On "My" Poetry

Poetry, to me is a question of personal integrity, how I reconcile all misshapen creatures of my soul into dreams and tales.

The poet always has a penchant for the unfortunate, prophetic allusions, echoes that make for his particular self.

Word streams and images wrung from a raw subjectivity, from a mind’s bizarre cathedral of the sacred and the profane - mood the sculpted terror of his being.

Are my poems mere fitful explosions of self, and all that is harnessed to my hauling shoulders? And as I often rely on metaphorical densely compacted in word-play, to express layers of an inner turmoil; poetry becomes my echo-chamber.

This fractured syntax without stylistic economy inhabiting conflicting realms serves to reveal micro-details of the crude ventures of souls in life.

Perhaps overloaded with verbiage, explosive yet melodious at times, these poems bear no fidelity to the real but only a truth resounding in the poet’s chest.

And always, the poet remain witness, emblematic of resistance untainted by selfish claims.

What can poetry be, but a testimony.

Here, moods of ebullient joy are rhymed with pain clumsily in lumps - poetry ennobled by strife, an interplay between the personal and world-historical, narratives bristling with anxious contradictions - a victim to the contagion of rumour and fact.

A polemical meditation on the spectacles of destruction and collective stupor in the face of that destruction (of culture)

Poets, from their macabre personae flow the blood diluted with all objects of life in an exchange of tribulations and joys in an age of disconcerting machines.

But can poets be said to read events, moments, history backwards?

Is history; the past inevitable? This coherence of linear historical recollection, is a fallacy when concepts and recollections thereof are snared by minds only as fragments of chosen ideals?

It must be poets therefore, who must also immortalise the evanescent, the fleeting, while voicing an apocalyptic collapse into disremembrance of all that is held dear to memory.

Paul Zisiwe 2023

PONDERING AGE (A Short Script) - Khahliso Matela

SELF And SELF-Image?

Are they battling against the decline and decay of the body?

***

Is remembering historical events a craft of attaching narratives to an otherwise confused past with no intrinsic meaning?

Is it all some form of “spring-cleaning” of the past into events - an obscure logic binding the miscellany of life?

***

(SHE.

A figure denoted by lineaments of jewellery, neck dazzling and emboldened by bearing her motionless contemplation of something mysterious. 

This canvas is taking shapes of mirrors.)

First, it was something like a memory -

A forgotten gesture -

A silence

A SIGHT MOVING ABOUT THE DUNES, SIGHTS OF FLICKERING RAYS BETWEEN SHAKING LEAVES OF GRASS BY THE BEACH AT DUSK.

To remember LOVE.

Loving.

Is an act that frightens.

A dedication to the unknown.

A FEMALE FIGURE WALKS IN THE DISTANCE, UPON A BEACH, FOAMY WATERS RACING ACROSS THE SHORE.

HER SERENITY AND POISE ARE FLOATING NEAR THE EDGE OF TURBULENT WAVES.

Would I be forgotten too, someday?

A sneeze in the wind.

WAVES CRASH AGAINST BOULDERS, AND BUBBLES ON WET SAND REVEAL SHELLS.

HER FEET WALK JOVIALLY OVER THE WET SAND.

Or, as an idle omen that makes one value life…

THE OCEAN ROARS AS THE FIGURE APPROACHES, RUNNING FINGERS THROUGH HER GREY DREADED HAIR.

A PROFILE OF HER MATURE FACE AS SHE CONTEMPLATES THE OCEAN, SUN SETTING ON THE HORIZON.

Is there any forgiveness from those left behind? The living.

Have they found a certain kind of peace, or contentment with loss and impermanence?

SHE WALKS AWAY FROM THE BEACH, AN INSIGNIFICANT FIGURE WITHIN THE PAINTERLY MAJESTY OF THE LANDSCAPE ABLAZE WITH A MOTLEY LIGHT.

OVER BOULDERS SHE CLIMBS, SILHOUETTED AGAINST THE SUN SETTING AT SEA.

