Muses and a milestone in a wilderness of words at the McGregor Poetry Festival

On 18 November 2022, the McGregor Poetry Festival kicked off, beating the World Cup in Qatar by two days to nil. But what exactly was the object of the celebration? The word “festival” is a derivative of feast. At a poetry festival the food is words, and the accompanying music is made up of the sound of those words, words aligned into messages of peace, admiration, dirges and delight, which writers birth and nurture until they have turned into orchestras of sound and sense.

The muse is the writer’s journey through life. It is their observation through all their senses. The muse is a metaphorical entity. Poetry does not come from elsewhere but from living and hearing, seeing, understanding, touching, smelling, getting angry and getting excited. The lines pile up over time.

This year’s festival-cum-competition theme was Touching the Wild – Die Wildernis In, and the venue was once again the Temenos Retreat in McGregor. It was to celebrate what we know and don’t know about the world by honouring the creator of poems and the enthusiast of poems both. This also happened to be the 10th McGregor festival and with it came the further thrill of a milestone to fête, the click of a cornerstone falling into place as the wall continues up.

I spoke to poet Harry Owen, who was one of the performers this year, and he said: “It was, as always, a spectacular celebration of poetry and poets in South Africa and beyond. It was welcoming, open-hearted and inclusive, and it was a joy to be there, to read and to host two packed, open-floor events. Start planning for next year!”

I have only ever shared a stage with Harry once, at Poetry Africa in 2016, and I’d like to renew that experience. After we spoke, he was generous enough to allow me to share here a poem he read at McGregor, Pièce de Résistance, which is part of his latest book, Thicket: Shades From the Eastern Cape (Minimal Press, 2022). Harry is an indefatigable fighter against the destruction of wildlife and much of his poetry reflects that.

Although both a wildness and the wilderness are quasi-pristine still and therefore, yes, untouchable – not untouchable because of caste, but because they aren’t to be altered – this year’s theme was right on point. The undomesticated wild is where our forebears rose and learnt, and by touching it, the festival reminds us to safeguard it. The tame and the wild are mirror images and what we know is fed from what we do not yet know.

We are curious creatures. The milestone this festival was celebrating is an opportunity to look back and to look forward at the same time. Where do we come from? Where are we headed? What are we doing?

Wendell Berry has said, When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, / I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things…

Read in Daily Maverick: “With Earth on the killing altar, the gods are pacified with sweet but empty words”

I bet despair for the world has grown in you as it has in me and in most people on the street. On the face of it, this call has gone unheeded, which is why the festival felt the need to rouse us again with word and song that remind us, once again, to be in fear of what our lives and our progeny’s lives may be. Who has not been accosted by these thoughts? Even the rich and privileged, who are used to raping the planet, must from time to time harbour them.

Owen, in his poem’s last stanza, is as determined as Mr Berry when he says: I might wipe away your lifetime with a cloth / but will not: you are worth so much more than that. / As each one of us is, every dancing soul.

At the McGregor Poetry Festival, emerging poets read together with seasoned, published poets. Everyone connects and each is an inspiration to the other. There is a certain novelty that the veteran poet can learn from the beginner and there is a certain degree of experience that the beginner can draw from the veteran. The result is the fireworks of words and collaboration that the event has been able to provide, year in and year out. The same way Harry Owen has invited me, I invite you, in turn, to prepare and make ready for next year’s celebration of the word. DM168

Pièce de Résistance

By Harry Owen

While I slept last night, the waves’ constant roar
enfolding us, you performed your final move,
the pièce de résistance. Pirouetting

moth-dervish, drowning, you died silently,
desperately, in the embrace of dew,
staining the tabletop with your lightness.

I might wipe away your lifetime with a cloth
but will not: you are worth so much more than that.
As each one of us is, every dancing soul.

Reading

By Rethabile Masilo

For one second you look at the audience,
then allow your eyes to drift back to the page
like the headlamps of a car that passes another
in the night, so you can find where a next line
fastens to a previous thought in the text. And because
traffic is heavy you let your head bob up and down
as if you were agreeing to something, perhaps
to a voiced meaning of the road you’re travelling,
or because faces in the rear are darkened
and ache to hear and feel something ignite in them
an intensity brighter than the lamp above
your head, illuminating a truth about the world,
as you pace yourself and never move beyond
the speed limit, reading each line with a mouth
full of purpose, a loud or subtle engine, a requiem
for when someone is dead, and mourners wait
around a hole in the ground wearing black, holding
oil lamps above their feelings. And you read on
to allow the dead to rest, the doe that is motionless
on the side of the road. A swerve would have
saved her, had the lines not become frenzied
by themselves, lines as slanting as ropes of rain
on your windshield. You have told yourself
that this is how a poet reads lines, and so
you stop looking at darkness and decide instead
to focus on each line, drive with your head down,
listening to the hum of the engine while staring
at the central line when the beams aren’t enough,
and following it to negotiate unknown territory.
Whoever heard of someone who is making love
look into the eyes of passers-by? Body sweat
now covers you, withdraws out of you, until
the poem is over and, when you look up, the group
is wearing the faces of individuals once again.