kagablog

aryan kaganof asks the questions in an email exchange with genna gardini

1. when did the poems first start coming through you?

Well, I first started writing poems when I was about six or seven years old. My childhood best friend recently gave me this little bound copy of poems I wrote when I was that age. They start off as blatant Roald Dahl plagerism about a creature called the Shnozzcumber (I think I even titled the whole collection something like “The Shnozzcumber Attacks!”) who is basically just the BFG with a cucumber for a nose. But then they morph into protest poems against my family (my mother’s shopping and my brother, in general, were the common themes here), fantasies about a nurse who was out to kill me and then steal my jewelry, and odes to a friend who I described as “god and true”. I don’t really think I’ve veered off from that formula, since, to tell you the truth.

2. anne sexton and louise gluck seem to be major influences?

Louise Gluck is a newer influence (a friend introduced me to her about three years ago). Anne is one of the big ones, if not the biggest. I think, like every other female writer my age, I discovered her, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf around the same time as the hormones hit, so they are always going to be associated with that precious, awkward period. I call them my Influence Trifecta. It was the first time since L.M Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott that stories felt like they were mine, again. But obviously, as I got older, other poets began to worm their way in. Atwood, Ruth Miller, Eliot, Antjie Krog, William Blake, Elizabeth Barret Browing, and Stevie Smith are all important to me.

But the writer who has had, and still has, the biggest impact in my life and work is Anne Micheals. I just felt so irreversably wrung out after reading Fugitive Pieces and her poem ‘Miner’s Pond’. They completely changed the way that I felt about writing, and my understanding of what I could write about. She managed to communicate the things I felt about love and duty in terms of place and people in a way that I never thought words could. And made me want to give it a go, too.

3. does being south african have a major impact on your poetry?

Well, ja, of course it does. I don’t really know how not to write about where I come from, to tell you the truth. Both sides of my family moved to Zimbabwe from Italy in the mid 1950s, to work on the railroads and tobacco farms. My parents met there (they were childhood sweethearts), married, and then moved to South Africa where they adopted me. So that whole legacy binds me here, in ways that I probably can’t explain properly but am always going to try to, anyway.

Also, I wouldn’t be writing about popping into the Jet to buy some broeks or bandying the word ‘fanny’ about so much if I wasn’t South African, and I’m sure the work would suffer for it.

4. who reads poems in the digital age? does it matter?

I’m not really sure who reads poetry at all, other than my poor friends who get spammed with mine. To be honest, I think the digital age is making poetry more accesible than rendering it reduncant. Work is being published all over the show, on blogs and forums and eZines- you don’t have to buy a literary magazine or an anthology anymore to read poetry. Of course this means that you don’t have to accepted by the editors of those magazines and anthologies to be published, anymore, either. So to an extent, it’s eliminating a certain exclusivity or standard when it comes to writing, but that’s really not the end of the world, in my opinion. Of course, the question of who is reading it is important, and that has a lot to do with how and where you package the poetry. I think somone like Lebo Mashile, who literally goes on the road with her work, and then broadcasts that journey on TV, is an amazing example of how the work can resonate on a wider level here.

5. are you going to move into other kinds of writing? the novel? plays?

Hopefully. I wrote plays when I was at Rhodes, and I’m busy working on a new script now. I have an idea for a novel that I want to work on, and I have a bit of time on my hands for the next few months, so I’d like to get cracking on that soon.

6. is there such a thing as a “poetry scene” in cape town right now?

The only scene I’m involved in at the moment is the dvd-and-then-bed-by-10 scene. But in terms getting your work out there, there are plenty of Cape Town-based options: Hugh Hodge’s Off-the-Wall is fantastic. There’s Verses at Zula Bar run by the lovely Winslow Schalkwyk. The TAAC have bi-annual showings for young performers, and usually include a helpful discussion period afterwards. And then there’s always the Internet- kagablog, book.co.za, and africanwriting.com are all great resources. There really are plenty of oppurtunities to showcase your stuff and interact with like-minded folk, if you make an effort to find them.

7. what do you think of “spoken word poetry”? and what is your relation to it?

I respond to any kind of poetry that guts me, and plenty of spoken word does. Earlier this year I got the chance to work some performance poets at the AFRISA and Centre for the Book’s Africa day workshop. I was floored by how genuinely supportive and encouraging everyone was. They really helped me come to terms with figuring out how to perform the work in a way that was respectful and true to it, and that’s one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learnt.

