David Mann, author of Once Removed, interviews award-winning Scottish-South African poet, Basil du Toit about his latest collection of poetry Studies in Khoisan Verbs.

 David Mann: Studies in Khoisan Verbs is comprised of ‘free sonnets’. The book can be seen as an innovative way of engaging a classic and perhaps even ‘archaic’ poem structure. Why the sonnet?

Basil du Toit: I would dispute the appellation ‘archaic’. Twentieth Century poets relished the challenge of forms which might be described as archaic – the sestina, the villanelle, the pantoum; the sonnet is not one of these – it has retained its currency and flexibility in all eras (Romantic Wordsworth wrote dozens, Victorian Browning made her name on faux-translations from the Portuguese, modern Auden wrote whole sequences of them). Twenty-first Century poets love the form too – Dave Smith has a brilliant bookful of them, Don Paterson wrote forty frightful ones (but thought it worth the effort anyway), etc. And secondly I would dispute the very name ‘sonnet’ itself. Genre snobs would sniff contemptuously at my hijacking of the term for the poems I have produced. But it’s handy to call them sonnets, and so I do, and go along with others using the word.

I chose this particular form, persistently, over a ten-year period, for both good and bad reasons. One of the bad reasons is that I hate to overstay my welcome, in whatever I am doing, so the sonnet is a form of writing in which I can introduce myself, say a few words and take my leave.

Another dubious reason is that I simply love the look of the sonnet – that neat block of words on the page, its compactness, its inviting brevity, its presentation of a nucleus for intense reading and meditation, its promise of being pithy and profound, like a Biblical verse.

A more pertinent reason is that the writing of a sonnet is over before you have time to think about it, thinking about it being a deadly inhibitor of literary composition; at that stage in my career I wanted speed and productivity – I needed to seize an idea, run with it, make it proliferate sub-ideas and out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye images, quickly, before second thoughts could step in and throw the rule book at me.

Over time, my modes of thinking adapted themselves to the form; mere glimmerings of ideas pre-disposed the lines that were to follow – what I wanted to attempt to say was already waiting in the fourteen lines lying ahead of me.

It’s also a form that demands tightness and brevity, or perhaps an economy of prose from the author. Do you still find the form challenging or is it a comfortable mode in which to write?

I can’t tell if this question views “comfortable mode” in a positive or negative light. For me, certainly, it is negative. Sure, it is nice to be comfortable, as if that were a sign of mastery, cruising along at a high artistic altitude. On the other hand, when the material does not resist, when there is no push-back, then perhaps the easiness of things hides an underlying emptiness.

Allied to this is the questionable notion of “finding your voice”; the American poet Archie Ammons has an interesting poem in which he suggests that a young poet’s pride in finally having found her voice is in fact misplaced – Ammons posits an equal or greater value (a style truly 2 untrue) in the earlier poems in which the young poet was still struggling to find that “voice” she had now become so proud of.

Once I had hit my stride in sonnet-production, I coasted along very happily for a while, in fact, astonished at the level of creativity and productivity that I had never been capable of before.  I got so used to producing ten lines, let us say, off the top of my head, and then having just four more to go involving slightly more conscious effort. And usually being pleased with the result. But after a while I knew I would have to kick the habit. I did, but it wasn’t easy.

There is a meditative nature and tone throughout the book. This is owed to the prose and the contemplative outlook of the author, but it’s also down to the knowledge of how language functions on and off the page. Could you speak a little about this?

One of the earliest line-types I felt able to master was the iambic pentameter. I slipped into its drives and inclinations all too readily, and soon felt a lack of achievement in using it. Now I use a more natural rhythm, prosaic or not. Most of my poems are predetermined by a kind of inner song which forms as soon as the initial ideas begin to form, a sort of rhetorical build-up of pressure, which the subsequent poem carries out and honours. That is a bit like subjecting myself to formal constraints, I guess.

But in a different respect my poems do indeed follow, or prefer, prosaic models, such as the essay, the footnote, the anecdote, the thesis. My poems are expressions of ideas rather than of feelings. They are workings-out of intuitions, expansions, and improvised riffs (to use an image from jazz, a form of music I have zero sympathy for). Many of these ideas are “what-if” projections, i.e. hypotheses, speculations. The poems withhold commitment to the ideas that they explore or propound. That is a very important impulse of detachment for me – I am reluctant to be held accountable for the doctrines explicitly broached. The poems are, ultimately, expressions of the form “let’s suppose for a moment that the world is such-and-such; what would follow from that supposition?” I am keeping the spirit of enquiry open, rather than imposing a doctrine.

So much of your writing, including the poems in Studies in Khoisan Verbs has taken place in Scotland. Does the physical distance from the African continent influence or affect the writing at all? Does it lend a clarity of thought, for example, or a certain critical vantage?