HER NAKED TOES PINCH SAND AS SHE WALKS.

HER DRESS FLOWS IN THE WIND.

THE SHRUBS BRUSH AGAINST HER LEGS LIKE A PET.

HER HAND HOVERS OVER BLADES OF GRASS.

SHE PROCEEDS TOWARDS A SHED SEEN THE WOOD OVERLOOKING THE SEE.

AND THE WAVES CRASH.

STANDING AT THE DOOR OF THE SHED, SHE LOOKS ABOUT AND LANGUIDLY VANISHES INSIDE.

FOAM FORMS AND SEEPS INTO SAND, AGAIN AND AGAIN.

THE HORIZON, DARKENING WITH CLOUDS, STREAKS WITH LIGHTNING AS THUNDER ROARS IN THE DISTANCE.

***

Does the wait for death tire the aged, weary them with yearnings for cessation and proof of impermanence?

When words escape meaning from lips torched by age and the ever present taste of death, do the dying need an ear for their final confessions?

***

(HE.

Together reflecting epochs of their being, sit daunted by the inevitable.

Stillness, and the weight of silence hovers over the bed of departing man, overseen by a son disaffected by all things to become.)

SILENCE. 

A NAUSEATINGLY PALLID ROOM WITH LARGE WINDOWS, WHITE CURTAINS DANGLE FROM GIGANTIC WINDOWS.

THE WIND BLOWS INTO THE ROOM, CAUSING A BALLET OF FABRIC CONCEALING A FIGURE ON A MAJESTIC BED.

SLOWLY SEEN FROM A PROFILE, A ELDERLY SICKLY FIGURE LIES IN BED, CURTAINS SLIGHTLY DIFFUSING THE LIGHT STREAMING INTO THE ROOM.

ANOTHER FORMALLY CLAD FIGURE IS SEATED IN AN ANTIQUE CHAIR, INTENTLY LISTENING. A DIGITAL PAD IS READY FOR WORDS SAID IN DREADY SLOWNESS, ONLY HEARD, NOT SEEN DEPARTING FROM ANY LIP.

If I die, it will be to protect you.

If I am dead, nobody will.

A SPIDER DROPS SMOOTHLY ALONG ITS WEB, SILVERY IN THE BEAMS OF LIGHT.

APPROACHED CLOSELY THE FACE IS SEEN FROM ABOVE, LIPS PARCHED AND UNMOVING.

A LONG SILENCE AND HEAVING BREATH.

I would rather you kill me before they kill you.

THE LISTENER SHIFTS IN HIS CHAIR, BUT SOON COMPOSES HIMSELF.

SILENCE.

THE FIGURE IN A WHITE SUIT LOOKS CAREFULLY ABOUT THE VAST ROOM.

HIS SIGHT PROGRESSES UNTIL IT RESTS ON THE BED OF THE SICKLY ORATOR.

For I would rather kill you, to save you.

THE CURTAINs WAVER IN THE AIR THAT IS FILLING WITH DUST SPECKS DANCING THROUGH RAYS FILTERING THROUGH THE ROOM.

THIS VISCERAL DANCE OF CURTAINS IS BLOWN INTO WHITE, FADING INTO BLACK.

***

In a pitch dark shed, a furnace is seen in the distance. A woman sits close to the crackling flames.

Her head craned towards the sky, in this shed, she sees immense starts in clusters and splendour assortment.

A SILLOUHETTE AGAINST LUMINOUS FLAMES.

CLOSING PATIENTLY TOWARDS HER LOTUS POSTURE BY THE FIRE.

HANDS PLAYS WITH THE FLAMES, AS EMBERS RISE.

STARS MINGLE WITH SMOKE AND FLICKERS DWINDLING IN THE VAST EXPANSE ABOVE HER HEAD. 

SHE

How fleeting memories twinkle.

Yet we hold onto the modesty and lyrical stretch of recollections, descriptions of faces and gestures.

