LitNet | ''To make art is to make a contact with what lies just beyond our understanding''

Born in Pretoria in 1956, Joan Metelerkamp grew up in KwaZulu-Natal. She has published six poetry collections: Towing the Line (Carrefour, 1992), which was awarded the 1991 Sanlam Prize for Literature; Stone No More (Gecko Poetry, 1995); Into the day breaking (Gecko Poetry, 2000); Floating Islands (Mokoro, 2001); Requiem (Deep South, 2003) and, most recently, carrying the fire, published by substancebooks in 2005.

Joan has had individual poems published in major South African poetry anthologies and in various international volumes. She has taken part in festivals and poetry readings locally and overseas, including Poetry Africa in 2005. She has been awarded poetry prizes and judged others, has edited the literary journal New Coin for four years, and has written poetry reviews in academic journals and newspapers.

The view from my window … This comes into my poems in fragments incessantly. First, I have to change my glasses - one of the irritations of ageing. If I turn to look through the glass door, I see: the door frame; the pillar which holds up the balcony above it; the very rank delicate heads of pale orange poppies, still today; deep purple geranium incarnum; golden hellichrysum; a big damp hole where the dogs have been digging for mole rats; grass swamping the pale wild allyssum; the ubiquitous erica; a grewia just bursting into little mauve star flowers (actually, I can just see the buds, but I know it's a grewia).

Then widening my vision: I see down into the valley, the river's silver bend. I can't see it behind the dune, then I do see it again at the mouth - a little stretch of beach and the breakers - but hazy today because it rained in the night, and the sea and the sky are hardly separate at the mouth. The valley: coastal riverine bush along the banks of the river - kikuyu fields - I can't see a single black angus, which means my brother must have moved them. The dune, covered densely by riverine bush at its base, sparsely covered half way up - a path, running along its length like the spine of a fish ready for filleting - which the Goukamma Nature Reserve made this year to back-burn for their fire in February. The vast sky: glaring now in one silver patch where the clouds must be thinning.

Behind me, to my right - the rest of the room. It's wood-panelled, rather like a cabin; in the corner, my daughter's silent piano, also her violin; four bookshelves, books lying this way and that; a bed covered with a woven Bitou bedspread; a rather wide yellow-and-roses armchair; my table full of messy papers, lip-ice and coloured pens (which I haven't used - I borrowed them from one of my kids to try to get my poem together - to mark bits in different colours, but didn't do it). I'll just tell you about one picture which is hanging above my desk. It's a watercolour which Sonja Britz made for me for the cover of Floating Islands. Stuck up next to it with prestik is a copy of "The Host" with "William Carlos Williams" in Robert Berold's handwriting.

O my god! This question I didn’t expect. My great-great-great-grandfather, Rutger Metelerkamp, came to this country in 1803. His father and grandfather had been advocates in Holland, though the family originates in Bad-Bentheim in Germany. He settled at Suurbron (close to the Gamtoos Valley in the Eastern Cape), having set up various small businesses: a ship’s chandler’s business in Cape Town, a granary in Mossel Bay, and a meatpacking business in Port Elizabeth. At the age of forty he gave that all up to join the South African Missionary Society as its secretary. Rutger’s grandson came to this area, Knysna, as a forester. My father, two of my brothers and their families, and I with my family, are the direct descendants of this lot who have returned to live here, as did my father’s father.

Short; plump; bossy (to my younger brother when he could walk); in love with my younger brother (where he slept under the plane tree in his pram); shy (to everyone else - other than my middle brother, who was shyer than I was); afraid of snakes and my dreams of snakes; safe in a deeply repetitive routine; in love with the fire in the winter, the mist on the cut kikuyu grass in the summer; afraid of death; afraid of war.

I grew up on a farm in the Lidgetton Valley of KwaZulu-Natal. When my two older brothers went off in the milk truck to Miss Stacey's school (a little farm school which I also went to for a year - everyone in the same hut - the smell of concentration, chalk on the desk boards, smoke and dust and Clare Thompson clanging the bell: "tea time, tea time'), that was my best time for me with my father. I'd carry the dish for inoculating cattle - the vet used to say "thanks my boy" - I loved the cows, silage, molasses, sweet dung. We rode horses, but only, at that stage, under my mother's supervision - even so I was dragged at the age of seven. My father also used to ride an ancient motorbike – isitututu. Once my eldest brother fell off the back - the hill down to the river was very stony - I used to stand between my father and the handlebars.

