of hearts
each blink each song
each drop in the forest stream
each moment of eternity
my love

☼

the circus leaves town
the trapeze artist sleeps
the lioness measures her cage
only the clown remains
serious under his mask
is that a tear
I see
in this mirror

☼

she touches this edge
peels me
reveals the pith
and seed
that sweetness
the honey
of busy lives
and all with a song
of summer kisses
of watermelon sugar

☼

black night
petrol pink
dawn sea
slick and still
and sacred
ibis queue
in space time
the stars lost
again and me
here too
hope and tide
turns another
cheek

☼

send a perfumed letter
wear gold on your right hand
nothing else
to distract me
do not smile
or touch your throat
you are not naked
yet your body is song
dances

Hugh Hodge is the former editor of New Contrast. He is a published poet, writing facilitator and host of live poetry events.

Photos by Romaney Pinnock

From Africa! My Africa!  An anthology of poems selected by Patricia Schonstein. ISBN 978-1-874915-20-1
African Sun Press: afpress@iafrica.com

Reading Robert Berold aloud on the London Underground

It was not quite rush hour. Most commuters continued with their own thoughts or read newspapers.
Two men, strangers to each other, but sitting side by side, bowed their heads and clasped their hands, listening to the words.
The absolute intimacy of the poem, with its snap-shot-view into the lives of  other, distant commuters in the old Transvaal, had a certain fragility to it, as it was recited there, in that British subterranean setting.
Despite that fragility,  the poem’s landscape of pathos and goodwill held fast above the metal-on-metal sounds on the Piccadilly Line.

Travelling
Robert Berold

Our compartment is muscled
with knees and beercans.
Between coughing and grunting
speech comes thickly.
We are all white men, hairy,
the conversation is army and cars.

The man offers homemade bread,
homemade chicken, homemade chutney,
then his photocomics, westerns,
tapes of Elvis hits.
He’s a railway carriage inspector,
his wife stays behind on an isolated farm,
his strained convulsive anger
is destroying them both
and his dear son
rides his bike to the fences
and watches for trains.
Railways no longer use ironwood
in their sleepers or teak in their carriages,
it’s all concrete and aluminium now
and his son still wants to be a railwayman!

He got off at Vereeniging,
nothing cured his cold.
It was a kind of weeping.
It was weeping.

Robert Berold is a poet, editor and the publisher of Deep South books.  He is coordinator of the MA programme in Creative Writing at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.

Travelling from The door to the river by Robert Berold. Bateleur Press, 1984. ISBN 0-86975-175-1.

From Africa! My Africa!  An anthology of poems selected by Patricia Schonstein. ISBN 978-1-874915-20-1
African Sun Press: afpress@iafrica.com

Photo by Romaney Pinnock

Reading Haroon Aziz in London

Walking along the Thames, the sky was that gorgeous grey-blue-white of London and the air was wet.
Passers-by were preoccupied, texting, busy with getting somewhere.
There was a sense of choreography, of feet moving in time together, of a great creative flow.
The words of the poem were light, like chiffon.
Only the street sweeper stopped to listen.
Someone watched through a lace-curtain but could not hear because of the window’s double glazing.
The phone rang in the red booth and a dancer leapt as though in flight.

The dancer
For Phyllis Naidoo
Haroon Aziz

A fiesta
dances
in her breath
dressed
in the colours of patience

tap
tapping, with a whirl
and swirl of her skirt

the fiesta
of defiance
seizes
her soul

hypnotising
death

she
a daughter of strength
dances into
a mother of courage
pierces
bullets

death
falls
by her side.

This is one of the poems in the definitive anthology Africa! My Africa!  An anthology of poems selected by Patricia Schonstein
ISBN 978-1-874915-20-1

The selection brings together a wide, rich range of poems all held together by a simple yet deep honesty. The words of Nobel Laureates, well-established poets, emerging poets and even Cape Town’s homeless people share the pages, expressing eloquence and wit, and reminding us of poetry’s unique place in the landscape of the human heart.

Available from African Sun Press
afpress@iafrica.com

Photo by Romaney Pinnock

Reading Ithaca on the closing day of 2012

Sometimes a poem will take a lifetime to arrive.
And when it finally comes, you may wonder why it took so long, for you might have done better, in your journey through life, having had it with you sooner.
Carmel Rickard recently brought me ‘Ithaca’. In a candlelit room, with red wine and a meal ready to be blessed and eaten, the conversation quietly turned to this poem.

I recite it aloud now, on this closing day of 2012, sensing the words fill the thermals and spiral down upon the city.

