Copies of Green Dragon #2 still available

Dye Hard Press has just TWO copies left of Green Dragon #2, published in 2003.

It contains poems by the late Daniel Abdul-hayy Moore, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Paul Wessels, Sumeera Dawood, Kobus Moolman, Gus Ferguson, Richard Fox, Aryan Kaganof, Alan Finlay, Philip Hammial and Joop Bersee. Prose by Allan  Kolski Horwitz, Alan Finlay and Arja Salafranca.

64 pages.

For South Africa the price is R60, including postage, and for overseas the price is R100, including postage.

Send an email to dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

Copies of Green Dragon #6 still available

There are just TWO copies left in stock of Green Dragon #6, which was the final issue of a literary journal published by Dye Hard Press from 2002 to 2009. Contributors to this final issue were Alan Finlay, Arja Salafranca, Haidee Kruger, Janet van Eeden, Joop Bersee, Kelwyn Sole, Kobus Moolman, Tania van Schalkwyk, Megan Hall, Cecilia Ferriera, Anton Krueger, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Goodenough Mashego, David wa Maahlamela, Vonani Bila, Mphutlane wa Bofelo, Aryan Kaganof, Neo Molefe Shameeyaa, Colleen Higgs, Gus Ferguson, Brent Meersman, Kai Lossgott, Daniel Browde, Ingrid Andersen, Gary Cummiskey, Mick Raubenheimer and Mxolisi Nyezwa. There were also lyrics from Durban folk group The Litchis.

Copies are available from Dye Hard Press at R80 per copy, including postage, for South Africa. For overseas, R130 including postage. 

Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

Copies of Green Dragon #4 still available

Dye Hard Press has just FOUR copies left of Green Dragon # 4, published in 2006.

It contains poems by Goodenough Mashego, Michelle McGrane, Colleen Higgs, Philip Hammial, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Amanda Van Rooyen, Liesl Jobson, Les Merton, Mkhosazana Xaba, Kobus Moolman, Aryan Kaganof, Joop Bersee, Haidee Kruger, Gus Ferguson, Bernat Kruger, Tania van Schalkwyk, Alan Finlay and Richard Fox, as well as prose by Allan Kolski Horwitz, Arja Salafranca, Haidee Kruger, Silke  Heiss and Gary Cummiskey.

90 pages.

The cost is R80, including postage, for South Africa, and R130, including postage, for overseas.

Send an email to dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

Copies of Green Dragon #6 still in stock

There are just THREE copies left in stock of Green Dragon #6, which was the final issue of a literary journal published by Dye Hard Press from 2002 to 2009. Contributors to this final issue were Alan Finlay, Arja Salafranca, Haidee Kruger, Janet van Eeden, Joop Bersee, Kelwyn Sole, Kobus Moolman, Tania van Schalkwyk, Megan Hall, Cecilia Ferriera, Anton Krueger, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Goodenough Mashego, David wa Maahlamela, Vonani Bila, Mphutlane wa Bofelo, Aryan Kaganof, Neo Molefe Shameeyaa, Colleen Higgs, Gus Ferguson, Brent Meersman, Kai Lossgott, Daniel Browde, Ingrid Andersen, Gary Cummiskey, Mick Raubenheimer and Mxolisi Nyezwa. There were also lyrics from Durban folk group The Litchis.

Copies are available from Dye Hard Press at R80 per copy, including postage, for South Africa only. Overseas is R130, including postage.Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

Copies of Green Dragon #6 still available

There are just SIX copies left in stock of Green Dragon #6, which was the final issue of a literary journal published by Dye Hard Press from 2002 to 2009. Contributors to this final issue were Alan Finlay, Arja Salafranca, Haidee Kruger, Janet van Eeden, Joop Bersee, Kelwyn Sole, Kobus Moolman, Tania van Schalkwyk, Megan Hall, Cecilia Ferriera, Anton Krueger, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Goodenough Mashego, David wa Maahlamela, Vonani Bila, Mphutlane wa Bofelo, Aryan Kaganof, Neo Molefe Shameeyaa, Colleen Higgs, Gus Ferguson, Brent Meersman, Kai Lossgott, Daniel Browde, Ingrid Andersen, Gary Cummiskey, Mick Raubenheimer and Mxolisi Nyezwa. There were also lyrics from Durban folk group The Litchis.