At home – or everywhere, actually – my mother was the queen of everything: food, love, books, picnics, social correctness, knowledge, fury, transgression. She was the one we loved completely. I started school in 1962, so there was no TV at all in this country throughout my school years. Our home was full of books, but we also used to make weekly trips to the library. My mother was the librarian of the Hebron Haven Library in the Dargle. She read to us before we started to read; we'd watch the clock. I don't know what was more exciting, the story or the occasions when the hands slipped past seven. We also used to have treats of buying books at Shuter & Shooter's in Maritzburg; Enid Blyton and comics were banned in our house. We had a weekly journal, Finding Out. Look and Learn was a little below par, a little too popular for my mother's taste. We always felt my eldest brother was the really literate one. He was jumping on the newspaper in frustration at politicians by the time he was seven.

There was no reason to think about god – god was never mentioned; death, yes, but god no. God became a complication only later when I went to boarding school. I can't think about my childhood without my mother's pain, the pain of my brother's separation and going off to boarding school. That and the shadow of the ancestors, like the shadow of the war; the foreboding, even then, in the early sixties, of something like war.

For a year and a term, while my parents were moving to their own farm outside Richmond, I lived with the Schreiners in Maritzburg instead of going to boarding school. I was at Epworth first as a day girl (catching buses across Maritzburg on my way home), and later as a weekly boarder, then as a full-time boarder, because the board of governors were not prepared to entertain my mother's eloquent argument in favour of continued weekly boarding. By the time I left school I was ill. I'd done fine, up the hierarchy step by step to head girl, until all that collective consciousness became too hard to carry. Anyway, I got ill, and didn't do very well in matric. I made up for it in English and Drama at university because I loved them.

Always there was a split sense of belonging and not belonging: to life, because somehow the shadow of death was always about (there are many explanations for this - but I used to think everyone felt death pressing close, always - it still surprises me sometimes to realise that they don't), but also in the social realm – there's always been a sense of being lent a temporary place here: not only because of my settler roots, nor only because my father was the manager, not the owner, of the farm we first grew up on, but because I was white, and a girl, and didn't speak isiZulu well. There was always a sense that the country belonged to other people, that the real social issues were being decided by other people. Perhaps this was exacerbated by my father's giving sheltered employment to someone who was really a political activist, and by my mother's support of the Liberal Party and vehement opposition to her father's (by then defunct) Communist allegiances.

Perhaps temporary is not the right word – my sense of temporariness hasn't only to do with time, so it's not transient or ephemeral. It has to do with space, incarnation. It's to do with a sense of feeling one's being almost tangential. Is this what is meant by "internal exile"? Yet that would seem to imply somewhere to be exiled from, and that's not the feeling I'm trying to describe. Maybe that's what makes it possible now for me to live in such isolation. It's also the impetus to ask the existential questions in my poems: to want the hidden, the solid, the truth, to reveal itself.

It makes me think of lines from Neruda's poem, "The Weary One":"The weary one, orphan/ of the masses, the self,/ the crushed one, the one made of concrete,/ the one without a country in crowded restaurants,/ he who wanted to go far away, always farther away,/ didn't know what to do there, whether he wanted/ or didn't want to leave or remain on the island,/ the hesitant one, the hybrid, entangled in himself,/ had no place here" …

Although one would think that there was an obvious answer to this question, there isn't for me. I wrote a poem when I was nine or so, about rhythm: about riding, and the pulsating hiss of the milking machines. I remember that as a poem fragment of sensual experience but it was also, as I say, about rhythm (and so about poems too). And then I wrote in high school. (I even got things into English Alive, though Robin Malan left me out of his recent anthology! Never mind.) The poem I remember was about an opposition between "thinking" and "fantasising", the end of the Vietnam War, Germaine Greer, and lying on your back in the grass looking at the clouds ... So that poem established a tension between responsible thought and action (theory! philosophy! politics!) and imagination. There wasn't very much room for the imagination, or the internal voice, in South Africa, and there still isn't.

