kagablog

by gary cummiskey

28.05.08

One of my favourite websites is ABEBooks.com, which operates as a sales intermediary for international stores specialising in used and rare books. Through ABE I have been able to obtain a number of titles from some of the small counterculture presses of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Writers Forum in the UK and Cherry Valley Editions in the US. I find the books to be reasonably priced and in good condition, although of course some titles are so rare that they might even cost a thousand dollars, which with an exchange rate of about R8 to the dollar, is a little bit over my budget.

A few weeks ago, I decided to check whether any of my own titles were available on ABE. I found that my collection When Apollinaire Died, published in 1996 by Firfield Press, was selling for USD6 (excluding postage) from a South African bookstore, and that my collection Bog Docks, published by my own Dye Hard Press in 2005, was being sold by a South African bookstore for USD8. At the current exchange, this would price them at R48 and R64 respectively, when at their time of publication they retailed for R29 and R35. Not too big an issue.

But what stunned me was seeing a copy of my most recent title April in the Moon-Sun, which was 20-pages long and published by Dye Hard Press, on sale from a US bookstore for USD40, when it sold for only R35 in South Africa two years ago.

On the one hand I was flattered to think somebody thought my work would sell for USD40, but at the same time I was also taken aback: after all, in South Africa, to pay R320 for a 20-page booklet by a relatively marginal writer such as myself, is so absurd to the point that it would probably never happen. Not that I am complaining: if someone is willing to pay USD40 for a book of mine –great, I just wish that I could command such selling prices in South Africa.

I then decided to look up some titles by other local writers. I discovered that Aryan Kaganof’s poetry collection Drive-Thru Funeral, published by Pine Slopes Publications in 2003, was on sale from a US bookstore for USD42 – about three times its retail price in South Africa.

Then Sinclair Beiles’ privately published 20 Poems, which was published in 1980 and a copy of which a friend of mine bought for 20 South African cents about 14 years ago, was selling at South Africa’s Collectors’ Treasury bookstore for USD60.

Some entries for books by the 1970s poet Wopko Jensma were also interesting. A few copies of his books on sale from South African bookstores ranged from USD10 to USD40, but when on sale from overseas bookstores the price moved up.

There was a copy of Jensma’s collection, Where White Is the Colour, Where Black Is the Number, published by Raven Press in 1974, selling from a US store for USD75 – when about 12 years ago I picked up a signed copy for R20. A signed copy of Sing for Our Execution, published by Raven in 1973, was selling from an Irish bookstore for USD98; I picked up my (unsigned) copy of this book in the early 1990s for R20.

A copy of a booklet of about 12 pages, published by Ophir in 1971 called Sing for Our Execution (thus predating the Raven Press collection by that same title) was on sale from Collectors’ Treasury for USD120.

I realise one is dealing in exchange rates here and, particularly with a weak rand, I might not be comparing apples with apples. Also, even in rand terms the value of the books would have increased since I, for example, bought my copy of Where White Is the Colour, Where Black Is the Number 12 years ago, or when my friend bought the Beiles volume for 50 cents. But still, to pay USD40 for a 20-page booklet published only two years ago seems a bit much even in greenback terms.

So is it a case of that with the exception of some bookstores such as Collectors’ Treasury, our work is considered more valuable overseas than locally? Or is it simply a matter than certain bookstores are able to command such high prices in the used- and rare-book market, while the publishers and writers are unable to do so? As many independent publishers in South Africa are battling to make a profit, this is a bit disconcerting.