Copies are available from Dye Hard Press at R80 per copy, including postage (South Africa only). Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

An infinite variety of form: A review of Allan Kolski Horwitz's There are Two Birds at my Window

When you scan the title of this volume, you make an important discovery: the personal pronoun is unstressed, and that is the key to appreciating a remarkable poet. The stressed parts are the two birds and the window. The birds symbolise the world and the soul; the window is the threshold, the veil, where art and nature merge. Horwitz is a poet of what Keats called “gusto”, that is a recognition of the necessity of opposites, as binaries (the world) and as paradoxes (the soul).

The first poem, “Mzansi, my Beginning – Mzansi, my End”, alludes to Allen Ginsberg – another Jewish poet a long way from his spiritual home in the desert where you lose yourself to find yourself....Read more here

Protest poetry, by Kulani Nkuna

Allen Kolski Horwitz has to be one of the most erudite writers in post-apartheid South Africa.

Horwitz is an incisive observer of the South African political and social condition through his creative works which include plays like Comrade Babble, poetry, and fiction.

He has produced works with the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group and Botsotso Publishing, which featured voices that seldom get heard in the mainstream.

He has also just released his latest collection of short fiction, Meditations Of A Non-White White, which he describes as “stories that scrape away superficial assumptions; bringing to life a multitude of characters whose issues and concerns have dominated post-1994 South Africa but are in many respects timeless.

"They probe the limitations of middle-class norms and blinkered identities; they grapple with the diverse 
experiences of those living beyond privileged ghettos”.

Another new release is a book of poetry called There Are Two Birds At My Window.

While he is heralded as a political poet, Horwitz also casts his eye over human pleasures, desires, love and struggles.

A poem titled Drunken Need jumps out of the page on an abstract level with an interesting second line that includes the phrase, “tongue-tying muse.”

“Drunken Need is all about the inspiration to write and the intoxication associated with writing,” explains Horwitz.

“There aren’t a lot of experiences that thrill me more than writing something and then marvelling at the end product. And it is funny, because you become inarticulate about that feeling, that rush of creation,” he says.

“That was the real impulse behind this poem. It was almost like an illicit relationship – the tension between the writer and the inspiration to write.

It is at an abstract level, but it is very real to me at the same time.”

Then there are other poems, which speak of the state of South Africa since 1994 like Mzansi, My Beginning – Mzansi My End, which talks of the almost schizophrenic existence of being in South Africa as it is today.

The role of the poet in a post-struggle situation is not as prevalent as during the struggle years, but according to Horwitz, there are injustices that still have to be corrected within the current political dispensation.  

“We have lived through 18 years of the national democratic revolution, which has sharpened  economic inequalities, and instead of making progress in closing the income inequalities, those gaps have widened,” he says.

“It is astonishing that the liberation movement is in power but many people are still stuck in poverty. So my poetry still has that political context and listening to other poets like Lesego Rampolokeng and Nova Masango, you will pick up that political aspect in their work as well. Poetry is not as widespread as it was back then, but its role is still significant.”

Sales of some local authors are not particularly good, with overseas titles achieving more success (think of Fifty Shades Of Grey or the Twilight books).

Horwitz attributes this to South Africa’s disturbing lack of self-regard.

“We still have a colonial culture,” he says.

“We are still dominated by the need for approval regarding what we are doing from the outside, more specifically Europe and the United States. We don’t yet have a full sense of our own value.

“Our inner sense of worth was shattered and Biko recognised that we have not changed fundamental psychological relationships between the coloniser and the colonised.”

(Published in The Citizen, October 29,2012)

In the lead up to the Melville Poetry Festival

Back row: Eleanor Koning, Hans Pienaar, Nicky Naude, Khulile Nxumalo. Front row: Arja Salafranca, Gary Cummiskey, Allan Kolski Horwitz. From Melville-Northcliff Times. 

