Intimate Stranger: A Writing Book Paperback - 2009

Excerpt

Waterwalking

If I were to propose a course I’d say that the coming pages would not, properly speaking, be a discourse on poetics, but rather a few causeries around poems, approaching the edge of sanity (from whatever side) with a balance of curiosity and tactful distance, if not distaste. The less you know the more tactful and circumspect you ought to be. It would be neither the history of any particular period or tradition or mode, nor that of any given poet. The situation of the poem may be high- lighted though. For there are many places of poetry: magic, mysticism, youth, the public forum, breath, history, memory, loss . . . There’s also the place of diamond shining.Of central concern will be the function or the workings. Poem is as poem does, and I think one paradoxically learns the ‘how’ of poetry long before understanding the ‘why’. Writing is a process of creating consciousness and thus the making of a self, because awareness is expressed through a vector, however abstract. The nature or intention of that ‘self’ is of secondary concern. In so doing I’d want to look at some contradictory givens: the poem as disorderly and unlawful as ‘reality’; the poem predicated upon breaks in an attempt to encompass or imi- tate a whole; as stilled movement, or moving stillness. You see, the position of the poem may change but the problem is the same ever since breath became audible and visible incanta- tion. Poem is a capsule of space and time; it is always finished – you can no less add to it than you can detract from it – yet never completed until such time as it has been consumed (consummated) by you, Reader.

Media reviews

In this inspiring, insightful and heart-warming meditation, Breyten Breytenbach has given us a masterpiece—a term I use with all due caution. He invites the reader into the process of poetry from vision to practice with a deep abiding humanity, genuine wisdom and compassionate good will spiced with humor. As unpretentious as a comfortable old shirt, this is a book to be read and reread, to be cherished by anyone who values the enlightenment found in great poetry of all kinds. —Sam Hamill

The greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation. . . . No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as Breyten Breytenbach. —The New Yorker

As a writer, Breytenbach has the gift of being able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm, that give life. —J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books