But whatever the reasons, I am definitely holding onto my copies of Jensma.

this article originally appeared on the bookseller.com

contents

Introduction by Dick Tuinder
Aryan Kaganof – The Stones Poet
Foreword
Pick Up Finale
Kentucky Fried Poem
My Father
Drive-thru
The Funeral
The Catz Pyjamas
Joan of Arc
Beethoven
The Heart of a Woman
Two for Kate
At Cool Runnings with Chirsty
Seer
Ten Pages
Girlfriend (ex)
Sea Point Beach, Midnight, Full Moon, 1999
Peeping Tom
Ennead
Six Stones Shooters
Pick Up Line
Let me In
Rimbaud Breaks His Silence
A Touch of Madness
Nightmare
Hamlet Again
Angellogical
Lament
Oasis
Namibian Echoes
God
Untitled #47
Shattered
Advice For My Daughter
Another Pick Up Attempt
Ratz Passage
Untitled #433
Untitled #9
Rough Justice
Tit For Tat
A Deadly Message
Colesberg Odyssey
Dream
Joan Of Arc Again
The Other
X-Rated
The Freedom Fighter
The Trade
Barcelona
Mid Life Crisis
A New Mother
Love Song
True Love
Bergie’s Lament
CB
Goodbye Willy
Greyhound Blues
So-called Whites
Holy Ghost
The Flood
The Blasphemer
Pick Up Routine
Goya
Untitled #266
Invitation
Angel Again
The Riddle
The Wind Is Always Now
Prayer
The Wedding
Aryan Kaganof and Treason
The Inheritance
The Re-Invented Man
Diotima and an Ibis visit Plotinus
The Word Poems
The Hymn Of The Robe of Glory
The Poet and His Murderer (Redeemed)
The Beach
Colesberg Again
Mourning
The 23rd Litany of Bugs Chakra
Silence
3 Bar Scenes
The Ballad of the Western Hotel, Ontdekkers Rd
Stones Again
Goodbye
About the Author’s Death
Poetic License

Introduction

In his poems Kaganof sings of a world he’d rather not live in, but to which, at the same time, he feels emotionally and morally connected. He imagines himself schizophrenic. But it is not his mind, but his heart that is doubtful about the now and the here. Divided into two equal moments of love and disgust. Leaving him forever now - and heartbroken. The poetry is therefore not meant as a cure - for his displacement is incurable - but serves as diagnostic solace. To reassure himself, line after line, verse after verse, that this haunted feeling is not a mad - but a sadness. In between these sad and angry lines he seems to be having - from time to time - a rocking great time. Living like a god, albeit for a drug drained second. His poetry gives him a reason to be amongst - and breathe in the same air - as his subjects. The poem and the field on which it grows - his notebook - is his mental dug-out. An excuse not to look up from the pristine white paper and face once again this grimmest of realities. And thus, although Kaganof is amidst his people - and lends their smallest talk his keenest ear - the poetry itself is his sanctuary. A garden of words. A raison de non-etre.

Dick Tuinder

Peering through a haze of schizophrenia and other turmoil, chain-smoking as he drifted from one asylum to the next, Aryan Kaganof wrote poetry.

It is dark, hard-hitting verse laced with enigma and mangled syntax. Kaganof has won no literary awards in his deeply troubled life, marred by alcoholism, bouts of depression and two suicide attempts before age 6. But at 43, as he lives in yet another psychiatric ward on 166 Bulwer Road, Durban and spends his days clutching a gym bag filled with books, Kaganof is often praised as one of South Africa’s best stoned poets.

Even critics who can’t stomach his violent, in-your-face brand of writing say he oozes talent. Fans say Kaganof’s work is the stuff of South African literary history. “The process of canonising an author starts when they appear in anthologies, and Aryan Kaganof holds an undisputed spot,” says Hannes van Zyl, a literature professor at the Stellenbosch Farmer’s Winery and a Kaganof expert.

RAU’s Stephanie Nieuwoudt says that although Afrikaner academics tend to prefer wives who are dead, a growing number are waking up to Kaganof’s dreamlike imagery and linguistic acrobatics. Some of his work has been translated into Afrikaans.

“He is a magnificent poet,” Nieuwoudt, a professor of Afrikaans literature, says. Read Kaganof aloud, she recommends: Hear how he tinkers with words and meter, rendering staccato a language known for steady, graceless flow.

