What is poetry which does not save/ Nations or people?
Czeslaw Milosz
All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful.
Wilfred Owen
for in truth/ We have no gift to set a statesman right
W.B.Yeats
Art is on the side of the oppressed.
Nadine Gordimer
This month’s poetry project is devoted to the idea of freedom of expression. I am inviting poems that protest against the Protection of Information Bill, but you may, as usual, interpret this brief in any way you wish.
How do you write a protest poem? First of all, you need to have strong feelings against something. Then you need to steer clear of mere polemic, pamphleteering, blurting. To avoid obviousness, you need technique. Here are just a few suggestions as to how to proceed:
Construct your poem around a catalogue or list of some kind, giving it the effect of a litany or prayer. See ‘Night in Al-Hamra’ by Saadi Youssef, where each line begins in the same way:
A candle for the hotel crowded with refugees…
A candle for the broadcasters in the shelter
Adopt a tone of defiance. Say, in effect, you can pass this legislation, but I won’t abide by it’. See Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘Conscientious Objector’
Have a specific title, but let the poem itself be oblique. See James Fenton’s ‘Cambodia’.
Be nostalgic about what life was like before the heinous thing happened. Read ‘What were they like?’ by Denise Levertov.
Adopt the voice of an object or thing that does not normally have a voice. Read Carl Sandburg’s ‘Grass’.
Adopt the voice of the enemy – send it up, parody it. Read Robert Lowell’s ‘Women, Children, Babies, Cows, Cats’ or Harold Pinter’s, ‘American Football’.
Speak from the point of view of the dead. Read Thomas Hardy's ‘Channel Firing’.
Be subtle and indirect. See Czeslaw Milosz's ‘A Song on the end of the world’.
Ask questions. See John Greenleaf Whittier’s ‘Stanzas for the Times’
Use repetition to create an incantatory effect. Listen to Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’.
Direct the poem to a ‘you’. Read ‘To the Tyrants of the World,’ by Tunisian poet Abdul Qasim al Shabi.
If you have Michael Chapman’s The New Century of South African Poetry, you might like to check out the protest poetry of Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, Sipho Sepamla, Mafika Gwala, Clinton du Plessis, Andre Letoit (Koos Kombuis), Nise Malange and Chris van Wyk.
Send your poems pasted inside the body of an email headed SLiP December poetry workshop to the SLiP editor pieter@slipnet.co.za by no later than Sunday 4 December 2011. Please give your poem a title. I’ll respond with general comments about all the entries, and select a few for publication here.
Submitted Poems
Censorship
Graham Dukas
If you lost a finger, waking one morning
to find your left hand had only four,
you’d get by, I suppose.
Losing a whole hand would be
more problematic I guess, but imagine
waking to find more than a hand gone,
like a beggar I’ve seen
who’s lost both an arm and a leg,
and who hops around like a pogo stick
between cars at the traffic lights,
a half man with the full memory
of being whole.
So, when censorship
snips a little something from your body,
take notice, because soon
you’ll not have a leg to step off,
a hand to raise, or a tongue to speak.
Guardian Angels
Michelle Betty
Eleven guardian angels
cup in their hands
your heartache
Ahmed Timol
Joseph Mduli
Imam Haron
Eleven guardian angels
cradle to their chests
your sorrow
Steve Biko
Neil Aggett
Simon Mdwane
Eleven guardian angels
mark to their memory
your agony
Mathew Goniwe
Fort Calata
Sparrow Mkonto
Eleven guardian angels
stand vigil at the door of
your truth
Bram Fischer
Isie Maisels
Vernon Berrange
Eleven guardian angels
bow to the headstone of
your courage
George Bizos
Arthur Chaskalson
Sydney Kentridge
Eleven guardian angels
salute the passing of
your cavalry of ideals
Nelson Mandela
Walter Sisulu
Oliver Tambo
Eleven guardian angels
we will -
let your wings waft open and
embrace
espouse
enlighten
HIPPOcrisy
Pam Newham
The crocodlile saw it. He remembers it still.
How the great beasts came to the water-hole that day
flattening the grasses at the water's edge,
bringing with them noise and disarray,
frightening fish and mallards and fat little frogs.
"You have nothing to fear," the great beasts said.
"We are here to save you. For hidden somewhere
deeper than deep, lie noxious weeds that will choke
your children and destroy us all.
"We are here to root out this malevolent threat
and keep you free."
The crocodile saw it. He remembers it still
as he lies on his solitary rock next to water
brackish with slime
and blinks one sly all-seeing eye.
I remember
Deirdre Slemon
I remember Cape Town in the ‘80’s
-when articles were blacked out in Varsity newspaper
-Jeremy Cronin could not address us
-the marches we should not have attended,
I ran away when the riot police came,
Knew I could not do interrogation,
-T-shirts by artists with slogans- banned,
-friends’ phones were tapped,
the Military Police came looking for my housemate,
who had disappeared on a tip-off,
Moving to Jo’burg
I had revolutionary nightmares,
-stranded in Jeppe Street beside the blue-glass office block
en route to the airport,
-people with guns
I remember going to Tembisa
-my friend hid me on the floor of the car
and covered me in a blanket at a roadblock,
-we danced to Brenda Fassie and Condry Ziqubu
until the cocks and dogs awoke.
