Anton Krueger
Salimah Valiani interviews Anton Krueger about his poetry collection, Everybody is a Bridge: poems, prose-poems, notes & fragments (Botsotso Publishing).
Salimah Valiani: Everybody is a Bridge spans a number of years. There are accounts of
people you know well, for instance in the poems ‘Uncle Noodle’, ‘Unwinder’, and ‘Eulogy for Willem Huyzers,’ and yet, these poems are more
than mere description. What broader messages might be part of the emotions you’re evoking?
Anton Krueger: I’m not sure if I’ve ever deliberately set out to send a message… well, maybe inadvertently there’s a wish to send out notes about the more obvious virtues of acceptance, tolerance, respect, and such… But yes, the first section is called ‘Close to Home’ and consists of poems resonating around perceptions of family members and friends. So, there’s a sense of intimacy about them, close to the bone, and yes, there are quite a few emotions caught up there: of affection and care, as well as frustration and—at times—irritation.
In ‘The Telegraph Inspector’, I read into the history of an individual a particular historical moment, along with some of its social dynamics.
Absolutely, that one’s based on my great-great-great grandfather... (hmm, how many ‘great’s’ is he… not sure, now… ). I came across a painting, a portrait of him in the 1800s, as a respectable and formidable looking Telegraph Inspector in Germany. It grew from there. The poem plays with the seriousness of his portrait and profession, and yet also comments on how utterly obsolete what was once a profound new technology has become today. At the time, he was important, elite, on the forefront of information technology, and now that system is archaic, utterly useless.
The poem ends with a mournful and secret message sent out in morse code. This has been one of my favourite things to perform, especially with Hluma Xako (with the show we did with African Melodic Remedies) playing a kind of mournful, under water sound on the keys as that morse code is sadly tapped out from centuries ago, reaching across time, into our own era where those signals are no longer comprehensible…
There are several sections of the collection which experiment with different forms and styles. It starts off with more formally recognisable poems in blank verse, and then there’s a prose poetry section called 'smallcaps', and toward the end of the book, in the final two sections titled 'Notes' and 'Fragments', the poems get ever leaner. Can you say something about form, and how this feeds the sectioning of this collection? How did you go about creating and ordering the different sections?
Well, it’s a collection from over a decade, since Everyday Anomalies in 2011. It wasn’t specifically written around a theme, but gathers together poems published over this period of time, plus a few that haven’t been published before. Possibly the main thing the poems share is an exploration of interconnection, of how everybody ‘bridges’ one to everybody else. Interconnection and impermanence—two of the classic Buddhist themes, I suppose.
The subtitle reads: 'poems, prose-poems, notes & fragments' and you’ve noticed how the form moves gradually towards dissolution. The Zen enso calligraphies which illustrate the headings of each section get progressively looser, messier, less defined as we move towards the increasingly fragmentary. There’s also a change in font, from the first half, which has a more ‘serious’ serifated font, and which uses capital letters and punctuation appropriately. In the second half, the font changes to sans-serif and we start to lose the caps and get a whole lot more ellipses… … …. in some way this demonstrates the difficulty of trying to tie things down. Despite one’s best intentions in terms of coherence of form and style, it begins to slip away from our grasp and as we move towards presence, to the living moment, we begin to lose form—what is solid becomes less tangible… As you mentioned, some of those in the section called ‘fragments’ are little more than notes… The extreme end of this trajectory would lead towards improvisation.
In the last few years, I have actually been experimenting with improvised speech in collaboration with improvising musicians—Tony Bental, Francois le Roux, Paul Hanmer—and I guess the purest form of presence becomes improvisation. I’m reminded of what Chögyam Trungpa said to Allan Ginsberg. He asked him why he didn’t just go up to a microphone and start talking. He said, “Why do you have to write things down, don’t you trust your own mind?” I’m trying to move towards a place of eventually trusting my own mind…
‘Naropa Poem’, ‘The Wooden Veranda’, and a few others, are both worldly and transcendent. Can you tell us about Naropa? How do you practice Buddhism in your life and in your writing?
Naropa is a university founded by Trungpa in Boulder, Colorado. He had an affinity with the beat writers and started the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in the 70s, where people like Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Anne Waldman taught. (He also did radical things with performance, including workshops with Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Joe Chaikin and such.) Anyhow, it’s quite an innovative space, one of the first to foreground contemplative education and trying to bring the spiritual and reflective onto the curriculum. I was there for a Summer Writing Retreat a few years back and the poem was written for their final night celebration and subsequently published in Bombay Gin, a literary journal started by Trungpa. (So I’ve heard, I never actually did get my copy in the mail.)
I’ve been interested in Buddhism since I was in high school when I spent a holiday pouring over a massive Encyclopaedia of World Religions, trying to figure out how all of these different systems of belief could co-exist. I got more into Zen in my twenties and went on a few Chan retreats, but I only formally converted in my thirties, in 2006, to the Kagyu branch of Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism.