What beautiful self-deception.

Would we be as disarmingly delighted at moments of dying?

SILENCE LISTENING TO THE CRACKLING SONG OF COLOURFUL FLAMES.

SHE LOOKS UP AT THE NIGHT SKY FULL OF MYSTERIOUS NEBULAE.

Perhaps my soul will reach that remarkable precipice, that gulf that separates worlds - into pasts, presents and futures.

So, is life but a veil that keeps the lived and unloved at bay from the rose gardens of our human experiences?

***

HE LIES STILL IN THE COLOSSAL BED, OVERSEEN BY AN EYE HOVERING.

THE STRANGER IS NO LONGER WITH HIM.

HE SEES HIS OWN FIGURE UNDER WHITE SILKEN COVERS, TOES POINTED TOWARDS DANCING SILKS.

IN THE DISTANCE A PAINTING OF A SUBLIME LANDSCAPE IS DOMINATING THE FIELD OF HIS WEAKENING VISION.

HE

Is it truly the duty of the living to recall the million corpses spoiled by time?

SILENCE. 

THE CURTAINS DANCE LIKE WAVES OF A STRANGE OCEAN, CONFINED WITHIN PALES OF A ROOM OF DEATH.

I sadly possess not many tangible memories, be they in photographs or hand-written postcards.

I have no scents from perfumed undergarments, not even the smell of old books - dust infectiously pregnant with meanings and stories of collapses.

THE CURTAINS DANCE IN THE FINAL GOLDEN GLOW OF SUNSET VISIBLE THROUGH THE GIANT WINDOWS.

A WHITE HAZE WASHES OVER HIS ROOM.

HE

When my absence is truly silent, unnoticed as the raw shrill of an ant underfoot, perhaps then, my not being needed will release me from needing others.

But will I deserve their grief? Will their presence haunt me - in my absence?

Would their absence be alive - a gaping labyrinth of essences gone?

I would I then long for then?

A CRESCENDO OF MELODIES CRASH IN THE PALENESS, WHICH EVENTUALLY GIVES SIGHT TO THE MAN, REMARKABLY AGED AND WEAK, SEATED ON THE SIDE OF THE COLOSSAL BED.

HIS LEGS DANGLE AND HIS WRINKLED FEET, CAKED WITH SORES NEVER REACH THE GROUND THAT SEEMS INFINITE AND TRANSPARENT.

HIS FACE AND EYES ARE SOMBER, A DREAM IN HIS EYES DANCING WITH THE SLIGHT TEARS FORMING ON HIS LIDS.

***

IN A PITCH COOLNESS OF AN SPECTRALLY ILLUMINATED SHED - SILENCE. 

ONLY THE CRASH OF WAVES IN THE DISTANCE.

HER SHAPE SITS, NECK CRANED TOWARDS THE NIGHT SKY.

IMMENSE STARS IN CLUSTERS AND SPLENDOROUS ASSORTMENT FILL HER SIGHT.

SHE

I lived for laundry of bloodstains and piss, thankless meals and quarrelsome dishes.

Yet, this final place, hellish as it maybe, is far warmer than those coals for eyes that always followed my every move in life.

This divinely undisturbed sky awaits my birth - among many births that are catastrophes, squandered potentials in the tragic purity of life.

SILENTLY HER HANDS DANCE IN THE FLAMES, TAKING THE COLOUR OF THE STRANGE FIRE THAT ALSO GLISTENS O THE INTENT FACE.

SHE

I feel cleansed.

I am blind to this continuity of unlived to lived life.

This fullness of being, chaotic and human, of dented halos and tongues lacking compassion - what a marvel it has been.

A delicious blend of the ironical and sentimental.

Sounds of housework, a toilet flushing, a sizzle of onion rings in hot butter.

A heartbeat and a wind.

A cat’s cry in the silent night.

Leaves crushed under nimble feet.

These sounds are memories.

