WHO’S IN CHARGE? THE
MUSE ANSWERS BACK
We have long attributed
the inspiration poems to ‘the muse’, a suitably vague notion dating back to the
Greeks and probably beyond. Yet, when a poem is finished (and, if one is lucky,
published), the poet takes the credit. What if, I mused, a writer really let the
‘muse’ speak through him or her? What if one considered the muse to be an
actual ‘person’? (Amusements, I
thought, would make a good title for a collection…)
Such thoughts might seem frivolous, but as the American critic Tony
Hoagland points out, “The big insight in
our era of poetics is that we live inside language, and that insight has
affected…poetic practice profoundly.” This being true, and because we are aware
of it, at least one of the responsibilities of writing poetry today lies in a
metapoetic exploration of the art itself—not simply writing about writing, but a
writing that at least carries an awareness of its own process.
DOUGLAS REID SKINNER
was born in
Upington, South Africa. His work has appeared in South Africa, Italy, France,
the USA and the UK. He has published seven collections of poems, most recently Liminal (uHlanga, 2017, Cape Town). He
has translated from Hebrew, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese,
most recently The Secret Ambition:
selected poems of Valerio Magrelli (together with M Fazzini, African Sun
Press, Cape Town). An early selection of the Magrelli translations was awarded
joint-First Prize in the 1995 British Comparative Literature Association, Open
Translation Prize. He directed The Carrefour Press from 1988 to 1992, was
editor of New Contrast and the SA Literary Review. He is co-editor of
the Cape Town-based poetry quarterly, Stanzas,
and lives on the southwestern edge of London.
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