9. are words electric?

Yes. I wrote about this a bit in my poem ‘Neccesity’. I like the idea that bodies are like circuit boards. I think that many things bolt across them, and words can certainly administer an impressive jolt.

There’s an Eskom joke in there, somewhere, I think.

You say guilt’s consolved a rod from your spine. Well,
it only ever made a fucking fossil of mine,

jammed its spit up my current, rift my petting
for a chord-

It cupped me, fatty as old cotton.
It plots an outline of my pipes.

While I fastened my membranes, quick as a purse. When I fisted
my lap at myself,

like a pocket, and rattled your faces in it, for change,
I wanted to say-

I’ll sting out a cave clean from this breath!
I’ll pop every prospect like it was a testicle!

My pride retains

because I calcify it.
Chalked with speech, I dorsal markers at each knee, so slit,

loss fits.

Knows the heft of tits packed with hessian. The septic flowers time
can stain on skin.

I’ve passed you over gum and root.
I’ve pushed you, puckered, through my gut.

I take what I need from you.

My body splits like a fish.

I slipped these facts from my flesh and jerked their glands
out for sex

in the cinema of synapse.

Loss kept you locked, like a tampon. But, look,
so can my tongue.

I’ll pitch you loose from that collar, you’ll strip the clotting
off my gums.

We’ll wave the wombs we worked for arms, press our parts
against our parts,

have the same constant conversation between this crotch
and that heart

instead of talking what flight or movement could make.
I part my dandruff and say

we were the chaff of God’s thigh! When all I hurtle now’s a trunk.
Is this false and testing body.

It’s Monday 25 May 2009 at A Touch Of Madness in Observatory, Cape Town. Off The Wall is a weekly poetry reading night organised by Hugh Hodges. “Cell phones on silent or off please.” Genna Gardini writes much older than she is but she reads much younger. Then suddenly we are hushed.

Mister, you crinkle off my broeks
like a yellow sucker wrapper,
calling me precious
(or, precocious, I can’t tell which
with the crackle of this cellophane hymen
caught snapping like a lid on your mouth).

Words are electric, not always, but they can be. Genna says “bodies are like circuit boards.” Her voice fills the Observatory cafe with a premonition of great things to come. There’s an almost visible tremor that we’re all sharing, all feel part of, as if the words are coming out of each and every one us, out of a place we’ve always known we harboured but never had access to until Genna Gardini’s became our voice. The applause is thunderous, Genna looks bemused by the fierce reaction she’s evinced. Hugh Hodges steps up to the microphone and advises us all to mark this evening in our diaries, “the night you first heard Genna Gardini read.”

Actually she reminds me of Janis Joplin and I don’t know why. There’s something unspeakably tragic about Genna Gardini, in the way that all wise youngsters are tragic.

Owie? I hazard.
Owie. She confirms.

“The first time I can remember sitting down to write a poem I was in Grade One. So, yes, between seven and eight. My childhood best friend recently gave me a whole whack of poems I wrote at that time. They’re the funniest things - I kept trying to use the word ‘upon’ but wrote it as ‘apone’, and was convinced there was an evil nurse, Nurse Betty, out to kill me.”

And then of course, the inevitable influences. “Anne Sexton is one of the big ones, if not the biggest. I think, like every other female writer my age, I discovered her, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf around the same time as the hormones hit, so they are always going to be associated with that precious, awkward period.”

What does the poet think of art? Does she have any formal relationships with the art world? “I think its fairly easy to spot the artwork (just like the song, and the book, and the movie, and so forth) that I was obsessed with at the time, in any given poem. Joseph Szabo is all over the show in ‘Mister’, and there’s a lot of Loretta Lux and Miranda July in later stuff, like ‘For Laura’. I think I probably identify more with somone like James Jean than with most writers. He does, on a much more accomplished and skilled level, what I would love to in terms of bringing folk and fairytales to modern ideas of innocence and sexuality.”