I didn't really write poems with any dedication or belief until I had already given up as an actress. I wrote quite a lot then, in my early twenties, and have unpublished short stories from that time, but the first real poem I wrote was in 1984. It's the one that opens my first collection: "Jeremy Cronin (from inside) calls". There you can see the tension immediately articulated. By then I had moved house and city I don't know how many times, was writing a thesis on Ruth Miller, was aiming for an academic job (I did in fact teach for a bit), got married, and had two children. I got my first manuscript together when my second child, my son, was about 18 months old. It was only in 1993, when I began to write Floating Islands, that I began openly to acknowledge how important poetry was to me.

The thing about Floating Islands is that it's also about Dorothy Wordsworth. Ruth and Dorothy both wrote poems called "The Floating Island", emblems for their lives in some ways. Ruth Miller came to hate her poem, and Dorothy turned her back on being a poet at all. In some ways, that was her most achieved poem. It's very moving to me: the poems are, their lives are. I'm thinking about your conducting these conversations with poets - you're interested in their lives - there's something about the "creative life" of a poet that you want to get at. There was something of this impetus for me with both these women, although the one died about 150 years ago and the other somewhat less than 50 years ago.

Ruth Miller was the one woman poet writing in English who left a considerable body of work. Her second volume, Selected Poems, has some very beautiful, fully achieved, moving poems, the best in South African English poetry of that time. When I began my thesis, I was reading feminist and materialist theory till it came out of my ears, and although my first supervisor thought I was blind to the poems themselves, I don't think I was, I was in huge conflict with them; I was fighting a vision of overwhelming sadness. I was looking for work which would speak to me of life and presence and possibility, and I read Miller as losing her own battle against nihilism, which I still think she did. I was looking for a literary mother and what I found was the kind of vision which was not far from what my biological mother could have articulated.

My thesis was that Miller was unable to resolve her ambiguity in relation to the power of her own work. You could say that this was my problem, not Miller's. I wasn't blaming Miller for her lack of "positive" vision (because I did find sociological explanations for it), but I was fighting it. Perhaps I didn’t understand the extent to which she did hold the contradictions, even if she could never resolve them. Her poems held them - I'm thinking of her later poems - even though she simultaneously didn’t believe in this holding. Maybe it was only I who was unable to hold the despair together with the achieved poem, but since then, because I've used poems (or they've been my vehicle) to begin to understand something of the relationship between "the material" and "the invisible", I’m not so resistant to her. I can look at Sylvia Plath differently, too.

I think Miller's contradiction was lack of faith in her own craft, in her own ability to "hold", her disbelief in her own work, whereas in a way it was the opposite with Plath. My reading is that Plath believed in Poetry as almost a Monument, a Colossus (she was the expert at holding - think of "Edge"). It was her inability to put up with less than 'perfection' that also made life insupportable to her. I used to be terrified of her: and I'm not any more. To hold and survive is the challenge - but, to return to other mothers ... there are poets who've managed this! I think part of this has to do with trusting and loving the forms that you find or make or find yourself given. You find forms that are elastic enough, flexible enough, to contain the systole and diastole; then you need to trust them; that they will keep pumping for you (even though you might have arrhythmia, and high-cholesterol). You need to trust that you will find "new life, life again, body love" until you die.

Tony Voss, who ended up supervising my thesis on Miller, first introduced me to Bishop. He'd been in her poetry seminar at Harvard, I think. I think it was he who told me she used to have an asthma attack before every seminar, like Marie Louise Von Franz writes that she went into a depression before every lecture - it's that dip of anxiety before creativity on a regular basis. But maybe I got this about Elizabeth Bishop from her letters. Tony also gave me One Art, her collected letters, when they were published.

Why these women? I don't really know. Who else? The seminar fitted in with a gap in a series on Twentieth Century Poetry which Robert Berold ran at Rhodes. The answer is very long and complex: to do with being a woman and having looked around at other women poets. Miller was the only one in this country; Gwen Harwood and Judith Wright from Australia were also interesting. There were British women - Stevie Smith - but having got over the social/settler/colonial issue it was these women from America whose poems spoke directly to me about my own metaphysical needs or search. I don't know why I should have been looking for mothers in poetry, role voices; I suppose I just took a very long time to come of age as a poet. Now I don't need "women" or "colonial women" or "black men" or "African".

