This year the first lecture of English Literary Studies 1 at the University of Cape Town coincided with Valentine’s Day and President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation address – the usual helicopters overhead and government motorcades along the M3. (Not to mention the Steenkamp-Pistorius affair ... but the news hadn’t quite broken by 9am).

As convenor of this big first year undergraduate course, I put it to the students that both domains – ceremonious speechifying and mass-marketed romance – were areas of linguistic deadness and predictability. “Mainstreaming job creation”, “For a very special person” – in both party political discourse and glossy Hallmark cards, you are likely to find long chains of words that have been used together often before. During the development of printing, there was a technical name for this: the “stereotype” was the term for a block that came ready-made with commonly combined words – or in French, the cliché.

“It is a cliché that most clichés are true”, writes Stephen Fry in his autobiography, “but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue”. Such epigrams point towards the real master of the epigram, Oscar Wilde, who remarked that “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”. Just a brief inversion is able to lay bare the violence inherent in our received ideas, in the logic of generalisation on which so much of our social understanding rests.

All language, wrote Nietzsche, tends towards lifelessness and dead metaphor. The world is full of riverbeds and chairlegs, mousepads and Windows™ – concepts we no longer even recognise as metaphorical. Anticipating the insights of structural linguistics, he goes on to describe words as old, worn coins, their surfaces rubbed smooth, mattering not in themselves but only as tokens to be exchanged.

This was one of two critical essays that I found startling as an undergraduate, and which I thought back to when planning our course with colleagues and tutors and the invited APA annotated bibliography maker. The second was Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” (1917), which speaks of the “algebrisation” of modern existence: the over-automatisation of that “permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort”. Such processes of habit and habitualisation “devour work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war”. But the artwork, he suggests, is charged with disrupting this process. It should make objects unfamiliar, should draw out the length and difficulty of our mental processes, so as to make us aware of objects “as they are perceived and not as they are known”. Art exists, he writes in a famous line, “to make the stone stony”.

To show this process of “estrangement” in action, we read two poems. The first was “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens, which considers its subject in thirteen disconnected, haiku-like stanzas – from different angles and dimensions of experience, almost like a Cubist painting:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

The second was Craig Raine’s “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”, in which an extra-terrestrial reports on modern human society in ways that make it seem by turns odd, disturbing, marvellous. “Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings”, it begins, “and some are treasured for their markings”. The last stanza gives a vision of human couples in sleep: at night “they hide in pairs / and read about themselves – / in colour, with their eyelids shut.”

These materials were then worked into an undergraduate poetry competition. Students were asked to select an ordinary object, and then to write a poem about it in thirteen short stanzas – but not to disclose the riddle too quickly. These were the winners:

 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Clown
Emma Reinecke

I
Among twenty grey streets
The only sound
Was the laughter of the clown.

II
I was of three faces,
Like a circus
In which there are three clowns.

III
The clown’s cigarette smoke whirled in the autumn winds
It was a small part of the pollution.

IV
A politician and a prostitute
Are one.
A politician and a prostitute and a clown
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of the pie
Or the beauty of the pie soaring through the air,
The pie smashing into the clown’s face
Or just before.

VI
The scent of McDonalds filled the children
With barbaric hunger.
The poster of the clown
Grinning, faded into the wall,
The mood
Etched on the faces
Of each underpaid, overworked employee.

VII
O thin workers of Manor Farm
Why do you imagine golden men?
Do you not see how the clown
Sits in the suits
Of the men about you?

VIII:
I know circus tricks and sleights of hand,
Business deals and campaign promises,
I know mellifluous words and sweet, bewitching promises
And I know too that the clown is involved
In what I know

IX:
When the clown vanished from the news
It marked the end
Of one of many freedoms

X
At the sight of clowns
Driving in their tiny clown car
The stomach of the man
Overflowed with mirth

XI
She sashayed along William Nicol,
In tight jeans,
Once, a fear pierced her,
In that she mistook
The shadow of her customer,
For the shadow of a clown.

XII
The children are crying.
The clown must be juggling.

XII
Bodies lay on the ground.
It was dark
And it was going to get darker.
The clown sat
On his grimy throne.

 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Salt
Lara-May Evans

I
Lazily,
Loosen sleep from eyelids
Eat it
It melts on the tongue like flakes of salty snow.

II
Playground, 1997
Pushed around, pants pulled down
Infinite tears and infinite snot
Smothered – breathless – by warm, wet salt.

III
Stand before an ocean,
Beat the waves with tiny fists.
It beats back:
Spat out and spluttering,
Stinging eyes and salt-scratched knees.