THE WAVES HUM IN THE DISTANCE, AMIDS A MEDLE OF CHILDREN’S VOICES IN UNDECIPHERABLE CONVERSATIONS.

OTHER VOICES AND MUSIC FUSE INTO THE SILENCE IN A SUBLIMELY INAUDIBLE ORCHESTRATION OF REMEMBERED SOUNDS.

***

SHE

Will I ever forget the sounds of a child’s laughter - a sight of butterflies in a field of sunflowers?

The smells of a drenched garden.

Will I hum a ditty I never learned for my grandchildren unborn, with eyes the mirror of all creation?

A MONTAGE OF THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH AND ITS ALL THAT PEOPLES IT IS PROJECTED IN RHYTHMIC PULSATIONS ACROSS THE SKY FILLING THE DARK SHED.

What a life, stocked with illuminating mirages and controversies, omitted names in the parade of spirits - all drawn towards memory like magnets of pain towards a euphoric heart

What clarity is abound in dying?

THE BEAUTY OF THE IMAGERY OVERWHELMS THE SKY.

HER SILHOUETTE IS DANCING ABOUT WITH A CLOAK OF STARS AROUND HER STOIC POSTULATIONS.

HER DANCE IS MESMERIC AND SOON HER FIGURE FADES INTO SHEETS OF WHITE SILK SINKING INTO THE SHED CASTING LIGHT THAT POWDERS THE SPACE LIKE A DREAM.

Yes, those overheard and unmapped minds await my a journey of eventful self-discovery.

All shifting sands of identity - their ancientness gone, shatter into a mosaic of an incomprehensible self-image, a book unfinished but that which altered me forever.

THE CURTAINS AND FABRICS OF STARS IN THIS CLOSE-HELD SKY MERGE AND MORPH INTO SHAPES TAKING A RESEMBLANCE OF HE AND SHE, AND THIS FINAL MOVEMENT OF SOULS BECOMES A UNION THAT WILL BE VEHICLE FOR THEIR SOULS’ JOURNEY.

THE END

Khahliso Matela 2023

Die Assewaai - An Ox Wagon.

 Can Video Be Poetry?

This confident art of improvised visual choreography does not negate the craft of story as embroidered in tales and myths, idioms and proverbs, but aims to exhume their simplest quality that exists beyond the complicated rituals of speech.

Oral storytelling can transcend certain verbal expression, of course, but video art looks at that which outweighs speech with an imaginative license, but binds oral differences with their similarities into a narrative formulation of visual codes.

These codes and nuances of gradual transformations surely must add to the vitality of the heard, as listening itself is a creative genesis, identity formation as a spoken actuation.

Languages possess traditional phrases, formal or informal, and some include inventions within unconventional formats, and the same is applicable in video language as constructed through montages, gradually drawing attention to intended memorialised meanings.

Abstract images employed in video art production are mere supplementary visualisations that elucidate and explicate the obscure details of a secret language, the conception and perception of these coded words/visual can at times only find meaning expressed through reception.

Even the most turgid and mechanical of languages do find an exuberance within the realm of remixed imagery, giving credence to their inner morbidities and exhilarations.

Although an unconvincing mask of objectivity gives language its prestige, the spoken aught to honour the import of colour and sound by the vestiges of the audio-visual orchestration of video artists, not to be regarded with derision. 

An often lamented loss of the abstract in visual interpretations of language and textual language to exactly, is also a predicament that video art grapples with in a variety of innovative ways. Like all archives, text has a longevity and an unalterability that often eludes plasticity, but this should not be an obstacle for the 

Narratives punctured by disdain for temporality often decay, and rescue lies with a signed type of communication, where frayed memories conjoin in a thread that bring artistic light to intellectual reinforcements.

What is fiction if not lack of material-scientific proof that something is materially real? How can therefore all mental activities, from meditation to faith, recognition and combination of symbols be but a fiction similar to any simulacrum concocted by the visual artist?