I am a South African poet, despite all evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, what has enabled me to be a poet at all is non-residence in South Africa – nearly every poem I’ve ever written was written in Scotland. Nobody has to write poetry; it’s entirely optional; but even more so, nobody has to write poetry of a certain type, poetry conforming to someone else’s idea of what poetry should be; nevertheless, one feels the pressure. As soon as you do start to write, people step forward to tell you what you ought to be writing about, and I find that highly objectionable. I cannot write to order in any way – commissions, commemorations, memorials, whatever, are beyond me. So, living and writing in Scotland, I can pass myself off as non-South African; as far as SA critics are concerned, I’ve removed myself from the scene, and am one less poet to bother about. I can get away with doing whatever I like (often quite flippant and whimsical stuff, stuff that’s morally irresponsible) without anyone (e.g. Leavisites) looking over my shoulder and ticking me off.

Here in Scotland, political consciousness is defined, in large measure, against England, against English power, rivalry and oppression – England as the colonial power. Now, these days, as we know, it is better to be viewed as one of the colonised than one of the colonisers – one of the oppressed, rather than one of the oppressors. I cannot share in that comfortable fiction, that smug self-satisfaction. My ancestors were colonisers, that is my fate and my legacy. I don’t have the political/moral luxury of being a Scot. I am stuck with the curse of being a white, middle- class, middle-aged English-speaking South African male. That involves a set of allegiances as well as accountabilities. I draw on both of these. In particular, I regard the arrival of European culture at the foot of Africa as a moment of extraordinary excitement and historic euphoria. Dutch style and Dutch thought (Spinoza is my hero) fizz in my veins. I can’t help it – I am proud of the European achievement, generally speaking (the ravaging and pillaging of indigenous societies is of course beyond excuse) – especially I am proud (insofar as it has anything to do with me) of the European Enlightenment (the banishing of superstition by scientific enquiry), which I believe to be the greatest achievement in human history thus far. As an extension of that, I am an atheist and a Darwinian. Just for the record, I was decolonised in the early 1960s, in Botswana, at the age of 11, some years before Botswana itself gained its independence.

You’ve built up an incredible career as a poet over a number of years, with multiple titles and prestigious poetry awards and prizes to your name. What advice do you have for the poets still finding their voice, or establishing themselves in the scene?

I regard whatever I may have achieved as a poet as still open to question, and therefore am not comfortable offering advice to younger poets. But if I were forced to bite the bullet I would say – write; and read.

Firstly, write. My advice is to spend two or three hours every day writing (at least four or five days a week); bring as much focus and energy to these sessions as possible; always write at full stretch, at the limit of your capabilities; bring the whole of your attention, your enthusiasm and your ambition to the table. In each case try to carry something to completion, or at least to a state of being securely begun, so that it may be confidently completed later on. In other words – be productive, have something to show for all your efforts. Please don’t sit at your desk year after year producing unfinished dribs and drabs, as many South African poets have done. The moral of this advice is – take yourself seriously as a writer; make your practice a declaration of the fact that this is what you do as a writer – you write. Everything else is secondary.

Secondarily, read. Find out what other writers have done, and how they have done it. Don’t be afraid to borrow ideas from other writers, don’t be afraid to imitate styles and writers you admire. You will always have enough personality of your own, enough individual quirkiness, to assert your own uniqueness, to make your borrowings or copyings unmistakeably your own. This means reading a lot. Read poets from all times, languages and traditions. Don’t be scared of any text or poet – tackle them all. You can be the equal, in your own way, of any of these. A sentence from Michael Longley’s introduction to his Faber Selection of Robert Graves comes to mind – “When Derek Mahon and I were undergraduates at Trinity College Dublin, we inhaled poetry with our Sweet Afton cigarettes.” I don’t recommend taking up vaping for creativity; it’s that inhalation of poetry that I would urge – you should be reading poetry continuously and compulsively, dozens of poems or passages every day. Poetry should be the air you breathe. Nothing less will do.

Finally (a bonus slice of advice) – submit your work. Get it published. And get rejected a lot. Send your work everywhere, and don’t be discouraged by rejections. Make the bastards read your work, even if they don’t (at first) publish it. Always have two or three pieces out there, being pondered by someone. Submit returned work elsewhere. Never give up.

Do you have a poem from Studies in Khoisan Verbs that’s particularly near and dear to you? Why?

Whenever people ask me what I write about, I don’t give them one of the usual answers, e.g. Golden Labradors, Death or Dialectical Materialism; instead I refer to my practice of mixing up various abstract and concrete systems, such as the human body, syntactic structures, the internal combustion engine, etc, and the poem that best expresses this kind of mix-up is called “Through World-Tinted Spectacles”; there, in a somewhat facetious and eccentric manner, I jumble up various realms of Being, crossing botany with geology with clockworks with the human eye with lemons, and so on; all of these systems are superimposed, one seen in terms of the other, a kind of synaesthesia on a universal scale; what brings me joy in this poem is my wonderment at the diversity of earthly existence, and a certain levelling-out of orders of being which is the opposite of hierarchical, i.e. is democratic, egalitarian and ultimately Buddhist.

Basil du Toit’s Studies in Khoisan Verbs is available via African Books Collective.

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.