Perhaps it is the task of the poet to restore to words their electric, cultic quality that is inevitably lost in daily usage. “I don’t really know how not to write about where I come from, to tell you the truth. Both sides of my family moved to Zimbabwe from Italy in the mid 1950s, to work on the railroads and tobacco farms. My parents met there (they were childhood sweethearts), married, and then moved to South Africa where they adopted me. So that whole legacy binds me here. Also, I wouldn’t be writing about popping into the Jet to buy some broeks or bandying the word ‘fanny’ about so much if I wasn’t South African, and I’m sure the work would suffer for it.”

But we’re in the ipod age, does anybody read poetry anymore?

“I think the digital age is making poetry more accesible rather than rendering it redundant. Work is being published on blogs and forums and eZines- you don’t have to buy a literary magazine or an anthology anymore to read poetry. I think somone like Lebo Mashile, who literally goes on the road with her work, and then broadcasts that journey on TV, is an amazing example of how the work can resonate on a wider level here.”

Why artists should listen to poets?

“It’s good for them.”

first published in art south africa vol 8 issue 1 spring 2009

I

Living Without Lucre:

Oh the title is wonderful
it’s the content I’m living with(out),
held fisted like a packet
at the no name brand ATM

and you’re fast my dear and you’re folly
but none o’ that’s nae good without lolly
even my purse has its piles,
only prising clots for the chemist

we were waiting in line you and me with our sugar coats on and only one critical word away from absolution
aye, canny that

clipping at heels
and never at coupons
the taste of hunger isn’t a favourite flavour
Oh and, before I forget, the title is wonderful

II

Protest Poem Against Durban

I became a little too cabbagey with self-pity
I was living in Durban then
my skin in retreat from the noonday sun
my ears a-tuned to Isolation
I peeled the wax off of each afternoon
and avoided the verandah.
There was something larval about the way I preened
at the right angle you could see right through me
Incubated in your mom’s musk, and shoebox,
I was not chrysalis for anything.
The taste of talcum powder on my faeries
and the fingers that had to work slowly through my thicket to free me
The bush-brush, the blanket laid flat, my legs
in the sliding door, milk-weyed, photographed.

But that was before you archly taught me
that my tongue, chained to ice,
was not enough

that the imperfections were precisely
what made us beautiful:
we were the
Gods after all.

III

Yes, you are right.

Since we’re doing themed protest poems so well
Let me tell you a few of the chains that have yoked me and ire.
Sister-sitters, kept in futons and floor-space and in proof,
deposited with each new scratch, new slip. Things you didn’t resent.

Ah but don’t go down that dark road again you rascal you’ll only madden me
It’s been ten years away from the powders and then last night you gladdened me
I scrape off the bacon, move it loose from the mains.
I don’t want to worry about the side plate, anymore.

Not since the cold breath of your stinging goodbye
And what could follow that?
Except learning about evenings, fresh and unpawed, the old legs
tucked into your pyjamas, your siblings on the bed.

Headless hatless erased while you murdered me
Then did it again, slower geared, just to be sure we were on the same page
(so to speak)
But we were a folio fan, creased lengthwise, creased saam.
Even using a ruler, the fullscap looks frayed.

Well then, don’t measure it
Oh and, by the way, since we’re doing protest themed protest poems again
there is no grief that I could keep. There’s only slight that spilt, like seeds.
See, I said us into say.

these three collaborative poems were first published in the 5th anniversay edition of admit 2

Genna Gardini is a young South African poet. She studied Drama and English at Rhodes University and has since been published in various magazines, including New Coin, Carapace and, most recently, African Writing Online. You can visit her blog at www.gennacide.blogspot.com.

Aryan Kaganof has been busy dying for years now. In this way he hopes to be reborn. The poems are a kind of detritus, little markers to remember the many failures on the way. He is 45 years old and has two gorgeous daughters, Goya and Abraxas.

VII

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
- and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.
Is all this close to the wolverine’s howled signals,
that modulated cantana of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all -
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our own freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

We live high. Our love gorges on the alcohol we feed it.
and it grows all fat and friendly
we have surplus if we need it.
We hold on as hard as we can.
Our knuckles are white.
We write letters to each other, invent secrets to confess to.
I learn foreign and exotic terms of endearment by which to address you.
We feed fresh fruit to one another.
We stay up all night.
I am healthy, I am whole, but I have poor impulse control.
and I want to go home.
but I am home.

