When asked about what poetry does, the poet Adrienne Rich said, in an interview with The Paris Review:
I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call ‘ours’, in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice false innocence, not pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference.
Nothing ‘obliges’ us to behave as honourable human being except each others’ possible examples of honesty and generosity and courage and lucidity, suggesting a great social compact.
Looking and seeing
In a poem called ‘A Hunger So Honed’ by Tracey K. Smith, the speaker recalls a night when ‘he…woke me for a deer on the road’.
It struck me as a good exercise to try and remember people who have shown me things.
Not abstract things – like Mrs Morris introducing me to shame that wasn’t mine or Mr Cilliers introducing me to the rage I have towards bullies like him and then being punished for it by being sent to a psychologist who said I had ‘issues with authority’.
No. People who showed me real things, are what I have in mind.
Like the night De Wet stopped the car to show us the owl that perched on a certain pole every night. Like Sam showing me the planets and stars and naming them, and Michael who showed me, way back, that planets don’t twinkle like stars do.
Like James showing me how to turn plumbago flowers into earrings for my babies, or how to squeeze the sap from a stalk of bulbine to put on bites. Caren showing me, when we were little, how to – starting with her crown – undress a hibiscus flower princess and help her ‘make a poo’. Making a princess poo was a very cool power.
Like Patrick showing me that spot in the mountains at Jonkershoek I returned to often with the children so they could play in the river.
Like Nick showing me how the Southern Cross would unstick itself from the horizon and waft up into the sky above your head if you just waited long enough. And that this would make you ‘feel the earth turning’.
Like my mother on the bus looking at the people and saying things like ‘she looks tired’, and ‘that man only rides the bus on Thursdays’. Like her showing me the harmless jaws on snapdragons and the tiny faces on pansies.
Yesterday, little Pai, found a feather. I said, ‘Let’s bury it and see whether a bird will grow.’
Afterwards, I thought that was cruel since I know a bird won’t grow.
I’m going to see if I can find a hibiscus flower princess and show Pai how to make her poo.
‘Look’ is another word for ‘love’.
Look!
Fathima sent me a link to this extraordinary speech by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges. It is a remarkable feat in which he captures all the irony and doublethink of the precarious historical moment. As Fathima said: ‘I cried and laughed and felt an enormous depressurisation.’
We watched Runs in the Family, a South African ‘naan-binary’ (you have to watch it to get the joke) road movie. It filled up every little cell of feel-good and ag-sweet-man after a busy week.
Sam and I finally, finally got around to watching Tár. It was a movie of surfaces to admire – Cate Blanchett’s performance, the bookshelf in the Berlin flat the protagonist shares with her life partner – but ultimately I was bored. It was too long. Setting up the character’s brilliance and arrogance took up way too much screen time. There were many scenes in which I couldn’t hear the dialogue and what I could hear was stripped of meaning by its obscurity and/or ‘mumbled-ness’.
A poem
Here is a different poem by Tracey K. Smith to the one that made me think of people who make you see things.
It’s from Eternity – Selected Poems.
Lots of love,
K.
When I was about 14 and my little brother 4 he woke me up one night while we were on holiday at the coast to show me the path the moonlight was making on the sea. It was a beautiful sight, but I was even more moved and amazed by the fact that a) he was touched by it and b) he wanted to share it with me.
Over the years we have shared so much and the foundation was laid that night.
I was thinking of my childhood nextdoor neighbor who showed me and my sister how to make pets by washing a mango pit and drawing eyes on it. Or my bestie from second grade showing how to take out books from our school library in second break. We'd take a book and read it together in the break and take it back the next day to exchange for another. Or my grandfather pointing out the songs of each bird in the garden. I see my father does similar things with his grandchildren now, "come look at the snail" and so on.