A memory comes to mind from years ago. I am sitting at a desk in a very cold room on a farm. I was invited to go on a writing retreat situated on a farm outside of Makhanda. Things aren’t going so well. I want to write a book on Russia but I am supposed to be writing poems. I think of Boris Pasternak, how I have never read his poems but I am a fan of his nonetheless. I go for long walks. I hide away in my room from the baboons, the host, his wife and the other poets who have been invited to work (see write poems). I eat breakfast and lunch alone trying to find my way, my place in the world. I try to work, I try to work on myself. I wonder about my father’s Makhanda. What he saw, how he felt, how he coped and handled himself in a racist South Africa, a regime that was on tenterhooks.

(I am a writer, a poet writing in a post-apartheid South Africa, a democracy and yet still very much a racist country when aroused, when identified, when fractured.)

I make lots of cups of tea for myself and I eat salads for lunch and scramble eggs with onions in the morning. It becomes something of a mission to get up in the morning. I tell myself it is Russia that is on my mind.

Poetry, reading poetry and writing poetry has taught me not to be angry anymore. It has brought me closer to God, divinity, the spiritual and my own shame.

“If you want to become a philosopher, write a novel,” said Albert Camus.

In response, I say to that that if you want to become poet, become a philosopher. Seek mentors out. Forgive yourself, for a poet writes from trauma, pain and suffering and a minor poet writes about the love they have found, or rather an elusive kind of love that is responsible for their suffering and loneliness.

The minor poet appears at the beginning of his career poised for distinction. He is also a philosopher, schooling the reader on his views of the environment and the circumstances he finds himself in, the lack of common sense in the undisciplined and the degenerate interloper who lives on the fringes of society.

The poet does not write from love although love transforms the poet. When the poet writes with extreme feeling about political undercurrents, human community comes into view and society’s ill feeling is penetrated, then veiled, then cloaked. It is both the minor and the major poets who are heroic in their outlook on life, they want to do away with war, they want to write succinctly about love, the object of their affection (see the third poetry collection Remote Harbour by the South African poet Kyle Allan).

To soak the page with innumerable comments about political standoffs, suns that hover (see the poem Memory Of Sun By the Russian poet Anna Akmatova), the gravitas of the falling leaf, people that exist, hauntings, suicide, insanity, visions and visionaries, inward we turn to find the universe, to make sense of the world and this is a crucial component. That we see this. That life can be beautiful when strangers are kind.

There is substance in being frail and being on the receiving end of pity, understanding, even tolerance. The poet oils death and life with a kind of rational analysis, a perspective that honours the greats and the saints that came before, all that they wrote and said. People and poets aren’t going to live forever. We are all going to die. Nobody will remain at peace or happy forever. Unhappiness and discomfort is unnerving but they are free.

I pluck a meditation from Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Take pleasure out of the simple pleasure of writing. It is dread that drives the pen and not pleasure. Pleasure is the reward but at the beginning of the journey it is dread that drives the pen and annihilates at will.

To aim higher than suspicion, that is what drives the female poet, and that is what drives me who is suspicious of everything. That is why I write. To answer what I question, to find solutions.

In South African Mangaliso Buzani’s poetry collection ‘a naked bone’ there is coherence, a specific timing between humble trusting people and events, virtue, and listening, the kind that trains your brain to become mentally fit when faced with the impossible and daunting. There are mental images that come to mind when I read his poems and I am able to perceive through my own senses and to withstand obstacle and challenge and fear of failure, to be able to face what is left, what you are left with when darkness falls or resentment falls.

Simone Weil asks of us to understand the female philosopher, the feminine mystique and puts us in the position to learn, to teach, to communicate, to be noble, to have the confidence to speak truth into both meaning and memory perfectly and imperfectly with intent and admiration.

What image or component do you conjure up when you think of the female poet, the female philosopher? What is the blueprint for her astonishing and surprising intellectualism? What does she want to achieve, how far does she want to go in life, does she want to have children, a family, stay in one place, travel to exotic locations, what meaning is to be found in the female poet  and female philosopher’s work? The image of this poet/philosopher is turned inward.

Poets are philosophers. Philosophers are poets. The work that is left behind speaks to our past and our future. It is timeless and free, it is of value and it connects us to our childhood where our self-development and search for meaning began.

To put truth first, as South African poets Arthur Nortje and Dennis Brutus did, as South African educationalist George Botha and South African poet Victor Wessels did, as Don Mattera did in his poetry, as the living poet Yusuf Agherdien does is not to be skeptical but to be virtuous and to accept our faults, the faults and our weaknesses, our limitations that we carry within, inherent, that forces us to turn inward, to rid ourselves and to escape ourselves from the irrelevant, from the irrational, to look inward again for coping mechanisms and imagination, illusion and creativity, to look for the real world, normalcy, the betterment of our mind, intellect and psyche in the parasite that is circumstance, manifestation and environment.

It is the poet that yearns for a better world. It is the poet that yearns to live without regret and misery. Misery is a negative emotion. To write poetry is to interact with and to encounter the divine, to collaborate with the universe, to perceive the availability of the recognition of damage, scars, wounding, and frustration. It is when the poet’s anger is justifiable, it is then when they write truth into being.