Wopko Jensma: en ebullient, reckless spender of words

Abstract

Wopko Jensma’s three volumes of poetry, Sing for Our Execution (1973), Where White is the Colour, Where Black is the Number (1974), and I Must Show You My Clippings (1977), together with his unpublished manuscript ‘Blood and More Blood’, constitute an interesting and idiosyncratic response to the strife and turmoil in South Africa in the 1970s. His experimental poetry harnesses the signatures of jazz lyrics, concrete poetry, the avant-garde as well as African dance forms in bizarre cameos of underclass misery and racial oppression. In lieu of metrical regularity and rhyme the aesthetic experience is simulated by asemantic qualities of speech, sound, and rhythmic undulations in a poetry characterized by a ‘withdrawal of semantic crutches’. Jensma’s diction of private idiomatic language, the use of syncopation, neologisms, portmanteau words, disparate argots, syntactic dislocation, fragmentation, and experimental typography express an insurgent, anti-authoritarian politics which has significant shared affinities with the Beat poetic canon. Protest against state oppression, consumer culture, materialism and the privileging of the underclasses and everyday experiences are key motifs in his poetry and resonate with Beat counterculture. The use of anaphora and repetition also foreground the surreal and hallucinogenic nature of his poetry. Although written predominantly in English and Afrikaans, Jensma’s poetry draws on multiple languages and township argot, as well as an Americanized slang influenced by the rhythms and lexical items of jazz. Jensma’s poetry is also an imaginative critique of ‘constituted realities’ and its ambient ideologies which have exiled the other outside the pale of common humanity.