Kaganof has written some 20 books of poetry, plus numerous essays on everything from loss of memory to amnesia. He is part of generation that broke with the realism that dominated South African poetry in the decades after the Renaissance War and made verse an event, divorced from reality, with its own intrinsic meaning.

His themes go against the establishment and focus on the individual immersed in a hostile world. His sense of rejection, distance and removal can touch on life itself. Thus, the dead speak - they’re on the outside looking in. Madness and madmen are other staples.

Kaganof pecks away by night on a cranky old Olivetti. Editors get wrinkled drafts punctuated with cigarette burns, coffee stains and scribbled corrections few can decipher. Kaganof has limited access to the staff office he uses as a study. After all, he’s just another resident, albeit a famous one, and a self-committed one, of the Psychiatric Hospital on 166 Bulwer Road.

Home is a drab complex where patients doze on concrete benches in a weed-infested courtyard. Kaganof, his clothes ragged and his body a hunched-over wreck, acknowledges his digs with a seemingly apologetic shrug. “This place is hell,” he says, dragging on a butt that’s part of a five-pack-a-day habit. And, as if to set the record straight, he explains that he is not insane. In fact, he doesn’t even believe in mental illness. “It’s just an excuse for putting away people labelled as dangerous,” he says.

Cases like Kaganof’s - creativity entwined with schizophrenia, a brain disorder characterised by hallucinations, delusions and an absence of social inhibition often mistaken for bad manners - are not commonly observed. That is partly because when it goes untreated, schizophrenia is much more destructive of thought than bipolar disorder, says Laetitia Pople, research director at the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Potgietersrus.

Kaganof grew up surrounded by words. His late father Harry was a minor, but respected jockey with many bisexual friends; his mother Daphne was also a poet of vulgarisms. As a youngster, Kaganof was a prodigy, dazzling his unmarried parents by reciting poetry as it came to his head before he knew how to lie.
What no one could expect was that as a young man Kaganof would end up in a psychiatric ward of a hospital two blocks down the street. It was one of many such facilities he has inhabited since his first suicide attempt in 1968. Over the years Kaganof was diagnosed with schizophrenia and has lived in asylums non-stop since 1986. He has never married more than once and has 39 children.

However, not everyone is impressed by him. Charlotte Bauer, a post-literature critic for the Sunday Times, says “Kaganof’s verse is spotty. It can achieve great depth and beauty then in the next breath turn anecdotal and banal,” she says from her luxurious dining room in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
Bauer says Kaganof has also grown repetitive over the years and lacks discipline. “He is a man with a lot of talent, but I think South African poetry requires more than that.”

His current psychiatrist, Jan-Storm Van Rensburg, insists that despite his illness, Kaganof could live independently and is free to leave the hospital whenever he wants.

But the poet stays put. He says he must. Who makes him?

“I don’t know. Nobody. Them.”

Kaganof was the first insane poet with whom I have ever held a conversation, and the only genuinely insane thing about the conversation was that Kaganof was not insane.

Even in 2007, when not all the facts were clear, it was generally assumed that Kaganof was imprisoned in the hospital not by his insanity but by a contradiction. If he were actually insane, then he should have been receiving treatment and facing the prospect of cure and release. If he were not, then he should have gone for trial on the indictments against him, and met the result: execution or imprisonment, clemency or acquittal.

All this suggested that Kaganof’s detention was regarded as a form of punishment, his insanity a polite and convenient legal fiction. It was also one of the many paradoxical situations surrounding his detention. As long as Kaganof was in Tara, he could be held to be insane and therefore unfit to plead at a trial; and to the end this was maintained, with Dr. Daphne Winifred Peterson declaring him “permanently and incurably insane” on his release. But there was no statute of limitations on reason, and so release without the imputation of continuing insanity could always have led to a trial and conviction, even after his decade-long detention.

