moira
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« Thread Started on Aug 17, 2008, 12:24pm » | |
Introduction to Ingrid de Kok
by Susan Rich
![[image]](http://www.ingriddekok.co.za/images/ingrid_newpic.jpg "[image]")
I was first introduced to Ingrid de Kok via her poems. At the time, I was an MFA student at the University Oregon searching for a subject which I could use to apply for a Fulbright Fellowship. Amazed at my good luck, I tracked down via inter-library loan, a copy of Familiar Ground, published in South Africa. The book arrived stamped with the name of a community college in Michigan. It had yellow glue peaking from its spine, its pages felt tissue paper thin. That hobo of a book changed my life and lead me to Cape Town, South Africa.
It is a testament to Ingrid de Kok’s work that the poems spoke to me across countries and continents. Poems such as “Small Passing” and “To Drink Its Water”. I arrived in Cape Town at the same time that Snailpress released Transfer and I had the privilege of reviewing it for The Cape Times and later, for Poets & Writers.
Ingrid de Kok is a poet that as Marianne Moore said of Elizabeth Bishop, “she is spectacular in being unspectacular.” Indeed, Bishop is certainly one of de Kok’s influences. However, as with Bishop, the poems are hardly modest or polite. Her work deals with the struggles of Apartheid South Africa as well as the complexities of South Africa today. There are poems of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but there also poems of the natural beauty of the African veld.
During my eighteen months in South Africa I came to know both the woman and her poems. In view of full disclosure, I must mention that during the last twelve years Ingrid has become a dear and loyal friend. She is that rare poet one loves just as much in-person as they have as a poet. It is an honor to bring her work to the Wom-po Conference.
* * * * I*
Ingrid de Kok was born in 1951 and grew up in Stilfontein, a gold mining town in what was then the Western Transvaal. When she was 12 years old, her parents moved to Johannesburg. In 1977 she emigrated to Canada where she lived until returning to South Africa in 1984. She has one child, a son. Her partner is Tony Morphet. She has published four volumes of poetry in South Africa: Familiar Ground, Transfer, Terrestrial Things, and Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems. Her latest collection, Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems has also been published in the United States by Seven Stories Press, 2006. Her work has also been translated into several languages including Italian, Japanese, French, Dutch, Swedish, German, and Turkish.
Here are a few of my favorite de Kok poems
Mending
In and out, behind, across.
The formal gesture binds the cloth.
The stitchery's a surgeon's rhyme,
a Chinese stamp, a pantomime
of print. Then spoor. Then trail of red.
Scabs rise, stigmata from the thread.
A cotton chronicle congealed.
A histogram of welts and weals.
The woman plies her ancient art.
Her needle sutures as it darts,
scoring, scripting, scarring, stitching
the invisible mending of the heart.
from Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems, Seven Stories Press, 2006
Kalahari Campsite
In the Kalahari night we wonder at stars ---
above us far, so many, all indelible ---
we think we’re underneath them, they’re in space and time
beyond us, we’re small and fleshy and they are admantine
but then immediately its raining stars, its shooting starts
the whole world is stars and nothing else
desert dunes, red sand, wild cats on killing raids
brown-backed hyena at the fire’s burnt remains
an owl’s alarm call, the pattern of ants across stone
they’re all starts and we too are stars
we glitter, we rotate, we fall away
we are nothing, there is nothing, but stars
from Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems, Seven Stories Press, 2006
Ingrid de Kok
* * *
I’ve included below a review of Ingrid de Kok’s work I wrote for the Eugene Weekly (Eugene, OR) on the occasion of her visit to Oregon in the Fall of 1996.
JUXTAPOSITIONS: WHERE SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY AND POLITICS MEET
A nation in transition is no easy place to live, let alone write about. Yet, this is exactly the territory South African poet Ingrid de Kok explores in her current work. Tales of exile are juxtaposed against the debris of domesticity allowing even American readers an understanding of post-apartheid South Africa that goes beyond politics and headlines.
What readers have responded to in de Kok's two collections to date, Familiar Ground and Transfer is her searing sense of compassion, her ability to weave a personal world across and behind a politically panoramic one. De Kok creates a formal lyric poetry that speaks directly to the heart. But the heart may be a misleading metaphor for de Kok's project. "I'm compelled by elegy" she notes. "I'm interested in the formal representations of the furies, of grief, violence, and anger and how they are played out in the delicacies of the work." The title poem from her new collection "Transfer," chosen by Adrienne Rich for Best American Poetry 1996 illustrates the bittersweet crossroads of daily life and politics.
It is this ability to render the complexity of grief into sensually alluring strategies that gives the poems their power. De Kok reveals the vulnerable underside of the fledgling, democratic, state. Her poems expose the stark reality of a Truth Commission that props up the nation at the expense of the individual. As she writes in "At the Commission:" The questions however intended / all lead away from him / alone there, running for his life. De Kok offers us no moral high ground, it is each reader's task to decide the detail called truth for herself.