Thinking about influences - one is constantly influenced, so I don't know where to begin. I find I'm in constant "conversation" with poems, hearing what they say and how they say it. I'm constantly internalising poems for my life. In the nineties, while Robert was editing New Coin, my real contact with South African poets was fairly intense. He brought a lot of us together, physically, in Grahamstown, and also in New Coin. Actually, there was a reading at Wits which he organised. I first met and read with Angifi Dladla, Vonani Bila and Ike Muila. Mxolisi Nyezwa and Lesego Rampolokeng I'd met before, listened to their work before. Karen Press too, though she and Kelwyn Sole didn't come to that Wits reading. These are all people who have influenced my work directly, but that phase of feeling this as an actual context has passed.

There are different reasons or energies in different periods, so it's that question I ask in my "Points on poems": Does there have to be a "thing" the poem is about, or does the "thing" arise from the process of writing - from language itself? Well, both. The writing itself sometimes generates "heightened awareness", and sometimes the words announce themselves, uncalled for. Like just when you're making the supper - which is inconvenient because then you forget them. Well, too bad. It wasn't a poem then. It didn't become one. Maybe, if it's pressing enough, the rhythm or the line will repeat itself. Or, on the contrary, you rush for a piece of paper and write the beginning of a poem (or it's in fact the middle), when something in you is saying "persevere, persevere" the next day. Or you decide, what crap! Who wrote that? I really can't answer, except to say that in the times when it seems as though there is absolutely nothing going on, there usually is, but you don't know what it is, because it's out of sight, out of mind. And sometimes it has to be – you don't want always to go digging around there with your pen. I don't believe in free writing exercises or journals any more - although, how I can say this when I'm sitting here with piles of foolscap full of scribbles? I think that each poem is really a new way.

I learnt that there are an enormous number of so-called poems being written, and almost no support for these could-be, would-be poets. I learnt that the poem on paper, the literate person's poem, has very little existence in this country - I'm talking about poems written in English. I learnt that to edit a journal is a huge amount of tedious reading, that I'm not a "facilitator", I'm not good at that part of the process; that I was bound to offend someone, simply because I was relying on my own judgements, which didn't necessarily accord with other people's. I learnt that the institutions which are supposed to be supporting you always have other priorities, always think they're doing you such a favour; it's a charity mentality when it comes to poetry. A person can get very sick of it, but anger is also exhausting and finally you need that energy for your own poems.

Yes it is, and it has been transformative - but then I think one is constantly growing and changing. I think the whole process of life is constant change. When has it not been transformative? I can't think. It's cyclical, change, isn't it? And you never arrive at a place of completion or fullness or awareness or enlightenment or peace - though there are glimpses here or there - and mostly you think: O shit, I'm not here again, am I?

Am I more confident? In some respects, not in others. In some respects I was brazenly confident when I was young. I'm more confident that my children aren't going to die of an asthma attack than I was 19 years ago. I'm more confident that they'll find their ways into and in the world. I'm more trusting that life will support them. But not only am I not confident, I’m thoroughly untrusting (not of them but of this particular point, place, in history): I know that they would be extremely foolish if they were to take the kinds of risks that I used to when I was their age.

I've become more confident that I am a poet; sometimes I'm less certain of whether that means I'm anything at all. I know that I am a poet, I know that it's beyond me now to change this: it's the limitation of middle middle age or late middle age. So, yes, that’s a kind of acceptance. But what it means accepting is feeling unconfident, unsure, embarked always on the unknown (sorry, that's a big fat cliché and it's true). I could tell you the story of my latest book, carrying the fire.

