Post by moira on Aug 17, 2008 12:24:29 GMT 2
Introduction to Ingrid de Kok
by Susan Rich
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
from Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems, Seven Stories Press, 2006
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:
www.ingriddekok.co.za/the_poet.html
www.elliottbaybook.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=1583227180
by Susan Rich
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:
www.ingriddekok.co.za/the_poet.html
www.elliottbaybook.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=1583227180