A review of Allan Kolski Horwitz's There are Two Birds at my Window, by Dorian Haarhoff

There is something of the archer in a poet – letting the arrow fly along the length of an arm. Horwitz’s poems land quivering in many targets.

 Arrows feature in the poems – in San rock art and in a bow drawn beyond breaking point. The 80-plus poems cover a wide range – Addis airport, whales in False Bay, hippos. There are odes to international figures – Neruda, Freud, Kazantzakis – and to South Africans – Abdullah Ibrahim, Ingrid Jonker, Josiah Madsunya – poignant poems.

Then there are the more overt offering - love poems and those that express the continued anger of the protest tradition: forced removals, maintenance courts, Steve Biko, refuges, census.  These perhaps find their strength in performance. Most poems reach their targets.    

(Published in Cape Times, September 14,2012)

BleKSEM, Botsotso and Dye Hard Press launch at De La Creme, Melville, Johannesburg August 7, 2012

Centre, seated, from left: Ike Muila and Siphiwe Ka Ngwenya

The mime artist

Ike Muila

Frank Meintjies and Arja Salafranca

Arja Salafranca

Alan Finlay

Allan Kolski Horwitz

Allan Kolski Horwitz

Richard Fox

Eva Kowalska

Toast Coetzer

Street view on a wintry Johannesburg night - snow had fallen earlier in the day.

Photos: Arja Salafranca and Michelle McGrane

Book launch: donga, There Are Two Birds At My Window, Meditations of a Non-White White and Botsotso #16

New from Dye Hard Press: Meditations of a Non-White White by Allan Kolski Horwitz

Allan Kolski Horwitz’s latest collection of short fiction, Meditations of a Non-White White, scrapes away at superficial assumptions and brings to life a multitude of characters whose issues and concerns have dominated post-1994 South Africa but are in many respects timeless. The stories probe the limitations of middle-class norms and blinkered identities, and grapple with the diverse experiences of those living beyond privileged ghettos. 272 pages.

ISBN: 978-0-9870178-6-4

Estimated retail price is R160. If ordered directly from the publisher, the price is R130, including postage.  

New publication from Dye Hard Press: There Are Two Birds At My Window by Allan Kolski Horwitz

There Are Two Birds At My Window is the latest collection by South African poet Allan Kolski Horwitz.

The poems in this new collection use many elements, touching equally on the “fire and flare of invention” as well as on “the springs of joy and convulsion”. Post-apartheid, neo-liberal South Africa subjects us to enormous pressures; the new society is gasping for air, and the way these contradictions play out in individual lives is uneven and often unexpected. This book bears poetic testimony to the maelstrom – the philosophic mixing with the symbolic, the lyrical with the agitational – being the fruits of a “situated and sensitive” consciousness.

Allan Kolski Horwitz grew up in Cape Town. Between 1974 and 1985 he lived in the Middle East, Europe and North America, returning to South Africa in 1986. Since then he has been based in Johannesburg. He is a member of the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group and Botsotso Publishing.

Previous titles include his poetry collections We Jive Like This and Dirty Washing (with the Botsotso Jesters) and Saving Water, as well his short fiction collections Un/Common Ground and Out of The Wreckage.

Totals 156 pages, with illustrations by James de Villiers.

ISBN: 978-0-9870178-5-7

Will soon be available in bookstores countrywide at an estimated retail price of R130. If ordered directly from the publisher, the price is R100, including postage and packaging.

Comrade Babble: a play by Allan Kolski Horwitz

Allan Kolski Horwitz's play Comrade Babble looks at the life and times of Brett Kebble, the controversial mining magnate who perpetrated the biggest corporate fraud in South African history and then was killed in 2005 in an 'assisted suicide'.

Comrade Babble stars David James and Lebohang Motaung, and will be performed at The Market Laboratory in Newtown, Johannesburg, from May 4 to May 13. Tickets: R70, students and block bookings R40. Telephone 011 832 1641 or 082 512 8188 for more information.