We paid R2 entry to Jameson’s,
listened to the dangerous, fiery lyrics
of The Genuines and The Cherry-Faced Lurchers
about what was happening
but could not be reported,
We felt free at Jameson’s in 1989.
Like we did before
Beverly Rycroft
Let’s keep secrets.
Let’s seal them off in vaults, like plutonium
to be managed by experts in chemical suits
who know how to handle them, who know how
hazardous information can be.
Let’s transport them in blue -light convoys
scattering pedestrians and motorbikes that need
to be taught respect for concealment
its menace and magnitude.
Let’s detain the foolish and the brave who
should know better than to search
for what they shouldn’t see
in places the authorities have decreed : dangerous.
Valuable.
The rest of us can go shopping. Or to the beach.
And if we happen to glimpse, in the distance ,
vapour twisting from the crypts where our futures burn
Look again and they’ll be somewhere else. Moved away.
They’ve got it all in hand, so why not
just agree: let the government govern, so we
can get on with our lives , knowing
our secrets are safe with them.
dirge
Dominique Botha
neruda in lemon scented exile
his country a knife
serrated by andes
whetted by sea
severing her vowels
into the bay of Naples
the great kremlin lepidopterist
his many steel pins too few
in the drying yard of secrets
history is a poor writer
time flies and time stands still
is birdlime and flight
a lark mirror in the orchard
dismantling herself
she is not swayed by us
truth is always on a lowering rope
trees of knowledge stunted by the Highveld frost
still the moorhen glides
buried flowers in the darkened garden strain
soil subsides
we must not
The coming of the rains
John Eppel
Romantics like Rousseau talk nonsense
when they insist that we are born free,
though he’s right about the chains. See,
you didn’t know which side of the fence
you would end up attempting to climb.
You had no say in your spawning,
or the biology of your thing,
or your complexion. Yet time and time
again we are told of a free press,
a free state, free will, freedom of speech,
freedom to write what we like, to preach
what we like, freedom to make a mess.
“It’s often safer to be in chains,”
says Franz Kafka, “than to be free.”
But safety is not the issue, see -
it’s the rains, the coming of the rains.
Law suit
Stephanie Saunders
They say a remarkable suit
has been fashioned by Mr Armani,
of fabric spun so fine
that only the virtuous see it.
A man, known as “The Big Man”
is wearing the suit,
only I dare not comment
on his obvious nakedness
in the press,
not because I fear exposing
my lack of virtue,
but doing so could land me in jail.
So I send messages to my friends
and these are sent on,
and this continues,
with embellishments,
the web being woven,
with the weft and warp
of fact and fabrication,
veined with the lurid
gold thread of hilarity.
Thus is more harm done
to the Big Man’s dignity,
than with the original “Armani” suit.
To My Darling Freedom or: The Protection of Information Bill
J.D. Warner
Once we were entwined,
all slippy bums on squeaky leather,
and at that time I knew not whether
I’d see out the summer with you.
Constantly keeping me alert,
Like a meerkat in savannah dusk,
Smelling the jackals potent musk,
I was made a schizophrenic wreck.
I said please? but you said no!
Keeping me obedient and at bay,
Preventing my hedonistic ways
I hated you the season long.
But my desire for you is
Now outweighed. I’ll not tolerate,
Your knuckle-raps and loud berates
Any longer; I am free of you.
For I have found another lover,
Who lets me loose and feeds my greed,
And cares not that I am a rampant weed,
Who will visit both your gardens.
Declaring now; “let’s all be free
But let me be freer still!
Do as I say and not as you see
And do only as I have willed.”
Freedom’s last stand
Danielle Crouse
When sitting in an East Coast bar
Away from home, so far,
One balmy night
In fading light
With Village people with their Village voice
Bored of hearing them smugly rejoice
About all that being American meant to them all
(this was before the towers’ doubly jeopardising fall)
I stood, silencing my liberal hosts,
Shamelessly interrupted their boasts
Of how their mighty soaring eagle gave their voices wings
And of their liberties and other such tritely expressed blessings,
To deliver an impassioned oratory
On the superiority of my liberty.
“This freedom you think you know
Is nothing, NOThing, nought, I tell you so,
Compared with the boldness of our voice,
With the openness of our ears, the excess of our choice,
With the swift and smooth velveteen speed with which our ink flows
How journalists’ reap the truths they sew,
If only Rach’s piano fingers were as fine as ours, strengthened from typing the truth
If only Mr P Glass himself could have our cacophonous liberty wash over him, forsooth -
A standing ovation
at our enviable elation
At the sweet syncopated symphony of our all-saying
At the electric magic that is our honest earnestness and playing
The unboundedness of our thoughtspeechpressmovementexpressionwillLIFE!
You, with your constraints,
Your restraint,
Your fears of complaint,
Your excessive consideration,
Your curtailed imagination.
The shackles of your political correctness
Are signs of your abjectness...
Don’t you talk to me of freedom
Let me coach your timid voice
Let me teach you about freedom, about liberty, and choice
For these run in my blood,
No, they don’t run, they flood!
And the blood that ran freely to free us from our chains
Did not run in vain
For we... are... truly... free!”
How many years ago that seems
Though in truth but a few
How these once-truths seem like dreams
As our truth is quashed, together with the hope we knew.