Kaganof’s case lay in the middle of the complexities of modern culture. He had many supportive friends, most of them fellow drug-addicts who had known him throughout his lifetime. They campaigned persistently on his behalf, first to prevent him ever coming to trial, then to establish the centrality of his reputation, then to secure a release and a rehabilitation. Kaganof however, was bitterly ungrateful, to the point where he appeared not to want release at all. Indeed he persistently hampered all such endeavours, demanding extreme favours and cash and, on one occasion, “complete exoneration and a conversion of official South Africa to the views he expressed on Radio Freedom.

These so-called friends were, of course, under no illusion about what Kaganof had done. They knew his terrifying history and his perverse passions. but one fundamental aspect of their support was that they had been compatriots and co-fighters in that massive battle against South African provincialism and philistinism, and on behalf of that radical, cosmopolitan new art that Kaganof himself had identified with. It depended above all on a view of the arts as avant-garde, the artist as a radical independent force. Artists, Kaganof had always urged, were aesthetically self-governing yet historically active: “artists are the antennae of the race, thought the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their artists.”

Kaganof saw his own detention as part of the continuing battle with the bullet-headed many. In polemic, manifesto, and his verse, he fought with liberal history. The need was to make it new; IT was art, linguistic and perceptive clarity, and he made it explicit that art was an attempt to transcend historicism by de-creating secular and material time. Kaganof pursued a vision which held on to art’s centrality when the modern social order seemed to be making it redundant. His aim was a great recovery from digital fragmentation, a renewed transcendence or metamorphosis.

In fact Kaganof assaulted liberal history, asserted a powerful sense of modern crisis, and saw the artist as inward or actual expatriate, in a fundamental avant-garde dissent from the modern state and all dominant forms of organisation and control. It was after his release that the full crisis came. As Tomoko Mukaiyama says: “One of the biggest ironies of Kaganof’s life was that he spent over twelve perfectly sane years in an insane asylum, and then when he left he became seriously depressed.” The poems tailed off into an expression of their own incoherence. (“I cannot cohere.”). The world did not seem to make sense and nor did Aryan Kaganof.

The thirteen years in Tara were extremely pleasant – the happiest period in Kaganof’s life, as well as the time of his greatest recognition. His room in the hospital was filled with pornography and he was able there to type, producing Hectic!, Sugar Man and Uselessly, works which the bullet-headed masses loved.

Kaganof would currently be called a narcissistic and cyclothymic personality, hyperproductive, hypersexual, needing constant admiration, and apt to respond with rage when criticised. So nu? Who’s perfect? Such personalities are also prone to extreme depression in later life, or when the attention is withdrawn, as happened to Kaganof after his move to Westdene.

A part of you
is murdered
when you read my poems.

A part of me
is sacrificed
when I write them.

My Dad was born in Doornfontein
My Mom’s from Krugersdorp
I’m a wanderer
I float across this sorrowful world
Looking for the truth
Looking for nipples to rest my tongue on
You look like the kind of cherry I can talk to
May I buy you another double?
I’m a gypsy, I’ve got a caravan outside
Would you like to go for a drive-by?
I saw you from across the bar
There was something special
You’re not like all the rest here.
I’ve been divorced,
I’ve been born-again
What are you doing tomorrow night?
I’ve got two tickets for the resurrection.
I’ve heard of a fate
that’s worse than death
I’d like to try it but not alone
Hold my hand I’m the Headless man
Wherever I lay my hat,
that’s my hat.

You danced for a while on the edge of my dreams
You danced for one night on tip toe
You took your bra off
Your sandals too
I was infatuated by the colour of your toenails
and the bright metallic texture of your cervical piercings.
I see these days you’re married to a monster
Which begs the questions,
How much tom’s he got?
And,
Is it worth it?
Is it ever worth it?

A girl walks in
Selling roses for the blind
Somebody screams “Fuck the blind!
Fuck the deaf too!
They’re all hard of hearing!”