Allan Kolski Horwitz's new collection of poems, There Are Two Birds At My Window, and  new collection of short fiction, Meditations of a Non-White White, are to be published by Dye Hard Press shortly.

Forthcoming titles from Dye Hard Press: There Are Two Birds At My Window and Meditations of a Non-White White, by Allan Kolski Horwitz

There Are Two Birds At My Window is Allan Kolski's Horwitz's new poetry collection, 169 pages. 

Meditations of a Non-White White is Allan Kolski Horwitz's new collection of short fiction, 272 pages.

Both titles are due to be published at the end of April 2012.

Programme for the Melville Poetry Festival, October 15, 2011

Ons Klyntji, August 2011

The latest issue of alternative culture journal Ons Klyntji has been published and contains poetry, prose, interviews and artwork from a wide variety of names including Allan Kolski Horwitz, Aryan Kaganof, Diane Awerbuck, Koos Kombuis, Kai Lossgott, Stacy Hardy, Kleinboer and notably - from my point of view - Fred de Vries's piece on Sinclair Beiles, 'The First Man in Space was a South African'.

Contact Toast Coetzer at info@toastcoetzer.com for details.

A poetic odyssey on wings

It was late 1994 when Alan Finlay told me he’d found a venue for us to read our poems. It was at a monthly event called Odyssey Theatre, at the students’ spot called Wings, in Braamfontein, diagonally across from Wits University and opposite Liberty Life head office.

For our first night there, Alan had told me we would be reading about 6.30, so I had got out there about six, to find the place deserted except for the organisers, Alex and Martin, who told me the evening’s proceedings were starting only at eight – something which bugged me, because I was in the middle of writing exams and had wanted to finish the reading and be home by about 7.30 and start swotting. When Alan arrived he also seemed put out by this news, but what the hell, we were there, so we might as well go with the flow.

Before Alan had pitched up there was another young guy hanging around, with a guitar, a rather quiet, shy type; for some reason he had also pitched up too early. We smoked a cigarette together and got chatting. His name was Matthew van der Want and it was his first gig, as I recall. It was my first reading and I was a nervous wreck but as Matthew pointed out, it was good to be nervous because it built up adrenalin.

By about 7.30 the crowds – mainly students, of course – were beginning to pile in and the empty beer bottles on our table were beginning to pile up. There had been a poster advertising the event, highlighting the appearance of “Four Poets On A Mission”, naming Alan Finlay, Robert Homem, Robert Berold and myself, though actually neither Homem nor Berold were there. Allan Kolski Horwitz and Anna Varney also read that night, and it was the first that I met them.

Odyssey Theatre was a mixture of music, poetry and performance – but mainly music. The first act that night was some hectic band, I can’t remember what their name was but they were damn loud – Allan and Anna sat with their fingers in their ears. While the band played some guy at the back of the stage was doing a painting, and at the end of the act he handed to the painting to someone in the audience.

One of the highlights of the evening though was Matthew and that first night he sang The Ville Blues, which was later to be published in the poetry anthology The Heart in Exile. I loved the lines:

But if I hear another pinball machine
If I hear another schoolgirl scream
If I hear another cafe owner’s dream
I think I’m gonna crack
In Rosettenville.

By the time I got onstage, about 9ish, I was almost staggering but at least all the beers had helped my hands from shaking. It was weird getting up on stage and staring into the darkness, you just couldn’t see anyone, only hear cheers or laughter – and of course the applause. It was encouraging and what was even better was that we got a bit of payment for our performance.

It was an exciting time. The first democratic elections had happened in April and a much-feared civil war did not occur. Nelson Mandela was president and there was a sense of relief and euphoria. South Africa was going forward and there was a tremendous amount of creative energy. There was a burst of small presses on the scene – Roy Blumenthal’s Barefoot Press, Botsotso, Bleksem, Something Quarterly and I had started up Dye Hard Press. The audiences at Wings were interested in what we had to read and publish; there was a receptiveness to a poetry that was different from what people had been taught at school and they welcomed our voices.

