kagablog

By Chris Buchanan

“I’m not a poet”, says Paul Wessels while perusing the review in Wordstock of his book My Ghost in the Bush of Lies.
The said review opens with the sentence: “South Africa’s hardcore poet of the outer edges of despair” which does not impress Paul in the least, but he hasn’t read the entire review so we continue chatting over espresso and cigarettes.
Paul and Robert Berold are the guys behind Deep South Publishers which grew from a distribution company in 1996 into publishers of largely poetry by authors such as Seitlhamo Motsapi, Ari Sitas, Angifi Dladla, Joan Metelerkamp, Khulile Nxumalo, Nadine Botha and Lesego Rampolokeng.
This is the fifth incarnation of Ghost and, through the guidance of a good editor, has become a story that is more expressionistic than narrative-driven and has been re-arranged to create more of a sense of continuity.
“It’s easy to get intoxicated by the sound of your own voice and a good editor can make your life profoundly easier,” Paul says of Robert who edited the book. The sequel is already three-quarters of the way to fruition and should be a reality toward the end of the year.
Paul studied a BA in Grahamstown and left for Cape Town where he has been editing, writing and dabbling in sweetmagazine.co.za, Donga and New Coin — all hotbeds of contemporary South African literature and critical writing.
He believes that most poetry is too flat and too much of a veneer. The poets have the performance capacity, but no content.
“It’s a matter of knowing when to shut up and lay your ego to rest.”
There’s nothing worse for this writer than to spend hard-earned money on a book of poetry only to be disappointed by the content.
“I’ve tried not to be constricted to a particular view or perspective in my book and given the reader
an enormous amount of space to interpret the content.”
Paul will return next year to Grahamstown and pursue a masters in politics which he understands will take him away from writing purely because it’s an intensive course and will leave him little time for anything else.
His political awareness started at varsity with Nusas (National Union of South African Students) and the End Conscription Campaign (ECC) in the eighties. Nusas, he felt, were a bunch of hardcore, objectionable, left, fascists; whereas ECC were a more anarchist contingent and their politics spoke on an everyday level within realms of expression.
This guy is no liberal lefty who needed to satisfy his conscience by belonging to as many organisations as was possible: he is profoundly aware of politics and in fact puts the subject to rest right there.
We continue to read the review of his book by PhD student Anton R Krueger, for whom he was beginning to show some initial contempt. “Fuck, these last three sentences are perfect. This review gets ten out of ten. It’s exactly right!” And Mr Krueger was exonerated for his initial cock-up.
More cigarettes and we talk about the festival and the dance in particular, which Paul feels he’s connected with in its similarity to what he’s been trying to achieve. “You’re left to your own devices in the interpretation of the work so different people can take different things away from the performance without being told in the blurb what you should be feeling.”
So I will end with a quote from Ghost which I think sums up a writer who is obviously comfortable in his genre, in his personal space and in his articulation of himself.
“The vomit of poetry: who returns, recoils. Who recoils, returns to echolalia, the saddest word in the world. Still this ache of release, the only violence is relief’s explosion.”