In video art, there is a recurrent trend of questioning, with diffuse reminiscences of events, characters seamlessly switching from protagonists to antagonists, a recycled hearsay compounded with valid though varied perspectives.

And that is its fallible strength, for video in itself is impermanent and its strips mere chemical composition that cannot withstand treasonous time. Therefore, perishability is key to understanding how transience operates within the artistic practice that is well versed in the impermanent. 

An art premised on aberrations, expanded histories and chromatic alterations, distortions and noises of elegantly captured memories,  sweltering in the heat of projection light, reflected on lucid spaces, yet retaining their alternative recollections.

The passivity of speech, the latency of meaning; but conjoins them but hallucinated images, as if mind were drinking from clouds, these grinding innovations of the cranium are what creates the marvel of communication - a feeling of being understood more than just perceived.

And thus video art become a self-constructed miasma, fractured extracts emerging from a forest of unfamiliar agonies and joys, an afterlife of each expressed syllable growing with the intimacy of an embracing mind.

This power to knit and join the abstract instils pleasure and awe, at times, and like all cacophonies of sound and sight, often the mind feels compacted, smartening the horrid, yet dimly conceiving the immensity of that spectacle being displayed.

In video art, those inscrutable mirages like incoherent fragments of a tale can unveil disquieting sentences anchored in hard earthly language, in a tongue that mirrors human disintegration in a photograph of moving time.

Poetry stakes its claim on relevance and necessity for literary preservation of human impulses, fine art prides itself in similitude and stasis that implies permanence, but both forms are ephemeral. 

Each speak to a need to halt their ceaseless pursuit for fluctuations in moods, a desire to feel a wide range of tragedies among the comical occurrences of being.

Yet video art, bestows memory an altered state composed of ghosts of multiple unstable memories, a spectral evidence of mutable reality, superimposed collages that waltz the unpriced streets of the imagination, to create new dolls and monsters, haughty in their expressions and floating beyond familiar linguistic playgrounds.

 

On The Question Of "My" Art

Can one’s art be self-effacing yet remaining convinced of the power of its form?

Does the highbrow and popular embrace artists often receive tamper with their creative temperament? 

Is there ever truly a fear that perhaps the artist can defile the selfsame subjects depicted through personalised re-imaginings or misinterpretations?

Why are we quick to umbrage, this propensity for atrocity in art, when faced with truths we cannot stomach, those that challenge the pomposity of self-assured infallibility?

Does the artist harbour a secret hectic greed, ruin-prone and ill-advised class envy that is prevalent among many artists, that also adds to the reticence we find in their expressions. 

Art’s is a voice that shades into a variety of mouths, as well as orifices of all social lamentations and cravings for full sensitivity to the imaginative rather than the engulfing nightmare.

Mad identities granted him (the poet artist) license to invade other spaces, as a naughty character with will torn between a duel with the world and its gods. 

A terrified reverie of conversation with ghosts, when things are left hideously doomed and deranged. This is the source of the poetic, an unnamed representation of a sordid world, viewed through salved eyes of romantic mysticism gone to extremes.

Artists are adrift in a turbulent world, finding sanctuary in words often mangled by cliches and poetry of paints and colour, with the motive to reflect on the power of the trivial and mundane. 

And this veneration of mundanity has allowed for innocence to permeate their work often in gleeful deployments of their creative energies. 

***

This quintessential urge to interpret cultural turmoils and social constructs, where does it position the individual’s perspective, that soberly lasting yet psychological vantage through which each artists views their world?

Is there poetry in these demonstrations and protestations, is art but a conflicting self-analysis of where we are and where we aught be as society?

Is there a space for artistic expression that cuts down and contemplates the world we have vastly destroyed, in richly entangled pictorial depictions or textual narratives, a verse to voice the sordid and rebuke the paradise of our mono-culture?

