South African Poetry Research Articles

The Lava of this land: South African poetry, 1960-1996

The lava of change has spilled over South Africa again as apartheid as ended. What sort of social and artistic emerges as it cools? This anthology, containing more than two hundred poems by over fifty poets, spans five distinct historical periods in the contemporary development of South Africa, from the 1960s Durban worker strikes to the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s. Most of the poems have been written in English, but forty-eight have been translated from Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and /Xam, a Bushman linguistic group. Inspired by music, by the language of the streets, by the sensual and the erotic, and by social, political, and economic turmoil, these poems showcase a remarkable complexity of literary traditions. They provide a fascinating and moving rendering of South Africa's hybrid language and unique worldview.

South African poetry: a personal view

South African poetry finds itself at a breakpoint which may imply a hiatus for fruitful self-examination, yet emphatically indicates a continuing

‘Text’ and ‘voice’ in recent South African poetry

This article explores in some depth two volumes of poetry which are indicative of a tension between the poem as ‘text’ and the poem as ‘voice’, or the self-conscious (metaphoric) ‘reading' or ‘rewriting ’ of the world versus the outward (prophetic) ‘speaking' to the world. While neither book is hermetically sealed and, like all rich poetry, delights in transgressing categories, each is distinctive enough to lend itself to exploration in terms of ‘text’ and ‘voice’. The article argues that John Mateer, the self-avowed iconoclast yet to find an individual voice, is postmodern in his reading and rewriting of the fragmented world, while Joan Metelerkamp is closer to the modernists in her speaking to the hallowed world as poet-prophet, eschewing textual pyrotechnics while situating herself within poetic tradition.

Bird Hearts Taking Wing: Trends in Contemporary South African Poetry Written in English

Bird Hearts Taking Wing: Trends in Contemporary South African Poetry Written in English

‘Shaping lines’: New South African poetry, 1994–1995

‘Shaping lines’: New South African poetry, 1994–1995

Essential Things: An Anthology of New South African Poetry

Essential Things: An Anthology of New South African Poetry

South African Women's Poetry: A Gynocritical Perspective

This paper is, in many ways, companion to paper I read at the 1988 AUETSA conference, which was subsequently published as Men's Club.2 In this paper I argued that what constituted tradition in South African poetry was overwhelmingly androcentric and exclusionary of women, akin to men's club. At the end of the paper I suggested that feminist criticism of poetry needed to develop awareness of the history of women's poetry?that there is such history and that it needs to be investigated.3 It is my aim in this paper to provide brief outline of such history of women's poetry in English in South Africa. In researching this alternative history of poetry I have focused on the work of women writing in the English language. Where Afrikaans women poets have been included, it is because they have published translations of their work into English that have been available to English-speaking women poets and readers in South Africa. The work of black women writing in English is also an inherent part of this history, but features prominently only in the latter part of the twentieth century for reasons that I will develop in the course of the paper. I have called this paper a gynocritical perspective of women's poetry since I am using the method of feminist scholarship known as gynocritics, or

Searching for words: Towards a gynocritical model for the study of South African women's poetry

Summary In this article I will attempt to provide a theoretical model for the feminist study of South African women's poetry. I argue for the use of a socio‐historical and contextual approach, one that accepts the “presence” of women as poets and acknowledges their voices and their attempts to define themselves as women and as writers. Using the preliminary work of Anglo‐American theorists as a point of reference, I attempt to justify the validity of my model of reading as a means of analysing the poetry written by women in this country.

Ideology and the study of South African English poetry

Summary Ideology is intricated in South African English poetry and its critical reception in complex ways which demand ongoing examination. In this study I approach the subject along three lines of enquiry. In the first section I trace the development of a materialist critical practice up to the recent challenge it encounters in the work of Michael Chapman. In the second section I attempt to shift this debate onto new ground by reformulating the concept of ideology in post‐modernist terms as a discursive practice rather than, as traditionally conceived, an autonomous body of ideas. In the final section, which forms the bulk of my study, I apply this discursive understanding of ideology to a reading of select poems by English‐speaking white South Africans, from Pringle to Butler.

"Azikwelwa" (We Will Not Ride): Politics and Value in Black South African Poetry

Previous articleNext article No Access"Azikwelwa" (We Will Not Ride): Politics and Value in Black South African PoetryAnne McClintockAnne McClintock Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 13, Number 3Spring, 1987Politics and Poetic Value Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448410 Views: 15Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1987 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Hayley G. Toth, Brendon Nicholls A dialectical literary canon?, African Identities 18, no.1-21-2 (Jun 2020): 41–63.https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2020.1773761Sarah Gibson Railing Against Apartheid: Staffrider, Township Trains, and Racialised Mobility in South Africa, (Sep 2019): 35–63.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_2Tom Penfold Black Consciousness and the Soweto Poets, (Oct 2017): 65–90.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57940-5_4Joseph McLaren James Matthews: From Cry Rage to the New South African Nation, Journal of the African Literature Association 10, no.11 (Aug 2016): 58–67.https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2016.1199361Duncan Brown Black consciousness, tradition and modernity: Ingoapele madingoane's “black trial”, Current Writing 9, no.11 (Jan 1997): 1–26.https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.1997.9678010L. John The colonization of consciousness in South Africa, Economy and Society 18, no.33 (Aug 1989): 267–296.https://doi.org/10.1080/03085148900000013Dorothy Driver Appendix II: South Africa, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 24, no.22 (Jul 2016): 133–169.https://doi.org/10.1177/002198948902400208