We are strong, we are faithful,
We are guardians of a rare thing.
We pay close, careful attention to the news the morning air brings.
We show great loyalty to the hard times we’ve been through.
We are filled with riches and wonders,
our love keeps the things it finds.
And we dance like drunken sailors, lost at sea out of our minds.
You find shelter somewhere in me,
I find great comfort in you.
And I keep you safe from harm.
You hold me in your arms, and I want to go home.
but I am home.

Don’t miss

GENNA GARDINI

share words and wisdom.

*************** OPEN MIC ******************

BE THERE
IF YOU DARE
BRING A POEM
TO COMPARE
AND ENSNARE

TOUCH OF MADNESS
12 NUTTALL ROAD, OBSERVATORY
–
http://otwtom.blogspot.com/

–
Ici vit un homme libre. Personne ne le sert.
- Albert Camus
(Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.)

New Contrast
http://www.newcontrast.net/

I became a criminal when I fell in love.
Before that I was a waitress.

I didn’t want to go to Chicago with you.
I wanted to marry you, I wanted
Your wife to suffer.

I wanted her life to be like a play
In which all the parts are sad parts.

Does a good person
Think this way? I deserve

Credit for my courage–

I sat in the dark on your front porch.
Everything was clear to me:
If your wife wouldn’t let you go
That proved she didn’t love you.
If she loved you
Wouldn’t she want you to be happy?
A better person. I was
I think now
If I felt less I would be

A good waitress.
I could carry eight drinks.

I used to tell you my dreams.
Last night I saw a woman sitting in a dark bus–
In the dream, she’s weeping, the bus she’s on
Is moving away. With one hand
She’s waving; the other strokes
An egg carton full of babies.

The dream doesn’t rescue the maiden.

“I’d already learnt this lesson as a father - you love your child, in part, because you see her utterly naked. A baby has no subvert life and by comparison everyone else you know seems cloaked, muffled, full of sad little tricks”

Micheal Cunningham
A Home at the end of the World-

Time’s licked me nut, and right to the bone.

Once, strange hands furred us down
and we were the nodes on furious mice.

Now, I operate from this, the dust-kitchen of my lap,
like a cook on conference call,

stellactating. I am bed iced, and sore.
A splinter, but sopping.

Little girl, climbed right between the nubs,
fretted my belly till it caved, loved me knowing

and unknowing I had grown our blood
sequestered. In rows, like mushrooms.

When you were a child we played clean as kettles
and I prized the printpress of your limbs, and skin,

because my looking read your living out-
Face fleshy little pig’s toe, fanny furled into a truffle.

But now, you’ve woken up foot wrinkled, and steaming

with the old game, caught arm down, wearing bite rungs
like chromosomes, saying

there are more ways to sully a sheet than with sleeping,
hey! as if I had chopped you out of nothing.

You asked the wrong question when you asked about the wolf.

first published on african-writing.com

I have shameless sheared
every thump and scab

as if loss is olfactory,
and comes plugged to the brain,

only playing for scarabs,
or scuttling the chord.

And handling the door!
And riding the train!

While we heed each glitch
against the pad of love’s fist

like we’ve ever heard a rattle
from that magic eight ball.

With others I cropped,
wielding prospects like rakes.

Passed over, fresh hoed, each peach-
half a face, or a foot soldered off.

But when you had gone. I felt, myself,
wedged

in the fish-shop’s pink stucco.
A wan stick of meat. Just, gutted.

You were never the boy at work

fleshing his back for a shoe horn,
his mouth coming cupped.

You were always a whole.
And left my days bombed. The grout

of a construction site.
A crack-bed. A blasting of ground.

Scuff at dirt for long enough
and you will find what can’t be cleared.

Ask and I’ll marry you tomorrow,
let myself be so lustlessly led
to a life of well-furnished sorrow
where you sleep in a separate bed.

Open up baby’s first album-
it’s stained with your uterine rust.
I pressed a placenta in the pages,
and laminated your umbilical crust.
Most people have childhood memories
but all I have is bloodlust.

The first time I can remember sitting down to write a poem I was in Grade One. So, yes, between seven and eight. My childhood best friend recently gave me a whole whack of poems I wrote at that time. They’re the funniest things- I kept trying to use the word ‘upon’ but wrote it as ‘apone’, and was convinced there was an evil nurse, Nurse Betty, out to kill me.

In our flat, with all its fittings,
loving is sistered to the futon.

Watch me take photos of your buzzard,
your girlfriend, all haw-head and coffee,
razoring Robbie.

