Conning the contours of South African poetry, 1970–2010

Abstract

The landscape of South African fiction is well-known, but South African poetry remains—in Kelywn Sole’s phrasing—“incompletely mapped terrain.” Sole’s metaphor evokes Franco Moretti’s efforts to map, inter alia, the European novel, and this paper reports on a Moretti-esque numerical survey of eighteen poetry anthologies published between 1971 and 2013, that sketches the contours of a “canon” of South African poets and poetry in that period. In keeping with this issue's theme of the institutions of African literature, the essay pays implicit tribute to Bernth Lindfors, who applied computative methods in his research into canon-formation in anglophone African literature long before Moretti coined the phrase “distant reading.” The survey offers a numerical base-line for determining which South African poets might be deemed canonical, while also commenting on political, material and commercial constraints governing who could write and publish poetry, who could build a reputation as a poet.