The Odyssey Theatre carried on for about eight months, I think, though I did not attend all the events. There was a lot of poetry being read, much of which found its way into the pages of Bleksem. There were poets such as John Cumming, a tall guy, who read hilarious poems such as this one about cocaine:

Diamonds are forever
Like de Beers in Angola
But the coke we love to import
Isn’t: ALWAYS COCA-COLA

There was a very quiet guy named John Raubenheimer, He had been a journalist and had resigned in order to try to live full time by his creative writing; and now I wonder what became of him. Then there was Brett Locke, who read his nakedly honest gay poems about desire and loneliness – poems he later collected into a small chapbook called 13 Poems for The Superstitious.

Looking back, there seemed to be a definite lack of black poets and performers at the venue. I think it was mainly a white line-up. Even though Botsotso Jesters Allan and Anna performed, I don’t think I ever saw the other members of the group – IkeMboneni Muila, Siphiwe Ka Ngwenya and Isabella Motadinyane - perform there.

I also remember a hectic performance group who did weird pieces with hecticl music and flicker lights. Alex reminded me just last week that they were called Breinskade. I remember asking one of the performers what inspired their pieces and he replied:” Lotsa drugs, man, lotsa drugs!”

There was also the MC, Cito, who used to talk with what seemed like a put-on American accent – this being a time when there were quite a few imitation Jim Morrisons running around Johannesburg. Cito, however came from Pretoria.

I recall the names of Battery 9 and Chris Chameleon being passed around at the Theatre, but I am not sure if they ever performed there, or if they did, maybe it was one of the nights when I did not attend.

Whom I do remember very clearly was a blues player called Black Paul, who would have difficulty getting off the stage. "Just one last song!” he’d say after hogging the stage for about half an hour, then just carry on playing more and more songs. It was annoying as it threw the whole schedule out, and some people - I think myself on one occasion – who were scheduled to read at 9 only got on stage at 11. I heard that once it was so bad they pulled the lights on him.

So the Theatre rolled on for months but eventually I felt there was a drop in energy becoming evident. At the last reading I gave at the Theatre there was a definite change in vibe. The audience was bad; they talked all the way through the first performance, a woman singing softly and playing on keyboards. When I got up to read it was the same thing – I could just hear talking and I at one point I was tempted to just stop and give it a miss, but I carried on to the end. There was clearly no interest in what I was saying.

It was probably also around this time that the initial euphoria of the elections began to wear off. Violent crime was rearing its head and a huge sense of fear was settling in. At work almost every day someone told of themselves or a family member or of a friend being robbed, hijacked, raped, assaulted or even murdered. The economy was going to pieces, interest rates rising and job creation not occurring. Emigration was becoming a hot topic.

By the end of the 1990s there was also a decrease in the number of literary journals appearing, and of those small presses that started up in Johannesburg during the period of the Odyssey Theatre only Dye Hard Press and Botsotso remain – and even I axed Dye Hard temporarily in 1999. There was also a drop in poetry reading venues in the area, although Pretoria’s Up The Creek took up the mantle for a while. I don’t think that in the past 10 years or so Johannesburg has had anything to replace what was happening back then at Wings.

For me, the Odyssey Theatre was an inspiring experience at a time when poetic and innovative creativity was welcomed more easily and audiences were more receptive, interested and engaging. But perhaps the time was also more innocent – it was certainly more hopeful - and in various ways I was naive about what was happening and what could be achieved.

Poetry Africa 2008

With Allan Kolski Horwitz and Mxolisi Nyezwa

(Photo: Pravasan Pillay)

No flash in the pan, this fiction

Review of 100 Papers, Liesl Jobson, Botsotso Publishing, Out of the Wreckage, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Botsotso Publishing, Botsotso 15: Jozi Spoken Word Special Edition

Flash fiction — essentially a very short story, which can range from about 10 lines to four pages — might be regarded as the ideal kind of genre for our rushed, fast-paced times. But it is as ancient as Aesop, and was practised by writers such as Anton Chekhov and Ernest Hemingway.