That reductive optic through which artists view this complex world is fast becoming a decimated habitat of imagination, constantly under attack by consumerist urgencies and an assortment of structural obstacles, leaving artists who merely produce art that is often palatable and sedative.

And that is the challenge faced by many cross-disciplinary creatives, as they are breaking through traditional veils and intermingling modes of representing commonplace sentiments of how we as humans have ineluctably altered the face of our planet.

Those wild and diverse forests of the mind have also been cleared at the rate of human desires and their obsolescence, a conceit that encourages a collective re-dreaming of those lost botanies and landscapes in jungles of a history past and yet tragically living.

Often in our otherworldly momentary glimpses we see possibilities from the murk of contemporary gluttony and predation of this world, yet how do artists communicate those intricate frequencies through obsessively re-run conversations in which they might say something amiss?

***

But, does art require patronisation in order to flourish in this culture of investor mentality that is driven by a select grouping from an elite cultural pedigree, and would artist even thrive within societies that do not feel they owe much to artistic philosophies and praxis of these under-resourced creative practitioners?

Does art for patronage imply that artists are neglecting their colossal responsibility of recording the past and present for posterity and not erasure, or can such patronage illuminate on evolving new artistic careers?

Powerless to effects of social atrocities, many artists have an overarching fear of an eminent end and often feel trapped in a ditch non-responsiveness to events beyond their control, not wanting to interrupt the reveries of a placid cultural system.

Does this sense of impotence, a life spent in years of vital creativity, ever reach a precipice where the final fall or ascension occurs? Do artists still sell their proverbial souls to the devil in some Faustian ritual authored in an eternal cycle of demand and supply?

Arguably, the view that art is solely evaluated imaginatively by those invested in its beauty (or any degree thereof) and also its worth as ascribed by economic barometers of profiteers, is wilfully naive; because captivatingly through art can we then find an accessible vehicle for profound thought about all intriguing premises of life. 

This contemplate relationship with collective existences and material vitality of personal life, is what should drive and sustain the unruly spirit of the artist, combining nostalgia for the romantic while daring to glare at our strife-torn present.

Perhaps this abiding notion that art can become something beyond the sensorial is rooted in a humanism that views the entirety of life as intertwined, and through this simple lens artists can venture into troubling and unapproachable portraits of their monumental times.  

***

Relinquishing the modern assumptions about what constitutes accessibility of art , one finds that the nature of the artist’s private and public character does inform much of this accessibility to their artistic practice. 

My Video Poems, for instance, I find to possess a literary texture, and my literary works to possess an audio-visual dimension. Although the correlation might seem arbitrary or coincidental, it is a rumination of a deep-seated urge towards incompleteness, such as with all things in life’s transience. 

There obviously is an underwhelming effect to the tedium induced by multiple layered deliveries of an artistic depictions of event, moments, memories and speculations, but this multiplicity inquisitively questions whether “is this all there is”?

Similarly, with my “not writing for the mob”, I am not attempting to offer exclusive access to my word-work, but rather to interrogate language as a tool and medium, an effort to “teach English a lesson” as renowned author Professor Wally Serote once put it in an interview - a western tongue melding into the language of my dreams or vis-versa.

Maybe an alternately politicised upbringing wrought with anonymous exposure to subversive literature, music and cinema have left an undeniably indelible cog in the mechanism of my thought processes, and perhaps that also affects my cognitive renditions of my thoughts and chaotic poetry.

Yet my concern if for the human and fragile in the midst of the brutal, reflecting on moral choices insisted on myself by myself, and to suffer the full consequences of choosing to confront the engulfing nightmare of creative life.

A tormenting century this has undeniably been, with artists vacillating between the horrors of COVID-19 and the isolation enforced through quarantines, border and theatre closures - here new myths about togetherness have to be cultivated or forged.

Therefore, my personal obsession and pre-occupation with demolishing linguistic borders in frenzied gesticulations and textual choreography, with subverting meaning and context, these are metaphors that reconcile horrors with all promises of life.

Paul Zisiwe 2023