That clean and squashcourt smell of bandaging,
fingers taking retribution from the spine,
clothes catching at an elbow of something
arid-

You gathered over the top of your cup, beautiful
little albumen pearl, strained through knees.

You tell me you shot a monkey once
(with your pellet gun)
and found it curled up the next day,
little, and bibbed in the sill.

This is what comforts you,
that every year is never your twentieth year,
with all its crawling towards an unsedimented
dinner-table, and so forth.

Instead, picked and sat in mid-morning traffic,
possessive about panic, prone to heart murmurs,
you see, now, what kind of marriage it would‘ve been,
its unsuccessful sex like its unsuccessful meals.
Glazed over.

Then I cooked it, you shift. Sorry?
Well, now we’re moving the fish forks, you,
I don‘t know, you always have to eat your first kill.
The sideplate clucks, shocked for me.

When I said goodbye, you kissed me
quick and on the mouth,
putting yourself between the cutlery
and my talk.

I felt it read my face out, into the serviette-
small and puckered children, corporate functions,
the queen-size we register for,
and at least a hundred more meals,
in restaurants, like this.

Brother, you are a brave black stitch
which I, myself, have long unpicked.

Look, your feet were never meant to be waxworks
no matter how stiff the school socks got.

Exploded, both, with one hockeystick wick,
struck flat, and flint, a parifinitic spill,

a recovery-site, slunk
between the crux of your slops,

until they were like fish,
strapped to anonymous legs,

and a lot more drugging
than anything your semaphore-shrink
ever recommended for my harmonal balance,
I’ll tell you that much.

And then there were years of the plastic ball
worked thin, crusted and cherished, a connection
to the stepping of pain, beloved as a boyfriend
who could never quite work your slippers off.

In the end,
you and I both know, first had,
that one can walk into proof
because flesh, above all, puts back

and there is no function that can’t, eventually,
be restored.

Vein in the heel,
vein in the head.

“I will not let thee go, save thou bless me” Genesis 32:27

You are my most precious
and glass opposite.

In phloem and in marrow,
sister-rib to your chest,
I am yourself always myself and love you best,
and love you best.

You treat me as if I’m made walking bad,
all grief, all urge

but full as I am of shift,
and wrong counsel,
you are just as pocked,
just as incapable of propogation.

I don’t go around gutting your kin for contents,
poor couches-

you rule with your own fishy fist,
your deft and wracking wrist,
slipping requests into the nimbus,
like baking sheets.

We are a sandblast of the other,
kissing as if measles, as if mirrors leaned together.

Who can say that one is the unsever,
the birth’s half, and conqueror,
when we are both so chinked, and living in link,
when to part us is to smash us?

Because your lovers wrote,
helpless: they never quite knew
how to sift at the fogless,
or breach umber straight through-

I let myself out.
Then went and fetched you.

Genna Gardini has a BA in Drama and English from Rhodes and lives in Cape Town. She’s been published in international magazines such as Sentinel Literary Quarterly and Sub-Lit, and her work has also appeared in South African publications Carapace, Itch, Fidelities and the 2008 POWA anthology. You can get all up in her business at www.gennacide.blogspot.com.

Let’s intone a little rhyme about passing.
Necessity renovates the interior,
quick-cut job, gravel still in the letters’ ridge,
so he can feel his way around

the back room- a chest that won’t contract,
because that would mean it was made of muscle
when, really, it is a tight, stone slab of fat.
Epidural, around about,
wobbling solidly under inspection.

Squat on the floor’s tin
with your bog-hair slickened to skin,
feigning a wind thinned under the airline blanket,
whispering “organic” to the boy you love,
instead of amen.

Pucker up, you spackled pore.

Damp as a tuber, bursting with something white-sauced and odorous,
these are the sumstains we tried to deodorize:

the sweat’s slug suggestion of facial hair, the lint off uncertainty,
thin weevils that burrow through your digestive tract.

You only wanted to grow it out of compost steel and manufactured
because you forgot the difference between shit and blood.

The bile-pit is shot up with swab samples now.
Hypothetical sisters you didn’t know how to love,

ignoring the kisses their bilious knees scraped against yours
as you tipped them in, grey limb by chalk limb.

A wing of skin tucked into your sleeve.
Things you chucked away, things you have heard already.