The book took some time for me to take in: poems are always about process, especially for the poet, which means, if they work, also for the reader. You know, that idea about aesthetics taken from a materialist philosophy: artistic praxis – the artist transforming herself as she transforms her material; and sometimes, like a dream, it resonates with you for some time before you feel you’ve understood it. I wrote carrying the fire, which is about encounter with the animus (to use a psychological metaphor); or, more strictly speaking, it’s about encounter with metaphor: it is an encounter with metaphor (“body found body where spirit is. Is”). It’s in four parts – sonata form – or classical tragedy. Agone (contest); pathos (defeat); threnos (lament); theophany (transformation). The parts arose as I went along: at first I thought it was only two, then three, and only later it became clear the fourth prose section was part of it.

First, an encounter – given, uncalled for – with another writer, who turned into (only because I wrote it like this) a metaphor for essential male energy, for the speaker, the internal writer. This sounds much more clumsy than I hope it is in the poem; the point is that "energy" signifies a hotline to something somewhere, we don’t even know where, and it’s not a linear journey. These are intense love lyrics, basically.

Second, after loss, facing the fact that the literal connection was of necessity finished, coming back to actuality. There’s also a space shift, a shift in location, which meant recognising that this was only a symbolic connection, but with what? With a man, yes; but by section three the man morphed into an essence, because he was really only a messenger, and the message was about love and poetry, that they are what last forever - whatever this means - because they show us the reality of the currents of our connections to everything else, the ways the "soul speaks", that the world, because it exists, is a metaphor.

That could only happen in the poem, by the third section, with the help of a resurrected first love, and recognising that this had nothing to do with present reality apart from as a symbol, with the help of a reader who read everything, understood and helped me to understand what was happening: a journey from literalness to something else – greater consciousness? Because in the fourth section I wrote that consciously: this is a connection of the imagination: to make art is to make a contact with what lies just beyond our understanding, to materialise, to give concrete shape to invisible currents. So, the whole thing is also a story which uses these mythic figures, like Eve and Mary and all sorts of other confusing figures, as dreams do.

Well, there was a lot of opposition from all sorts of people, and to cut a long story short, the books exist, at my expense, but are undistributed, in my house. This in itself is part of the continued saga. What does it tell me? That my friends were right? That I should never have written it, let alone published it? That the critics were right? This book has no relevance to anyone; it’s basically an indulgence. Well, perhaps. But there’s also another way of looking at it. This humiliation is crucial to my understanding of what’s going on in the book: it's only writing for myself; that also means it's writing for "god", as Denise Levertov puts it in her poem "Conversation in Moscow". The first poem in the book:

This goes back to your question about middle age. I’ve finally understood what it means that collective consciousness, ideology, is very unlikely to like what I say. There’ll be people, if they read as far as this, who think what I’m writing to you now is really inflated – well, I can’t help that. This is a little poem I wrote earlier this year, and which is part of a cycle I’m working on (so you see - I’m probably not as cautious as I think I am):

In the fourth section of carrying the fire, the narrative, you write: "They liked the previous paintings: death: mother dying - I painted her in diminishment, in increasing pathos, in pain. Stiller and stiller. They were hard those paintings. Hard. People prefer grief to joy - they're jealous of joy. Pain they pity./ Put on Beethoven's appassionata and by the last movement, the one I wept to all that year, now I'm dancing, I'm flying." It seems to me that this transformation has been crucial to your artistic development - a breakthrough – that confronting the opposition, flying in the face of others' advices, is exactly what you had to do "To keep the spirit dancing/ in the blood".

It wasn’t, still isn’t, so much a role as a way of being, a constantly changing way of being! I very much wanted children – the maternal urge was enormous, and I can’t conceive of my life without them. So, I didn’t embrace the "role" at all, but I embraced them! It was very difficult – just having won some sense of oneself as an independent person, you’re plunged back into knowing absolutely nothing – nothing - and from day one, from the antenatal classes, everyone is telling you what to do and what not to. That part of motherhood - and the stakes are so high - it’s a matter of life and death for a lot of the time. Juggling your own intuitions and feelings about how to do things against all the conflicting voices is very difficult; apart from all the issues of work or a visible "role" in the world. Then you have to deal with schools all over again. So, you’re confronting ideology, collective consciousness, all the time. But as for loving and being with these amazing people, my children … it’s not just that I embraced that with enthusiasm, it’s that life couldn’t have given me anything better.