So I’m a card carrying Buddhist, (I literally have a card which exempts me from participating in any army) and am fully committed to this path, even though I often get things wrong and am by no means an exemplary example. Still, I do have a sense of faith in the basic tenets and beliefs and I have a meditation practise and regularly go on retreats and have been travelling to India each year for teachings by the 12th Tai Situpa. I also help to run a small centre in Makhanda where we host visiting teachers and offer mindfulness courses. For me it just makes sense, it’s a practical system of working with one’s mind, heart, being and the benefits for myself and the people around me were immediately evident.
In terms of how my practise effects my writing, well, I’d never want to proselytise, but any life habit and practise are bound to seep through. The title and cover of this collection kind of gives the game away, and yet it’s certainly not a religiously themed collection. It’s personal and idiosyncratic and I’m not trying to persuade anybody of anything. These are simply snapshots, windows of perception, moments of reflection, ‘notes’, really. (I’ve long since wanted to bring back the genre of the ‘note’.) Unfortunately, many of these became too carefully worked to fully retain their original improvisatory quality, but I guess one sometimes has to trade off spirit for form.
In ‘My Sister Sonia’, and ‘Heimwee’, you elaborate, among other things, on guilt. A friend of mine once said guilt is the most useless emotion; but as a white privileged man in South Africa, you seem to be doing something creative with it.
I agree with your friend, there’s very little positive that comes out of guilt. It tends to enervate and paralyse the experiencer, rather than encourage them into any kind of helpful action. Maybe people reckon that feeling horrible and guilty exonerates them, as though it’s a kind of punishment which redeems them, I don’t know…
Still, sometimes when one has slipped up it could be appropriate to feel bad, ashamed even… regretful, sure… yes, we should regret things that cause harm to others and ourselves and do our best to change or correct destructive patterns, but just feeling guilty sinks one into a pit of despair and depression and as you say, it’s not a very creative space…
The history of white people in South Africa, of course, is laden with atrocities, littered with the crimes of my forefathers… not only that, but my own father was born in Germany during the Second World War, so I also have the baggage of belonging to a people who perpetrated, objectively, surely the greatest evil on the world; causing more death, destruction and suffering than any other race I can think of. And it wasn’t even that long ago…
And I’m part of that, I mean those are my genes and my lineage, so yes, at some point one does need to face where one comes from. It is also a bit different, I guess, to being an English or Afrikaans White South African. What the Germans did to their own people and others was beyond belief, and what the Europeans did for half a millennium to African people is incredible, in terms of the scale of the suffering meted out… I grew up in South Africa during the 70s and 80s and as a child was shielded from the truth and yes, benefited from the suffering of others. What to do… Sorry, I’ve drifted from the question now…
One section in your book, 'After Watching', is inspired by films you’ve seen. Can you talk about the collector in Istanbul, and Seraphine Louis, and how the films about these people touched you? Why did these films lead to poems? More broadly, what other art forms are you inspired by as a poet?
I love films so much. I watch one a day if I can, and have a lot more notes on films to get to one day. I liked these two real biographical characters (Pelin Esmer’s Uncle in The Collector and Seraphine Louis in Seraphine) and I was drawn to their peculiarities, their outsider status. I’m fascinated by those on the outside of convention, beyond the normal psychological, political, cultural systems which condition and imprison most minds.
There’s a wonderful museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, one of my favourite places, a collection of Brut Art—pieces made by outsiders who never
studied and never created for money or fame or any other reason than their own compulsion to create. They were often driven by madness, or
ecstasy, creating only for themselves, or God, or for who knows what mysterious reasons. Like our own Helen Martins. I find them
inspiring. I wish I had their spirit, their freedom.
Anton Krueger was the first English poetry editor for Litnet and from 1997- 2001 was part of the Bekgeveg team performing monthly at venues all over Pretoria and Johannesburg, as well as at the Klein Karoo Kunstefees and Aardklop festivals. His first anthology, Everyday Anomalies, appeared in 2011 (Aerial) and in the same year his poem “Nine Notes on Lisbon” was a runner up for the Dalro poetry prize. Recently, Anton has been experimenting with improvised spoken word collaborations with a variety of musicians and DJs, including Tony Bentel and Francois le Roux (the HA! man). Anton has also published plays, memoir, short stories, criticism and arts journalism. He lives in Makhanda where he heads the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University. Selections from Everybody is a Bridge have been performed in collaboration with improvisations on piano by Paul Hanmer. Everybody is a Bridge is available from ABC.
Salimah Valiani is a poet, activist and researcher. 29 Leads to Love, her fifth poetry collection, won the 2022 International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry. Love Pandemic, Salimah’s first audiobook (also in print) was released by Daraja Press in 2022. Salimah's book IGoli EGoli is available from ABC.
Botsotso Publishing is made up of a group of poets, writers, and artists who wish to create art and to generate the means for its public communication and appreciation. They speak particularly of art that is of and about the varied cultures and life experiences of people in South Africa – as expressed in all languages. To find out more, take a look at their publisher page.
Photograph copyright: Sophie Kandaoroff.