South Africa

South Africa, Maverick Life

Kyle Allan’s 'Remote Harbour' is a poetic voyage through love, memory, and vivid imagery

Right: Poet and editor Kyle Allan. Photos: Supplied

By Mick Raubenheimer

8 Dec 2024

Daily Maverick speaks to KwaZulu-Natal-based poet and editor Kyle Allan about his latest collection of verse.

In Kyle Allan’s third volume of poetry, Remote Harbour, there is a seeking. Love, sensation and memory intermingle and weave through the collection’s poetic scapes. The mystery of relationship — between a subject and its experiences, between objects unknowingly ensnared in wider narratives, and especially in the intimate and glowing relating of lovers — is at the core of these pages.

The collection brims with vivid and unexpected imagery, for the most part seemingly redirected from the gentle surrealism of dreams:

“There is an edge of lightning where the houses / changed their name and drank water” (from the poem 6)

“Your mouth / repeating our footsteps like folktales / talking of insurrections on the beaches” (from 3)

“I can’t say I’m innocent / like when we walked among the butterflies / with stones on our feet” (from 14)

“There’s a crack in time / through which our love / is falling like a photograph” (from 34)

When did you first identify as a creative artist?

As a 15-year-old, I came across A Century of South African Poetry, edited by Michael Chapman, and read a few of Wopko Jensma’s poems. That started me writing poems.

I dived into contemporary South African poetry and whatever poetry I could get my hands on. I went to second-hand bookstores, and found the corners of other bookstores where poetry could be read and found.

I have had times where I have stopped writing, here and there. And end up going back to it. Some callings you cannot escape.

Poet and editor Kyle Allan. (Photo: Supplied)

Outside your medium, which branch of art most stimulates you?

Music. Its stories, its landscapes, its shifts and movements. It always feeds me. There is a connecting zone between music and writing. I am also steadily moving towards exploring this musical aspect of writing — moving towards songwriting and the different tones that emerge in the mobile landscapes.

Which artist in the said discipline has significantly inspired you, and why?

There are so many. But I have to start with Bob Dylan. There is something for every situation. The album that inspired me and has lived through me the most is Blood on the Tracks (1974), and also the outtakes from that album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1nOgCEjs4w

From my teenage years, his work, and the work of many other musical artists, has been a fuel behind a lot of my artistic approach. There are echoes in my poems of this.

More recently it has led me back towards musical composition with the guitar. Songs of love and loss.

What, to you, is art’s most important function?

It is a way of being awake, even in one’s dreams, even while the overt conscious is not awake. That is what distinguishes it so much from artificial intelligence: the imagination and the subconscious are these seas and portals that connect to other dimensions, other times, including those still coming, and to other people.

Art is also a way of seeing, not just with the eyes but with all the senses. It’s a way of feeling and knowing simultaneously.

Realism is not enough if it just looks at the obvious, revealing the enclosures, the binaries, the appearances and the visible dimensions and kingdoms of experience. That is why I am an actualist, not a realist. The actualist considers all the layers of reality, even the unseen.

Local creatives (in any medium) who currently excite you?

I am very excited about the recent generation of poets: Zizipho Bam, Zodwa Mtirara, Zeenit Jacobs, Teamhw SbonguJesu, Dimakatso Sedite and Nomangungu, to name a few.

I say the recent generation, but it’s more of a loose thing. They are of different ages, (and) different situations, but they exist around this point in time and its impossible possibility. Its indeterminate contours, its intimacy and alienation, its excitement and its disembodiment. They are writers who depict the actuality of our time.

Which specific work, be it in literature, music or visual art, do you return to again and again, and why?

South African poets such as Mxolisi Nyezwa, Seitlhamo Motsapi, Angifi Dladla, Isabella Motadinyane, to name a few.

Rimbaud. Borges. In a strange way, Borges communes with my upcoming short story collection, Subjectivity/Problematic. Bolaño. Bites of Kafka.

In film, Tarkovsky, though I know his limitations as well. The Bible. It is a deep reservoir of words.

Singer-songwriters and groups, especially of the ’60s. I mentioned Dylan earlier. All these reservoirs of song which trace back into different pathways of life and love, longing upon the old breezes.

Tell us about Remote Harbour.

It is a collection of 37 poems, none titled, all numbered. The ecological, social and emotional landscape is that of KwaZulu-Natal, and particularly Durban. Some of the poems were written about worlds that did not yet exist at that time. They are poems written in a very free-flowing jazz kind of style. They move back and forth like the laminar spaces they describe — waves of feeling and experience on the shores of time. DM

Mick Raubenheimer is a freelance arts writer.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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