South African Liesl Jobson has just published her debut volume, 100 Papers, which consists of 100 prose poems and flash fiction pieces. The opening piece in her collection, Shopping List, sets the tone for many of the other stories with its strong sense of the understated, of what is not being said, of unspoken and unresolved tensions.

It also introduces the theme of relationships, motherhood and loneliness, although some of the stories are fairly lighthearted, such as How the Oreo Stole Christmas and Bridgework.

And, not surprisingly, considering Jobson’s career as a bassoonist, many of them feature orchestral musicians, such as Bassoon Lesson, Perfect Timing, Zebra Breath, and She Cannot Love Her Own Air.

Notable flash fiction pieces in the collection are Litter-Bugs, Spider Salad, Bump, Saviour, Cell, My Mother’s Diary, Vessel and Green Socks, White Lies.

But the strongest items are the prose poems, such as Naysayers, A Hundred Times a Day, In the Biscuits, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, The Corner of My Eye, and Under My SAPS Star, though sometimes the distinction between the very short flash fictions and the prose poems are not so clear, such as with Cell — a mere 17 lines and clearly a narrative — and Vessel, which is one-and-a-half pages but reads like a prose poem.

This is a welcomed debut volume. A slight problem is the fact that the strongest pieces are mainly in the second half.

Botsotso editor Allan Kolski Horwitz’s Out of the Wreckage is also a collection of very short fiction, predominantly a series of “dream parables” involving a male character named Abel.
They are surreal tales which the blurb says consist of “the dream-like; the waking fantasy; the reverie; the parable that instructs; the story that informs … the dream that saves the dreamer”.

Like Jobson’s volume, most of the pieces are not longer than three to four pages, and one piece, Excursion, is only 19 lines. Some are more conventional short-story narratives, two of which — Blue and Ashford — appeared in a previous Botsotso anthology of short fiction, Unity in Flight.

The collection starts off promisingly with The President, a powerful, all-too-familiar story of a despot determined to hold onto power while his country goes to ruin.

Despite the dream-like atmosphere throughout the volume, the realities of a contemporary violent society are sometimes not too far away — one of the pieces is called War Time.

While some of the other dream parables are strong — such as Discover, The Dog, Accidents, Out of the Wreckage, The Festival and She Was Taken Captive — the most rewarding pieces are the more conventional stories, such as The Tap Plant, A Faraway Shopping Centre, Four Seasons, Gerhard, Blue, Ashford, Mystery in the Cottage and She Whom I Love.

The concept of the dream narrative is fascinating, but the overall feeling with Out of the Wreckage is that of overkill. If the number of dream parables had been reduced, or if there were more conventional stories to create a balance, the book might have been more effective.

The 15th issue of literary journal Botsotso is a special edition, with about half of its 200 pages selections of material presented at the first Jozi Spoken Word festival, which took place over four days at Wits University last year.

There is commentary from critics such as Anthea Buys and Darryl Accone and papers on Who Makes or Breaks the Canon? by James Ogude and Rosemary Gray, which were originally part of a panel discussion at the festival.

There are poems by Angifi Dladla, Hugh Lewin, Mak Manaka, Ike Mboneni Muila, Siphiwe ka Ngwenya, Peter Horn, Mphutlane wa Bofelo and Dennis Brutus, as well as short fiction by Achmat Dangor, Horwitz and Jobson.

The second section contains new work ranging from short fiction by Zukiswa Wanner, Jean-Francois Kouadio, Hlengiwe Mnguni and Arja Salafranca, to poetry from Alan Finlay, Brent Meersman, Elizabeth Trew and Dave Stevens.

The volume is illustrated throughout with a powerful graphics series called Xnau by Garth Erasmus, which are the result of flame on paper and show mysterious black and white shapes suggesting figures or skeleton-like bones.

In SA, where literary journals are scarce and constantly struggling for survival, it is encouraging to see Botsotso not only still publishing, but also growing stronger and publishing such rewarding, innovative and imaginative work.

(First published in The Weekender September 20, 2008)