Sharon Olds talks about "the spectrum of loyalty and betrayal", and the fiftieth point in your "Points on poems" is: "(The point is, nice girls always lie –/ to protect the innocent of course –/ there is a point beyond which/ they do not think;/ think what their good/ friends/ might think.)" How does your family accommodate the intensely personal nature of some of your poems? Do you share your work with the people you write about?

The simple answer to this question is that they love me, and they know I love them. They know that at least part of me is a poet, and they know that for me that means using the matter of my life to explore the unknowns, which often means going beyond what other people see immediately, or believe, to try to make concrete what is difficult to perceive. If you're working with metaphor you're also always working with your everyday confusions and clarities: what is going on in my life, that’s the stuff of my poems. You can’t do this by being nice or protecting people. “Protection” is often just a word for fear. They know this, just as they know that our dreams are full of figures from our lives, because this is the only way that the voices which are beyond consciousness can speak to us. My family knows that it would be a waste of my time to be engaged in anything other than what I feel are urgent truths. If it sounds glib to say that they love me, you also know that love is hard won and enduring … so, that’s another novel! But I think the thing is we believe in our love. I’m very lucky. To quote carrying the fire: “I said to It : why do I deserve this/ It said : because you asked for It”.

Poetry works with, is completely at home with, an attitude of paradox. A real poem is not a statement or a position or a dogma or a fact or even a confession. That’s its attractiveness – that’s how it comes at the truth. Related to this is more of an answer to your question about the "personal": because a poem is something made, a work, art, the figures are never simple, never directly correspondent to actuality, just as the construct holds paradoxical meanings simultaneously. I’m thinking of an obvious example in the context: Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy, daddy, you bastard I’m through": it’s such an oversimplification and reduction of the poem to read it as a rage at Otto Plath.

Yes, I do share poems; whether people always read them or not I don’t know. But the best book launch I’ve ever had was of Requiem, where I read in the Knysna Library - you know the book’s about my mother’s suicide, so that’s not exactly a "nice" topic - and my family, my mother’s old friends, and some friends from my children’s school were all there. It felt fine. You know, what do you do about the fact that some things in life are not pretty? Every artist has to face that.

I think the book is trying to understand what suicide means. Requiem was trying to hold together the paradoxes of incomprehension and unassailable stark fact: a mother kills herself; how can this possibly be true? Well, this is life, horror happens - how? How do we let it? How does it come to this? How do we go on, all the while knowing that what is most loved, most life-affirming, has shot itself to death? ("the freight/ of nothing to lose/ every day".) I think the questions it asks are everyone's questions, even if the emblem, the starting point, is my mother's suicide. It's about unknowing - knowing and then not knowing. It's also about not even knowing what I don't know. Of course, the Requiem is for my whole life, for my whole life until then, and for now; writing the requiem was an act of liberating my life from "that yoke of necessity". (The central poem of Stone No More is “Joan”, which is about my grandmother and her suicide.)

I'm not a religious person - or I don't espouse any religion - but the ritual of a requiem mass (and although I went to St. Saviour's Cathedral in Maritzburg every Sunday for five years as a teenager, and became familiar with the highchurch Anglican litany), I've only really learnt about it through listening to musical versions. This form (and again, I didn't know I was writing in this form, consciously, until it appeared) makes a communal link, somehow, although the book is fairly unambiguous about its dismissal of doctrine or dogma (or at least, I am). As far as I know a suicide may not have Catholic burial? Isn't it considered an irredeemable sin? I also think the book comes to some acceptance by the last "Sanctus". And part of this is saying my mother's life was holy. Blessed, depending on how you translate "sanctus". By extension it's saying that Life is … life with its terrible shadow of death. The dominant tone is grief, but surely grief is the flip side of joy? I don't think a poem, or a sequence, can ever be "only about" something, if it works.

It is at once an impossible plea for the mother's physical return, and an acceptance that what is needed is belief in new life. That's why it's called "Everlasting Light". It's about the "symbolic". It's both a poem of personal anguish because the body cannot be resurrected, and a poem about knowing that the body is so linked to the "spirit", generation carried in generation, that that "knowing" becomes also "unknowing".