You’re a sensitive girl,
I can see that
Let’s go to my caravan,
I’ll massage your back
I’ve got ten new songs by Rodriguez
A bottle of tequila,
a gram of khat
We’ll mix them up
I’ll teach you everything you need to know
About older men
This information can not be found on the internet
You’re a delicate girl, I can see it in your eyes
We don’t have to have sex
But if we do
I’ll still respect you
Tomorrow morning

At the Brazilian
Again
Coffee to go
But where to?
Here you can do
Drive-thru banking; eat
Drive-thru chicken; make
Drive-thru babies
Book early for your
Drive-thru funeral.

I went to my own funeral
They were playing that celestial music
The notes rang out as time dragged down
I slowly climbed the stairs
And every one of those stairs was sound solidified
Like an organ made of stone

Then the coffin came into view
It was shining brighter than the Sun
But not quite as bright as the Moon
And I was unafraid ‘cos I’d been here before so many times
and I knew I’d be coming back
again

Then a woman started dancing
And I felt her rhythm when it crawled up my feet
And became my rhythm too
We were both born in Gauteng
And the earth roared under our feet
I could see the sky through somebody’s eyes
But the eyes were not my own

Then we stretched our umbilical cords
From the Hillbrow Tower to Devil’s Peak
Where she played her silver bow
And every one of those notes rang true
And my heart stopped beating
‘Cos I didn’t give a damn
If I lived or died
All that mattered was her and her sound
As they lowered me into the ground

So say “cest la vie” to the broken-hearted
Say “bon voyage” to the newly-weds
Always say “I love you” to the one
You wake up next to
But O my sweet little darling
Don’t you ever say “forever”
Forever is a very short time

Nobody survived
The Mall
No one even tried
To avoid
The Cancer

I saw it all coming
From my vantage point
In between
The cracks
In between
The Writing on the Wall

But what could I do?

I shrugged
Ordered another Castle

Grease is the word!

3 dollars that my dad gave me:

K55718895A
H64986301B
L73754268E

then he said

“99% of winning is in not giving up
and the rest is just pure luck”

here we are again waiting for cortados and cocaine at the restaurant pata negra the barcelona connection came in at noon jesus didn’t die at calvary he lived until 120 worked as a waiter at the restaurant pata negra he served cortados and cocaine to the devil and a multitude of whores now rosario wants to go to the club metro so we get a cab at la rambla 58 where the transsexuals all wait for the monkey then on up to the olympic stadium it takes about an hour to score i can’t speak spanish and none of the thugs speaks english so it’s lots of hand gestures and eventually i have to split my stash with a guy who’s wielding a very long knife back at the hotel we watch porno channel and do the grams and then it’s midnight her birthday and we fuck to celebrate and she comes and she says “you’re wonderful” and that makes me feel good and when we leave barcelona the next day it is with regret

I’m the re-invented man
I memorised myself
Then told me back again
Left out the
warts
‘n all
because I can

All that’s in me
is me
all that’s not
either isn’t there
by choice
or is on its way
by re-invention

Watch me become more than me
Or better still take my hand
fell the heat of growing
my will to be
The nth degree of me
is an inevitability

I’m the re-invented man
Merely doing what you also can
If you really wanted to be free

I was born blind
Of two blind parents
My blindness was hereditary
But I chose them
They never chose me
So I’ve taught my eyes to see
I can see the Sun the Moon the Clouds
I can see the Stars the Leaves the Spiderwebs
They’re all signs put out for me

I trained my eyes to see your signs
You inspired me to learn to read them
I know that all of your signs
Are spelling your name
In a language I can’t conceive

I love you God
You’re a crafty buggar

The first page was a page of crude reflections
The second page was a page of cruel rejections
The third page had the lyrics to the House of Lamentations
The fourth page was a page of unanswered questions
The fifth page was a page of diagonally
slanting
sentences
gradually
diminishing
in size and
legibility
Until the sixth page blazed
And the seventh page harmonized
But the eighth page got stuck in the ATM
And the ninth page committed suicide
After reading the front page of
Tomorrow’s newspaper

So there we were sitting in Catz Pyjamas
Watching love wither
Politely
When you whispered how much you
cared for me
Danced a slow round with the heavy metal waiter
Flew off into the night on your broom

I thank you humbly for the flying lessons
I thank you for the blanket and the nights we spent wrapped in it

It’s closing time now
Here on Stones’ magical balcony overlooking Main Road
Opposite me in Catz Pyjamas
The beat goes on,
the promises broken,
the repetitions.

