Entangled Poetics: Apartheid South African Poetry between Politics and Form

The 1960s–80s saw the rise of a radical poetics in apartheid South Africa, referred to as Black Consciousness, and an equally conservative, formalist poetics, most often practiced by white South African poets. Black Consciousness poetry was characterized by its direct, conversational approaches to the everyday violence of apartheid; the “white lyric” followed the modern poetic practice of an abstracted, sublimated sensibility. South African critics were sharply divided over the ethics of poetry (and art) during apartheid. After the first democratic elections in 1994, Black Consciousness poetry was increasingly viewed as a relic of an earlier age, while lyrics by white poets entered critical aesthetic discourse. By returning to the divided decades of the 1960s and 1970s now, and reading both the critical conversations and the poetry by black and white poets, we can work toward a reading that registers the interstices of black and white poetics, politics, and aesthetics today.