IV
The puppy whistles in his sleep
His breath is milk and salt

V
Driving with grandmother-and-talc
Cowlick and carsick days
She calls the other drivers Sods
I think a sod’s a sort of fish

VI
Rough flakes of stone
Fall soft and dissolve
You are not stone at all

VII
Brave hand to velvet-muzzle
Hot breath
Tongue to sweat-softened palm

VIII
Cannibal Dream:
From a jar, eat small cubes of briny flesh.
The label reads, “Pickled New Zealanders”
Wake up uneasy

IX
Shrieking seagulls
Turned to pterodactyls
By vinegar and salt

X
Sucking the soft blades
Of the artichoke
Lick the salt off shiny fingers
Your wet mouth allures and appals me

XI
Cormorant with tangled string – distorted feet

XII
And salt so ancient
Sits the same in the sea
As it sits in me,
Sits the same
On the tongues of Lot, and god
And me.

XIII
See how it runs

 

13-2-1
Nkanyezi Hlatshwayo

Matted and free flowing
crocheted wool
hung loosely, at-ease,
from a patient chin.

Rule-lined and pressed
processed-factory-cotton
– Scalped.
Conquered remains,
of a buzzing-restless-impatient blade.

                  _

Borrowed psychedelia:
A bright theme and variations on light,
of a bygone, by-going era
- yet, to be gone by again – in another time,
in another place
By another race of sunburnt hearts.
              (For they so loved the world…)

              Traditions of traditions:
              traditional renditions
              of young men in blazers and dress-ties.

                 _

In 1969, thousands of Xhosa initiates
under the garb and comforting cover
of homogenous heavy blankets
made their way to “the mountain”,
the lighting way-up is truly incredible sometimes
– on clearer crisper days,
as they made their way up,
like any other year.

The Summer of Love found thousands marching
in uniform drips-and-drabs
wearing the coats Nature gave them
under the cover of stars
It rained a bit – stopped – rained some more
An exceptional year – 1969.

                 _

Pluralists preachers pulpiteer in unison
their faith
(in) their knowledge of all that matters.
(Voices pretending to know everything)

Soloist-advocates
wax on to the gathered
their knowledge
of nothing but love and the lack thereof.
(Voices pretending to know nothing)

                 _

The ever-ready
greeting grins
of those loathsome-lovable
proprietors of sin. (To be disrobed:
rung-out and clean-pressed. On tuesday evenings
and sunday afternoon limbo, and other long dark
tea-times and come-downs of the soul.)
The omnipresence
of saluting shiny buttons
and doubly-sewn weighty badges.
(In every on-going field of war and on every street corner
big brothers, anywhere and everywhere,
To be watched by us.)

                 _

At Thirty:
four parents
three more rungs on the ladder
two salaries
two more mouths to feed
a four-door
a lawn
a dog
one tennis-shoe-in-a-tumble-dryer heartbeat
one pair of open eyes at 3AM
one very constricting neck-tie
ten reasons to buy a new ’82 Pontiac and have an affair with an air-hostess.

At Thirty:
one moderately-priced “sports car”
one world illuminating idea
one dog
one plate
one pillow to help stop snoring
one toothbrush
fourteen oversized and drafty dress-shirts with virgin top-buttons
any number of meaningless numbers in a phonebook.

                 _

These self-defined and self-defining threads
–thirteen to one –
comfort and encase
us all
.

 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Van Gogh’s Ear
Heather Kirkby

I
A shelled pea,
An enthusiastic outpouring of adoration:
A famous ear.

II
An ear that the sea
White-washed into through a clasped conch shell.

III
Did this ear transgress,
Or was it pierced
For our iniquities?

IV
Some said it sought
Summer slumber –
Shy, snail-like ear.

V
This is the season of cauliflower ears
Bound in bandage.

VI
The hammer and anvil,
Blacksmith’s ear.
Deafening hammer and anvil,
Forged fire ear.

VII
Rippling, wrapped in brown paper,
An ear:
“For you.”

VIII
Ashamed of what it had heard,
The ear-ache
Of whole-faced jeering.
Deaf to the left of the world.
So that the wind is no longer madding.

IX
There is no such thing as a bearded ear.

X
Even impasto
Could not make up for
A missing ear.

XI
“Here is a rag of my existence,
A prayer flag blown out to the wind,
A mournful ear
That is a sign of rapture.”

XII
The crickets have stopped singing,
The ear must be gone.

XIII
A revolver
In an ear of wheat
That we find at harvest
And it undulates
In the late afternoon.
 
 
What the judges said:

3^rd place (tied)
Emma Reinecke
The best poetry, in my mind, expertly juggles the abstract and the particular, which is what this weird and wonderful poem does. There is something visually and semantically satisfying about the final image of the clown sitting on his grimy throne. Throughout, Reinecke captures the menace and beauty of clowns, with a dash of humour (intended or not) to make it all work. She gets what Stevens was trying to do with perspective, but she makes it her own, as well.

3^rd place (tied)
Lara-May Evans
The end of this poem by Evans really succeeds; the final two stanzas are brilliant and evocative, especially this notion that salt sat on the tongues of Lot, of god, and the poet.

2^nd place
Nkanyezi Hlatshwayo
Sometimes a little cryptic but the sections that work – Xhosa initiates and the Summer of Love – are remarkable.

1^st place
Heather Kirkby
The imagery in this poem seems to undulate in the way that Van Gogh’s paintings do.