Sparse, lean, tightly constructed lines transfigure a litany of personal loss into exceptional works of art. Sexual encounters, bird watching, and the politics of South Africa keep easy company in these honest renditions. What makes de Kok's work compelling is that she binds the personal to the collective life. In "Small Passing," a poem widely anthologized, the white narrator mourns the death of her stillborn child and is comforted only when black mothers "arm" her with one of their own babies. In "Mending," a woman does her needlework as she attempts to heal her own heart simultaneously healing a nation.
The process of remembering, of bringing fragmented histories to the surface of the present is integral to much of lyric poetry. The unique situation for de Kok is that South Africa as a whole is undergoing a similar public reckoning. Through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings spearheaded by Desmond Tutu, testimonies of torture, killings, and betrayal are being made public for the first time. It is the uncovering of these national wounds and fissures that compel de Kok's work forward. South Africans are fortunate to have her as one of their most prominent chroniclers, she is up to the task.
--- SUSAN RICH
More about this poet and her books here:
http://www.ingriddekok.co.za/the_poet.html
http://www.elliottbaybook.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=1583227180
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moira
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Karma: 3 | | Ingrid de Kok
« Reply #1 on Oct 22, 2008, 11:15pm » | |
Here is my review of Transfer by Ingrid de Kok
Published in The Cape Times, December 5, 1997
![[image]](http://www.ingriddekok.co.za/images/books/transfer.jpg "[image]")
Transfer
Ingrid de Kok
Published by Snailpress
Read these poems to yourself late at night, in the early morning before anyone else is awake, as you wait for a friend on the train. Read these words aloud and allow each to linger on your tongue: histogram, grace, grenade. Read them and register what the best poetry does without pretense or apology: it gives us back our lives. Ingrid de Kok has accomplished the close to impossible task of producing a second volume of work as finely tuned and uncompromising as her first critically acclaimed collection, Familiar Ground. Her literary concerns remain constant: memory, landscape, politics, and the inevitability of grief.
What readers have recognized and responded to in de Kok’s work is her deeply developed sense of compassion, her ability to interweave an intensely personal world “behind and across” the politically panoramic one, thereby creating a formal lyric poetry that speaks directly to the heart.
But the heart may be too easy a metaphor for accessing de Kok’s work. A poet of intense questioning, de Kok slits open country and self not to find solutions but rather to sift through layers of history, memory, mourning, and desire. The book is in two parts; the first highlights poems of the public life including finely wrought lyrics “Ground Wave”, “The Talking Cure” and “Inner Note”. But the separation is hardly as neat and tidy as one might imagine, private and political histories spill over from one section of the book into the other, colliding in unique configurations.
What compels this reader to return to de Kok’s poetry again and again is her ability to render the complexity of grief into a sensually alluring and uncomfortably familiar consciousness. Reading Transfer however, is not an exercise in depression nor is it an airing of emotional underwear; rather, what de Kok has so deftly expressed through pared down language, careful rhythms, and a conjuring of the South African psyche is to render the unsatiable sadness of our lives in a way as to speak to each reader personally: “Look here, come closer; the remembering is not pleasant, but only in the reassemblage of memory is the context created for us to move on.”
There is, however, no guarantee that the pain will abate. Ingrid de Kok is not a poet of easy solutions nor of feel good formulas. The process of repair as it refers to the torn cloth of home or country is exquisitely registered in the poem “Mending”. The poem closes with this stanza:
The woman plies her ancient art.
Her needle sutures as it darts,
scoring , scripting, scarring, stitching
the invisible mending of the heart.
“Heart”. Only in the final word does the poem quietly reveal its intentions. Until then, it is the technically masterful pattern of sound and the startling imagery of the lines that captivate our imaginations.
Similar in tone and texture to the canonical poem “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop; “Mending” also functions as a kind of repair manual for how to fix, or in some sense come to terms with the ruptures in our lives. Both poems turn on the last line and function as much in terms of rhythmic pattern as meaning. The ancient art of healing requires an artistic solution: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission alone will not suffice.
In “At the Commission,” a poem ruthlessly cut down to the bone, the central section rebutes us with this question:
Would it matter to know
the detail called truth
since, fast forwarded
the ending is the same
over and over?
The simplicity of the language lulls us into complicity. De Kok does not offer an ethical high ground, rather, it is up to the reader to decide on “the detail called truth” for herself. A moral imperative runs through all the poems but never announces itself, never presumes.
Poet and critic Marianne Moore said this of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and the same is true of de Kok’s Transfer. “She is spectacular in being unspectacular. Why has no one ever thought of this one asks oneself; why not be accurate and modest”?
So read and re-read these poems. They will not disappoint. Recite them to a lover in the quiet spaces of a Sunday afternoon. Ingrid de Kok has found a way to say the not-yet-said, to depict the experiences we have hitherto declared indescribable. With the arrival of Transfer it is clear that Cape Town’s premier poet still writes with as much integrity and mastery as ever.
- Susan Rich
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