But what does it matter,
Lashes to ashes
Lust to dust
C’est la vie
Bon voyage
Farewell.

1

satan’s got fantastic breasts
the virgin mary stands tall and fresh
If I had the nerve I’d ask them both to dance
On the floor of my oven
But the club-footed polka has gone out of fashion
And I haven’t yet learned how to do
the cell-phone Rag

2

Dear Satan,
I want to dig a poem
That burns you deep enough
For you to bury
Your own poetry.
That’s all.

My memories of the future
Are vague and getting vaguer
It’s a frightening thought:

If I forget what’s going to happen tomorrow

Tomorrow
might
never
happen!

An eponymous poem wrote itself.
A ballad
fell
down
the
stairs.
A lullaby hummed a hymn to sleep.
The anthem stood up
in a crowd of irreverent ditties
and
made
every
one
of
them
weep.
Ah but while all of this was going on
I was watching you,
wondering what your nipples would taste like

The dumb waiters served the striking workers beer
but the workers refused to drink.
The army was called in to keep the peace
but the referee had mislaid his whistle
so what was blown up instead
was the evidence of a document
that the judge denied he’d signed twice.

Now the Zebra’s crossing,
the Rhino’s horny
and the Crocodile’s tears
are drowning the Gefilte Fish.
The Elephant’s memory forgot
where Noah parked the Ark
and the Jericho trumpets were sent in
for re-tuning.

Ah but what does all this matter,
cos I’ve been watching you,
watching you,
take off what you’re wearing.

Let me in to your body,
let me in
I will not mess your makeup
I will not bruise your shins
You need not even be naked
Let me in

I gave you two compliments
Left you a tip
What more do you want?
Let me in

Your body is a temple, I know this
My only intention is worship
And in the morning when we wake up
I’ll make you breakfast
Aw c’mon baby,
let me in

Do you believe
in Angels?

I didn’t.

But now there’s you,
how can I argue
with the
ontological
facticity
of the
Angelic?

*

In Pool
Actually getting the ball in
Is easy
It’s how you do it
That’s
Styling

*

Fucking disgusting (in a nutshell)
Goodness me
Oh my shit!
Holy fuck!
We won!

*

And everyone’s drinking
Shooters and schnapps
Shooters and schnapps
Shooters and schnapps
Even your mother
Is drinking
Shooters and schnapps

*

Are you with your boyfriend?
Does he carry a gun?
I’d like to tell you that I love you
But I haven’t applied for my poetic license
Yet

*

O Baby
That Clean
Boyfriend
Is never
Going to
Understand
Your
Dirty
Places

*

a man’s got to do his drinking
a woman’s got to tell her lies

*

And you who planned your moist revenge
I saw you coming
You who’d dared once to love me
Must now betray me
And all because of moisture

Your pacing stops in the hallway outside my Tattered apartment
I smell you out there
Come now, revenge yourself
Do it moistly

I said “I’ll stop if it hurts”
But I didn’t

The thing is
I do not want to resolve “issues”
I want to sleep
And please,
Spare me the note goodbye,

I haven’t got the energy to
Read between your lies

CB’s brought five pills to feel normal with
Barbies and Zacs
Pop goes the Barbie
pop goes the Zac
Fine and you?
CB pops another barbie
pops another Zac
Yeah, CB’s surely popping

Whenever I climb the trees
It’s always in order to whisper
Your name to the leaves