Black Consciousness in East and South African Poetry : Unity and Divergence in The Poetry of Taban Lo Liyong and Sipho Sepamla

Black Consciousness in East and South African Poetry : Unity and Divergence in The Poetry of Taban Lo Liyong and Sipho Sepamla

The Return of the Amasi Bird: Black South African Poetry, 1891-1981

The Return of the Amasi Bird: Black South African Poetry, 1891-1981

Contingencies of Value

Contingencies of Value

Four Poems

Sydney Sipho Sepamla was born in 1932 and has lived most of his life in Soweto, the giant township southwest of Johannesburg, so recently notorious. Soweto, with an unofficial population perhaps upward of a million (so much in Soweto has been unofficial always, even the people are thought of as temporary sojourners) living in a vast dormitory of jerry-built houses stretching for astonishing miles over the flat, bleak veld, existing in the minds of the planners and ideologues as merely a place to sleep the thousands who service the white city next door by day. Sepamla must be ranked along with Oswald Mtshali and Wally Mongane Serote among what I might call the poets of the new cities. I am referring not to Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, but to their black satellites, Soweto, Langa and Kwa Mashu, cities of night attending the cities of the sun. Such mirror images and inverted relationships are characteristic in South Africa. In his anthology of Black South African verse, the first and best introduction to the new city poets, which takes its title from Sepamla's fine satirical poem ‘To Whom It May Concern’, Robert Royston remarked that the new poetry was ‘a form of self-preservation’. However angry and expressive it might be, it presented less of a target to censors, priests and police who had sunk, literally without trace, an entire raft of black prose writers in the fifties and sixties. Understandably, some of the new city verse is assertive, angry and confused - but in South African poetry there has been nothing so invigorating for years. What sets Sepamla apart from the others, I think, has been a certain wariness of political rhetoric, a most un-South African subtlety. There is nothing unusual about using the big stick in South Africa; everybody has one. But in a country of brutal distinctions what is truly rare is the ability to distinguish. Sepamla's is a nervy, urban sensibility, perfectly suited to finding the chinks in the regime's fibrous armour and thrusting in his spear. He is at his steely best in ‘the deadpan, factual, throwaway line’ which Douglas Livingstone has pointed to, splendidly instanced in this poem, ‘The Will’: The burglar-proofing and the gate will go to my elder son so will the bicycle and a pair of bracelets His strength is double-edged; not only does he recount the pains of the blacks under apartheid, but articulates, too, the white nightmare of dispossession, often imagined, always expected, forever abjured. Sepamla's books include Hurry Up To It! ( 1975) and The Blues Is You In Me ( 1976), both published in Johannesburg. With the publication of The Soweto I Love his work is for the first time available abroad. He edits the review New Classic ( named for the dry-cleaning business in the room above which the magazine was founded), now in its latest metamorphosis and always amongst the most worthwhile South African little magazines open to the work of black writers. He edits, too, the drama magazine, Sketsh!

Panel on Contemporary South African Poetry

The only was I can describe black South African writing is to say it’s a very tragic thing in its own way because of what is happening in South Africa. The writing seems to have no continuity; usually when we talk about black South African writing, we start around the sixties, but I think it started long before then. We have people writing in Setswana, Sevenda, Shangaan, Xhosa, and many other indigenous languages, and I’m sure that up to now we still aren’t fully aware of the wealth of literature written in those languages.When I started writing, it was as if there had never been writers before in my country. By the time I learned to write, many people—Zeke, Kgositsile, Mazisi Kunene, Dennis Brutus—had left the country and were living in exile.

Panel on Contemporary South African Poetry

Panel on Contemporary South African Poetry

The Myrrh of Parting: A Study of the Theme of Exile in South African Poetry

The decision that makes many South African poets leave their native country and spend their life in England, has something in common with the forces that make Australian and New Zealand writers COme to London, or Canadians seek renown in New York. However ardently nationalistic the dominion writer may be, there is a sense in which London and New York must represent the stimulus and competition denied him by the apparently more limited and parochial surroundings of his own country. But the South African writer has a choice more complex and painful than that facing the writers from the other dominions. He shares with other isolated writers the need which impels him to seek the literary communities of London of New York, but he also faces a national situation that doubles the pressure by repelling him from his native country and making return impossible. Even though the poets I am considering in this essay are not political exiles, their motives cannot be entirely aesthetic as they avoid a country where "politics hangs a long hand over the wall."

Essays in Poetry--Mainly Australian; A Critical Survey of South African Poetry in English; Our Living Tradition

Essays in Poetry--Mainly Australian; A Critical Survey of South African Poetry in English; Our Living Tradition

Poetry of the present, South African poetry

Journal Article Poetry of the present, South African poetry Get access Notes and Queries, Volume 194, Issue 19, 17 September 1949, Page 418, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/194.19.418a Published: 17 September 1949