Licking the Stage Clean or Hauling Down the Sky?: The Profile of the Poet and the Politics of Poetry in Contemporary South Africa

Kelwyn Sole describes some of the issues and trends in contemporary English-language poetry in South Africa. Focusing on the current fashionability of poetry and the aura that surrounds the figure of the poet in the media and public sphere, he summarizes some of the uses being made of poetry at the moment. On the one hand, it is being utilized as a tool of nation-building and an advertising medium for big business. On the other (and usually in sharp distinction to this) it is being mobilized by poets as a means of social critique and an expression of anger vis-à-vis current structures of power. Questions are asked of the susceptibility of lyric poetry in particular to usage by political and business elites as a means to assist the construction, in its audiences, of a consumerist sense of self; as well as to provide models of citizenship in tune with the discursive priorities of the South African state in its current, capitalist form.