I grew up in the bad old days of colonial Rhodesia. My primary school teachers (in the 1950s) were British expatriates so you can imagine the kinds of poetry and song I experienced: Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Noyse, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Lewis Carroll… poets from the Victorian and Georgian eras. We learned songs like “The Ash Grove”, “Hey ho, the Drunken Sailor”, and “Annie Laurie”. Then there were the Anglican hymns like “Stand up, stand up for Jesus” and “Do no sinful action”. My parents were South African, and they had quite a repertoire of popular Afrikaans songs like “Sarie Marais” and “Bobbejaan klim die berg”. There were nursery rhymes too, and limericks by the number.
Would you say your childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a distinct influence on how you write poetry now, and why?
Most certainly. I use prosody to accuse the culture that taught it to me. I don’t write sonnets, I write parodies of sonnets. More than that, I use it because I believe there should be a distinction between poetry and prose, beyond the way they look on the page; and that distinction comes down to rhythm, aural effects. I like poetry to have a distinct beat.
Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?
I admire Shakespeare above all other poets because his ability to merge form and content transports me to the eternal present where I experience a sensation of simultaneously living and dying:
O! withered is the garland of the war,
The soldier’s pole is fallen; young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
How would you summarise one of your poems in one paragraph?
“Sonnet with One Unstated Line” is a response to the government’s Operation Murambatsvina (“clean out the trash”), which resulted in instant homelessness for more than 700 000 poor urban Zimbabweans.
How would you describe the appeal of this poem to readers?
It has the beauty of the sonnet form and the sting of socio-political commitment.
Could you share a stanza or small section of this poem?
Since it’s a deliberately curtailed sonnet, a single stanza, I’ll give you the whole thing:
See the shambling gait of the unemployed,
the vacant stare of the dispossessed;
the plastic bags by breezes buoyed
or, when evening settles, at rest.
Hear the cry of hornbills lost in yards
of rubble and rags, to split the ears
of those who stand and watch; and the guards
unguarded, hammering, hammering.
Smell the blood and mucous, ashes damp,
breath of birds turned children clamouring,
children clamouring. A tyrant’s stamp,
a boot, a fist, a fourteen pounder;
come and witness our city flounder.
How would you describe the contribution this stanza or small section makes to the poem?
Since you’ve got the whole poem, let me describe the contribution the omitted line makes. Firstly it suggests self-censorship; secondly, as it’s the fourteenth line, it seems to have been appropriated by a very large hammer!
Would you describe your poetry primarily as narrative, thematic, character portrait, or how would you describe your poetry?
In a sense, my poetry is a reflection of who I am. It’s an attempt to merge European form with African content, to replace a contradictory split with a paradoxical threshold.
Do you read your poetry aloud to people? If so, how would you describe the size and response of your listening audiences?
Almost never. I don’t get the opportunity. There is not much demand for ageing white male Zimbabweans to ascend the podium.
Do you write groups of poems to form collections? If so, how were the poems connected in your most recent collection?
I once wrote a sequence of twelve sonnets on a common theme, but my books are pretty eclectic. My most recent collection is a collaboration with a Shona writer, the late Julius Chingono, and it is a mixture of poems and stories. Most of these are connected by the year 2008, Zimbabwe’s annus horribilis – to date!
http://www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com/the-authors/17-john-eppel.html
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