Ithaca
Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933)
Translated from the Greek by © George Barbanis

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Photograph by Don Pinnock

Reading Norman Clothier and Uys Krige in the vacated, former premises of Clarke’s Bookshop in Long Street

I  met Antony Clarke in 1975, in his bookshop in Long Street, when I first moved to Cape Town.

One day, in exchanging some details of our own histories, I told him that my mother was Italian. He then confided the remarkable story of how, as an Allied gunner officer during the Second World War, he had defied orders and held back from shelling the Tuscan town of Sansepolcro, where there were presumed to be German soldiers and the strong possibility of ambush.

What prevented him from giving the order to bombard the town was the memory of an essay written by Aldous Huxley. In that essay, Huxley had described The Resurrection, a fresco masterpiece by Piero della Francesca in Sansepolcro’s town hall, as being ‘The greatest painting in the world’.

Knowledge of Mr Clarke’s deed stunned me, for he would surely have been court martialled had there in fact been an ambush. I internalised his defiance as a benchmark of integrity in my understanding of war and destruction. ‘This should be in a book,’ I told him in a flush of youthful admiration.

Antony Clarke established Clarke’s Bookshop in 1956. It has traded at 211 Long Street since then and is now owned by Henrietta Dax. She has just this month had to move premises (a few doors down to number 199 Long Street) but has managed to relocate the shop’s atmosphere and spirit so entirely that one is hardly aware of the move at all.

Poems by Norman Clothier and Uys Krige were recited in the vacant premises of the ‘old shop’ in homage to Mr Clarke.

Libyan winter
Norman Clothier

There is so little earth, and so much cold
Grey sky clamped down upon us that we seem
Cut off from any kinship with the world,
That safe sane world we knew once in a dream.
We have been set apart like fallen souls
Without a past or future to fulfil
Blindly a driving destiny that hurls
Us on towards a goal beyond our will.
We only know that nights are long, and sleep
Comes slow to shivering men who lie
On cold hard ground, and dawn brings no respite,
Only the pallid sun and sullen sky.
Always on every side our trucks intrude
Their stark forbidding shapes above a plain
Of stones and yellow earth and grey dwarf scrub,
Bleak under wind and clouds that bring no rain.
The idle anxious days draw out their length
Into uncharted seas of time, and all
The urgent incidents that stirred us once
Are blurred and fading, lost beyond recall.
We know capricious death drones overhead,
And, more insistent as our column runs
Into the unknown battles we must fight,
Lurks in the thudding menace of the guns.
And we are trapped, for there is no escape
From this colossal tumbril as it reels
On its relentless way towards the fate
That waits us in the west before our wheels.
But still we trick ourselves with poignant dreams
Of half-forgotten days, and long in vain
For the old easy life we knew at home
In peace – that we shall never know again.
Those things are not for us; ours is the way
That lies over the desert under sombre skies
Past rusting blackened wrecks of trucks and tanks
And graves of men who blazed it in this guise.

Farm gate
Uys Krige
Translated from the Afrikaans by Jack Cope and the poet

Blood-red the aloes flank
the winding road.
As if aflame with leaping sparks each fire-lily glows.
But nothing, nothing stirs … only
a breeze that flows
that seems to pause and waver there
the grass-seed grows.

Above, the blue, blue sky;
and far below, the falling stream
drifts through the orchards with
a flash of green.
And no sound breaks the hovering peace
of this still mountain scene.

Now after all the years I’ll open
a gate again.
Where have my paths
till now not led
to bring me to this farm-road gate
with all illusions shed
but hope, hope in my heart
and clear dreams in my head?

The gate stands in
a maroola’s shade.
A wholeness in me, harmony
and no bitterness, no hate.
I lift the catch … and in my heart
open a gate.

Anthony Clarke was awarded the Freedom of City of Sansepolcro and a street – Via Anthony Clarke – was named in his honour.

Norman Clothier (1915- ) was a long-serving National President of the South African Legion. His poems appeared in numerous anthologies and one collection.

Uys Krige (1910-1987) was a multi-award winning South African writer, poet, playwright, translator, and war correspondent. He translated many of Shakespeare’s works into Afrikaans, as well as poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Lope de Vega.

Africa! My Africa! An anthology of poems selected by Patricia Schonstein
African Sun Press
ISBN 978-1-874915-20-1
To order please email: afpress@iafrica.com

Author photos: Don Pinnock

The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca was painted in 1463.

Anthony Clarke

Reading for the Imprisoned Writer

One correctly imagines the Imprisoned Writer to be published and well-known; a journalist, poet or novelist whose words unsettle regimes, dictatorships, military juntas and otherwise deviant governments.

But there is another type of Imprisoned Writer to consider. This is the one who has not yet emerged, who is held, not in a penal colony or high-security prison, but within the vaults of grinding poverty and by the chains of educational and artistic deprivation.

