Ah yes. A wonderful Saturday spent in the library wandering through the seemingly endless and uniform shelves...looking for something to clarify Sheila Cussons' poetry. At the moment its gotten to the point where I don't want to see another literary book or poetry anthology in my entire life. I am sick and tired of all this pretention...of people being hailed "the most influential poet" or "most prolific writer of their time" . I fail to see how one person could garner so much acclaim simply by writing something that, to the naked eye, seems pretty straight forward and uninteresting.

van Wyk Louw (who, we find out now, was a total player and cheated on his wife) (and he wasnt even that attractive) , Opperman and Jonker being the prime examples here. Jonker's poetry was lyrical, beautiful and at times sad. van Wyk Louw's was largely uninterpretable. Opperman refused to make use of poetic oddities, leaving it terribly plain. Im not saying they we'rent good writers. Im just saying that people are taking this poetry things wwaaayyy to seriously.

This reminds me of Zoolander, where they interview Hansel and he says "I like Sting. I don't listen to his music, but the fact that he's making it...i like that."

That's how I think of the poetic world. People love them because they're poets. Not because they move people with their poetry.