Yes it does, but the themes are all there. It's like a musical interlude, or a "let's get out of this cathedral for a minute and just get back to life", although in some ways it's the most formal poem in the sequence. It's a version of terza rima - appropriate to its setting. And in a way it brings all the preoccupations of the other poems together - it's a celebration, or something of an exploration, of family love, art, eros, christ, belief.

Each book is slightly different from the others and I wrote each one differently. At first I thought Floating Islands was a novel, or a novella; it has clear setting, characters, even a little plot, though not really much of that. I thought it might be a "literary" novel in some ways because one of the characters is trying to write about Ruth Miller and Dorothy Wordsworth, so the issue of writing centres around her (and she marries a poet, who is Moslem, though we never actually hear anything he's written because in some ways he's just her shadow). The issue of art centres around her sister who lives in Bristol and who has two tiny children and is a potter. Then there is a mother who's basically dealing with the death of a friend and her daughters' absence. Margaret Daymond from UKZN was extremely kind to read this saga in manuscript form and to recommend highly that UKZN Press should publish it, but they didn't, so now it's one of my many books which basically has no life. But it was important for me, in so far as my poems are anything! What was also important for me was failing as a novelist - it simply wouldn't get written like that - I kept wanting to turn, and was in fact turning, each section (belonging to one voice/character) into a poem. And then not knowing whether it could be considered a poem, because it was also only part of a longer narrative. I was experimenting a lot with form. There are all sorts of (or almost) fixed forms in the book: villanelle, sestina, sonnet. I used syllabic verse most of the time. There's a series of haiku to form the closing poem, so the whole narrative has many different formal aspects. It also had elements of a critical essay. So the book did say something to me about my wanting to make poems. But it is one long poem - it's a little like a sustained piece of music or dance; it could almost be a verse drama (I've thought of staging it, or reading it over the radio).

With carrying the fire I knew I was writing a series pretty early on, just not how it would go. The poems in this series don't even have titles. There's less separation between the poems than in the other two, and the musical model was quite obvious to me by the time I had three movements. What I liked about this book was the way it spun out of control: my lines in the last poem, my images, the whole way of writing got looser and longer, and then, before I knew it, there was a whole short story which became the fourth movement.

What interests me is the challenge of sustaining emotional involvement. I'm not really sure; but I do know that it's how I tend to work. I think I'm doing it (not quite) again. I think I'm writing a cycle, but I don't think it'll be book-length. It'll form a part of a book, probably. In fact, if I keep chucking away at the rate I have been, it might not be more than half a dozen poems that belong together. This time I'm clearer than before what the cycle's theme is, so I've got more sense of the vessel, but not much about what the hell I'm cooking in there.

My first collection, Towing the Line, wasn't a book on its own - it's one of three winners of the Sanlam prize, in a volume published by Carrefour, edited by Douglas Reid Skinner. Douglas decided which poems he wanted to include and which not. So the real manuscript was the one the judging committee looked at. It certainly wasn't as carefully ordered as it could have been, and the book doesn't have a shape in the way that the latter ones do.

Let me just talk about Into the day breaking, because this isn't a series and yet it is certainly a carefully constructed book. The book itself has a coherence which may not be narrative - but, begin at the first poem, read through to the last, or begin at the last and read backwards, and (as well as the other two approaches) dip into the book, read this or that poem. The whole book reveals itself as a kind of "body" - it has a sculptural reality - because the poems resonate off one another, relate to one another; and part of how they do this is their place in the book. Robert Berold edited the book; he had a good deal of influence over that structure. For example, I wanted to begin the book with "A New Language", because I felt that it would burst the book open from the start - wham! a new language! He wanted something gentler, something which gave the reader more sense of the social "setting" for most of these poems, so the book opens with "Night fire". Then there was "black ox" - I always wanted to call this poem "black bull", but Robert argued that the actual animal in the poem is an ox - so how could the title have "bull" in it? My intuition was that this was a poem about male energy - not about castrated male energy - anyway, he got his way, which shows he was probably right! I should have stuck to my balls! In this book there was a dialogue with an editor, as there was to a lesser extent with Peter and Gertrud Strauss for Stone No More, but not for the others.