‘The unborn future author’ is imprisoned within the child who will never have books to read, and so will never learn to render imaginings and observations into literary, journalistic or poetic text.

Today, the fifteenth of November, is the Day of the Imprisoned Writer. We reflect on  South Africa’s  looming, notorious Protection of State Information Bill, on censorship, on text book-dumping and pulping; but particularly on the silencing of unrealized authors doomed from the start.

We are all the poorer for their muting.

For Zanethemba K

I see you still
under the erythrina
on the day Mandela was released
from his twenty-seven years.

Everything will be different now
I told you
What you dream to be
you can become.

You said
I will be a writer, when I am grown.

There were cicadas ringing
and it was like bells
like shrill whistles filling the air
with the ochre and gold
of poems yet to be born.

Photo: Nicholas Wiid
For Zanethemba K by Patricia Schonstein from The Collected Poems 1974-2012 (Unpublished manuscript)

The Day of the Imprisoned Writer, initiated in 1981 by PEN International, is observed annually on November 15 to draw attention to persecuted writers.

Reading The Unknown Child in a back-street of Cape Town

After the First World War, Britain created the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey. France placed La Tombe du Soldat Inconnu in the Arc de Triomphe. In each were interred the remains of an unidentified soldier. Since then, such monuments, dedicated to the common memory of all soldiers killed in war, have been erected in other countries.

Politicians sometimes stand before them and say grand things about nationalism and sacrifice.

There is no standing Tomb of the Unknown Child, no marble monument dedicated to the numberless unknown forgotten child victims of humankind’s perpetual wars; and no apparent plan to erect one.

Could such a monument be created with poems, poems recited into the wind, to be carried with seeds and pollen, sent out on the thermals that wrap the earth? Could we make something lasting and memorable out of simple verse, in order to pay homage to those innocents who could not, and indeed still cannot, escape the plateau of war?

The Unknown Child
Luanda, Angola 1995

Did no one cover your nakedness,
small boy, small fallen angel,
bent beneath the heavy wings of war?

How did she die, your mother?
Was she the one who fell by the roadside
when the many were fleeing the attack on Huambo?

Was she the one who stood on a landmine in the field,
blown apart and unto the winds,
away from you?

Was she the one the soldiers took away in the night
or did you just lose her in the crush,
when the armies opened fire across Kuito?

Did no one lift you, hold you up,
unknown boy,
in the rain, in the traffic, in Luanda?

Did no one notice this holy moment
of hunger, of cold,
of the human heart longing for love?

Did no one realise that the mission bells were silent
and that all you wanted
was the smallest of things?

Where are you now,
unknown child?
Did you find somewhere to go?

The Unknown Child – poems of war, love and longing
Patricia Schonstein Pinnock
African Sun Press
978-1-874915-15-7
Poetry

Newly released in Norwegian translation

Det ukjende barnet
ISBN:978-82-93065-21-0
Pages: 120
Paperback
Translated by Per Olav Kaldestad
Margbok Forlag, Strandveien 95, 9006 Tromsø, Norway margbok@gmail.com

‘Det er ingen tvil om den medfølelsen og den sorgen som levendegjør disse diktene av krig, død og kjærlighet.’ JM Coetzee 2003 Nobel Laureate

Photo ‘Author with Angel’: Nicholas Wiid
Photo ‘Child in Traffic in Luanda’: Joao Silva
Author photo Norwegian edition: Gaelen Pinnock

Reading a poem by Rudyard Kipling outside Clarke’s Bookshop in Long Street

A young man picks up the pulse of the rhyming and strides with it.

“Poetry is lekker-deep”

Everyone, but everyone, on the pavement affirms this comment: “Ja, man! Die wêreld is lekker-deep!”

[Lekker-deep: Sweet-deep. Nice-deep. New South African English. Expressly used for poetry and chance moments of beauty in everyday life]

The recall
Rudyard Kipling

I am the land of their fathers,
In me the virtue stays.
I will bring back my children,
After certain days.

Under their feet in the grasses
My clinging magic runs.
They shall return as strangers.
They shall remain as sons.

Over their heads in the branches
Of their new-bought, ancient trees,
I weave an incantation
And draw them to my knees.

Scent of smoke in the evening,
Smell of rain in the night –
The hours, the days and the seasons,
Order their souls aright,

Till I make plain the meaning
Of all my thousand years –
Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,
While I fill their eyes with tears.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is one of 149 poets included in the amazing definitive anthology, Africa! My Africa! He was an English poet, novelist, short story writer and children’s author who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907.

Photos by Don Pinnock

Africa! My Africa! An anthology of poems selected by Patricia Schonstein
ISBN978-1-874915-20-1
African Sun Press
afpress@iafrica.com