The dark surrealism of Phyllis Haring’s poetry
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458160 , vital:75720 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v48_n3_a4
- Description: The slender poetic oeuvre of Phyllis Haring (1919–2016) is now almost forgotten. Only one collection, A Taste of Salt, was published in 1976, and a number of poems appeared in small magazines until 1991. Though she is unquestionably a “minor poet,” I argue that her dream-like, dark yet musical work is worth attention, especially as something of a local pioneer in Surrealist techniques. (Surrealism’s influence more broadly in South African poetry is apparently yet to be comprehensively explored.) This article aims to reintroduce Haring’s work, and suggest some possibilities for further, more precisely theorised study. Following a biographical sketch and brief history of her publications, I respond to selected poems to provide a preliminary taste of her salty, almost Nietzschean, world-view, her craft, and some persistent techniques, themes and images – notably of human cruelty, death, and the natural world.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458160 , vital:75720 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v48_n3_a4
- Description: The slender poetic oeuvre of Phyllis Haring (1919–2016) is now almost forgotten. Only one collection, A Taste of Salt, was published in 1976, and a number of poems appeared in small magazines until 1991. Though she is unquestionably a “minor poet,” I argue that her dream-like, dark yet musical work is worth attention, especially as something of a local pioneer in Surrealist techniques. (Surrealism’s influence more broadly in South African poetry is apparently yet to be comprehensively explored.) This article aims to reintroduce Haring’s work, and suggest some possibilities for further, more precisely theorised study. Following a biographical sketch and brief history of her publications, I respond to selected poems to provide a preliminary taste of her salty, almost Nietzschean, world-view, her craft, and some persistent techniques, themes and images – notably of human cruelty, death, and the natural world.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Feral whispering, community and the reach of the literary
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458091 , vital:75715 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171542
- Description: Google "elephant + basenji" and you will observe a remarkable event. Every so often, on the edge of Cecil Kop Game Reserve, bordering my home town of Mutare, Zimbabwe, one of the reserve's two elephants approaches the fence of a private house. On the house side is a Basenji dog. The two animals get as close to one another as the electrified fence permits. They seem to take a great interest in each other. Neither the other elephant, nor the household's other dog, participate in the exchange; this is a communing between two unique individuals. Sometimes, the elephant lies down, and she and the dog continue staring at each other. Just what is passing between them is impossible to say, but something is going on. Curiosity at least, and a measure of trust. Albeit tentative, a new, wholly unpredictable social aggregation has come into being, neither quite wild nor tamed: feral.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458091 , vital:75715 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171542
- Description: Google "elephant + basenji" and you will observe a remarkable event. Every so often, on the edge of Cecil Kop Game Reserve, bordering my home town of Mutare, Zimbabwe, one of the reserve's two elephants approaches the fence of a private house. On the house side is a Basenji dog. The two animals get as close to one another as the electrified fence permits. They seem to take a great interest in each other. Neither the other elephant, nor the household's other dog, participate in the exchange; this is a communing between two unique individuals. Sometimes, the elephant lies down, and she and the dog continue staring at each other. Just what is passing between them is impossible to say, but something is going on. Curiosity at least, and a measure of trust. Albeit tentative, a new, wholly unpredictable social aggregation has come into being, neither quite wild nor tamed: feral.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
"Muscled Presence": Douglas Livingstone's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Snake"
- Authors: Everitt, Mariss , Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:2262 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004642
- Description: Douglas Livingstone's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Snake" is an artwork which addresses precisely these questions, seeking a manner of portraying the snake which is neither grossly appropriative nor wholly detached, neither ethically empty nor preachy. In its multi-angled structure, Livingstone attempts aesthetically "to establish and embellish ... a contact zone with the nonhuman animals who share our world with us, but accepting also that there exist considerable venues on either side of this contact zone that are, on the one hand, only human, and on the other hand, only nonhuman". Even in his more formally scientific work, Livingstone argues for the inevitability of such limits to knowledge, and for the value of the imagination in addressing them.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- Authors: Everitt, Mariss , Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:2262 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004642
- Description: Douglas Livingstone's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Snake" is an artwork which addresses precisely these questions, seeking a manner of portraying the snake which is neither grossly appropriative nor wholly detached, neither ethically empty nor preachy. In its multi-angled structure, Livingstone attempts aesthetically "to establish and embellish ... a contact zone with the nonhuman animals who share our world with us, but accepting also that there exist considerable venues on either side of this contact zone that are, on the one hand, only human, and on the other hand, only nonhuman". Even in his more formally scientific work, Livingstone argues for the inevitability of such limits to knowledge, and for the value of the imagination in addressing them.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
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