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Someone said all poetry aspires to music. Jazz in particular ignites ardour and argument in the hearts of many South African poets. I feature two such passionate avatars below. The late much loved poet-laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile (known to his friends as Willie) was deeply influenced by blues and jazz as well as by his friendship with musical giants such as Hugh Masekela. Poet Gus Ferguson wrote in his introduction to This way I salute you  that “by including jazz references Willie is following a jazz practice of quoting one tune while improvising on another.” Rustum Kozain has written tenderly about his father’s suppressed career as a double bass player, invokes jazz and musicians directly or indirectly in many poems, and below writes vehemently, deliriously, about Charles Mingus in Mingus Octopus.

***

For Hugh Masekela

By Keorapetse Kgositsile

Manboy of all the ages

mirror of my stupidity

and wisdom. Yours too

if you know there is no such

thing as even a perfect god

We are all dispensable

like words or songs

like obsolete tools

like a mother’s afterbirth

Rending. Yes. We travel

we move closer. Or apart

Don’t we know that even

the sun can be brutal!

This then is the rhythm

and the blues of it

Home is where the music is.

For Billie Holiday

By Keorapetse Kgositsile

Lady Day Lady Day

Lady Day of no happy days

who lives in a voice

sagging with the pain

where the monster’s teeth

are deep to our marrow

Lady Day of no happy days

carried in a voice so blue

she could teach any sky

all about the blues

Lady Day of no happy days

Mrs Scag still roams

the treacherous ghetto streets

of white design wasting

the young bloods who think

themselves too hip to learn

from your hurt

Lady Day

them that got power

wealth and junk

are still picking your pain

for profit and fun

Lady Day Lady Day

of no happy days

the willow still weeps for you

though now we should know

that all tears are stale

though now we should know

that tears ain’t never done nothin for nobody

Both poems are from This way I salute you, Kwela, 2004.

***

Mingus Octopus

By Rustum Kozain

Oprah’s on TV fucking crying again
crying crying at all those gentle folk
who change others’ lives
through acts of gentleness.

And so they get their letters, maybe
themselves, in the nation’s eye.
A phenomenon I have often
noticed, like finches. Or feral pigeons

in Cape Town’s Company Gardens.

Meanwhile, Mingus’s going
absolutely apeshit in my bedroom
moaning moaning oh lord
moaning about the Ku Klux Klan: 

They something this, something that
they brainwash and teach you hate.
And he’s not Miles.
No, Miles isn’t Mingus,

doesn’t quite get there, you know
up there, hauling that big black
bass out as if it’s the heart of it all.
Mingus thou pluckest me out

changing your motherfucker chords
like God furious at creation
not knowing what or where switching
firmament light land or how

and himself the lord in it. Oh!
He is in it like the darkness
on the face of the deep. Yeah,
what do they know

of disjuncture, Mingus, my heart?

And when I walk into the room
there you are big fucking octopus
soft-headed, squashed
in that corner, but you got me

can you get this? Me, sagging
in your arms like a pale
Victorian heroine
frighted at your thud of bass,

your eighty thousand tentacles
all around me like I’m the bass
you play. Me, you play me
and I let you, I let you.

From This Carting Life, Kwela Books/Snailpress, 2005. DM/MC/ML