What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

seemed less and less appropriate to tell Monica what I was thinking about or engaged in. She accepted with mild interest the few snippets of publishing industry gossip I was able to muster, heard my news from home as relayed in my sister’s letters, and then offloaded about her own troubles. In Monica’s version of events, she was always long-suffering, hard done by, conspired against, maligned, underrated, yet ultimately triumphant and vindicated.

      My mother followed Monica’s career in the press. She observed Monica’s increasing bullishness. Eventually she told me that she had “disfellowshipped” Monica from the feminist movement.

      When I had about twenty-six poems, I approached the publishing director at Karoo Books for advice. Harry Botha-Reid was kind enough not to laugh out loud. He pointed out that publishing poetry was the most risky venture imaginable. “Now if you’d brought me a nice solid textbook on business management, prescribed at five technical colleges, we would be talking,” he joked.

      There were two or three tiny presses which put out poetry collections and I might try them, Harry said. He wrote the names for me: Tertium Quid, Cadmus, Finch. “There’s a whole art to naming publishing houses,” observed Harry drily. “But before you approach them, there are some questions I’d like you to consider. Do you ever buy volumes of local poetry? Do you subscribe to any of the little poetry magazines? Do you go to poetry readings?” I shook my head. “Well, I suggest you start,” said Harry. “You know what I’m saying?”

      I knew what he was saying. That I hoped to plant myself in a literary scene that had painstakingly been feeding and tilling a little ground for itself. I put my twenty-six poems away in a drawer and started to haunt the poetry section of Exclusive Books in Hillbrow. I used my “pin money” to buy new poets’ work. I subscribed to Thalia, Night Attack, Sub Divo and even an overseas journal, despite the exchange rate. I attended one public reading at Wits where they passed around a register, after which I happily found myself on the mailing list for poetry launches and the poetry circuit.

      At poetry readings I was often bored, yet even the boredom was fascinating. I would sit quietly in small rooms while other introverts whispered their minute observations of lichen on rocks or droned in slow monotones imagined histories of shipwrecks they hadn’t actually been present at themselves. I was engaged in a hopeless struggle to reach someone else’s meaning. I couldn’t seem to connect with the other poets on a simple, conversational level either. I’d stand in the foyer afterwards eating funny little cocktail sticks of cheddar cheese blocks and olives, sipping a glass of bad wine, hoping someone would talk to me.

      Then one day at a bookshop reading in Berea, a poet from Cape Town was introduced, Red Moffat. His reading was natural. I mean, you didn’t feel he had a special, portentous voice he reserved for poetry. His topics were immediate, funny, poignant. Best of all, his poems were short. I went up to him afterwards to tell him how marvellous I thought his poetry was. His sunburnt face and washed-out eyes made me homesick.

      Red wasn’t staying long in Johannesburg, but he took me to Soweto Stadium to hear Mzwakhe Mbuli. I was completely blown away. The man’s voice was a double bass; his presence on stage – he must be well over six foot five – was utterly commanding. To stand there in a packed stadium and to hear the audience chanting the powerful refrains from memory was to return to the very origin of poetry. “Who is in Lusaka?” he demanded to know. At that stage, who was north of the border, negotiating with the ANC, was practically everyone.

      In poetry journals, in threes and fives I published all the poems in The Secret Life of Things, but I didn’t show them to Monica till Finch Press accepted the collection. I had reworked almost all of them, mostly from a technical point of view. I thought that even if the poems didn’t win praise, at least they wouldn’t offend anyone.

      I was wrong, of course. Monica read the volume from cover to cover and found it deeply offensive. She read every poem as a sly, veiled criticism of her, and of our life together, particularly “Pestle and Mortar” which she claimed was an unabashed exposé of our sexual problems. All news to me. She said it didn’t surprise her that the book contained not even the smallest love poem to her, nor a dedication, because she’d always suspected that I didn’t love her. I was a weakling, a parasite. I just sat around and did nothing. I should wake up and smell the coffee. Get myself a life, “pull finger”. She wasn’t going to subsidise me any longer.

      She was shouting at me, which was not in itself unusual, as she’d frequently lambasted me in the past for my inattentiveness to her long monologues about trade and industry, or for forgetting her dry-cleaning. What was unusual was that on this occasion I answered her back. Once I’d raised my voice, I felt quite exhilarated. So this was how bellicose people felt: the thrill of drowning out your opponent, pumping out abuse. When you’re shouting, you open up a direct vein to all your repressed rancour. It is like being drunk but without losing the power of speech.

      I told her that she was a grubbing materialist, a harpy who had betrayed the ideals of feminism by aping the grotesqueries of the male mafia. That she must be mad to think I’d write a love poem to someone who regularly and unblushingly called for the playing fields to be levelled, that I was happiest and always would be happiest when she was out of town.

      After we’d said all there was to say, we were quite polite towards each other. In a mutually understood ellipsis, I started to pack my things. Monica even brought a cloth to dust off my suitcase which, unlike hers, hadn’t been anywhere recently. The truths we’d just revealed had left us both as embarrassed as a post-one-night-stand couple. The near decade we’d spent together could be as easily erased as a film of dust on a piece of luggage. Suddenly I was awake, looking around our townhouse in utter surprise. Had I really lived here? Had I padded across these thickly carpeted floors to brush my teeth on those cold tiles more than three thousand times?

      I moved into the spare room of a Karoo Books colleague, Martie Oliver. Her house was very messy and full of peculiar little dumb-waiter figurines in colonial dress who seemed always, solicitously, to be offering one a tray to put one’s glass on, as well as some less tangible form of companionship. I found them kind and supportive. Martie seemed genuinely touched by my “Valediction to the Dumb Waiters” poem, with its refrain:

      Goodbye, little men –

      men of kindly acumen.

      Monica didn’t attend the launch of The Secret Life of Things. During Red’s speech, a man stood just outside on the patio talking loudly into a cellphone about his planned camping trip in the Golden Gate National Park, as if he felt it necessary to remind me in this way of how unimportant I was. I wondered for a moment if Monica had sent him, but then came to the unflattering conclusion that Monica simply didn’t care enough about me to be vindictive.

      It’s a mark of my naivety that I was completely unprepared for the bad review I got in one of the Sunday papers. “Although ostensibly a study of the ornaments in his home, in The Secret Life of Things John Carson writes about the only thing he knows well: himself, himself, himself.”

      I would have thought that one copy of the reflexive pronoun would have been enough. The reviewer had been at the launch. Her name was uneuphonious: Tizzy Clack. She described me as “an incongruous figure in cowboy checks, looking furtively towards the door as if at any moment his favourite calf would come leaping in”. She went on: “As the attention to detail in his poems is almost foppish, one could be forgiven for thinking this flannelled Carson before us was an impostor, a charlatan.” In her closing salvo, she said the collection might appeal to “the sort of people who enjoy crossword puzzle clues that lead them triumphantly to obsolete words like ‘brumal’.”

      Lots of people saw the review and they all asked how I felt about it, as if perhaps I might have found it insightful and sartorially useful. It’s true I wear checked shirts. I feel comfortable in them and I don’t consider them worthy of comment.

      The review left me indignant. After I’d read it, I went straight to Martie’s loo and scrubbed it with Jik. Martie said, “If only more writers responded to bad reviews like you do.”

      As might have been predicted, Red Moffat found both the review and my response to it hilarious. He said