Jacques Coetzee​: The Colours of Our Flag was published in 2016, but it feels as timely and relevant now as ever. Would you like to say something about what this title meant to you when you chose it, and what it means to you today? What kind of response have you had to the anthology since it was published?

Allan Koski Horwitz: I chose this title because I think the new South African flag is a very striking and vibrant combination of colours and shapes. The official history is that the six colours are drawn from the flags of the ANC, the Boer republics and the Union Jack. But my reaction has always been on the symbolic level, and this relates to the associations they awaken with the natural world and our senses. At the time, I was trying to counter-act a growing sense of foreboding, not only about the direction our country has been taking, but in global terms, in relation to growing economic disparities and looming climate change. So I was searching for an affirmative title even though my gut feel was that things are actually on a downward slide. By and large, the politics of crisis continues though I remain committed to our country and African responses to international power games.
Reader reactions to the collection have been positive in that the poems cover a wide range of themes, and those that are provocative, if not agitational, do so in a fairly nuanced way. The collages created by James de Villiers are also very strong additions to the poems, and I am thankful to him for his imaginative pairings.

All of these poems reward repeated reading, and at the same time many of them feel as if they are written for performance as much as for the page. Could you say something about your approach to writing them, and how you imagined your audience at the time?

For most of my ‘poetic’ life, I have tried to present my work as dynamically as possible and to utilize the drama of live performance – and thus avoid the cliché of the mumbling poet hunched over a laptop or lecturn! However, most of these poems were not written with performance specifically in mind. In my case, presenting them for performance is made easier because a key feature of my work is its sense of rhythm. I try to be sensitive to line breaks so that the sound of words and their combinations helps elucidate their meaning. Most of my poems are thus easy to ‘’lift off the page’’, constructed as they are, of word patterns/sequences that lend themselves to vocalization. Moreover, I choose carefully when presenting a live ‘set’.
In general, I want a wide range of listeners to find the work accessible. As a result, the dramatic element is often accentuated although, to ensure variety, quieter, more contemplative poems are also included.

The book opens with a vision of Johannesburg, both as it is and as it might be, and several subsequent poems, featuring recorded or imagined conversations, are set there. What, if anything, does it mean to you as a poet to celebrate World Cities Day, and how can we celebrate it more consciously and imaginatively?

Johannesburg (where I have lived for 40 years) is a vibrant but strained magnet for people across southern Africa. Founded as a gold mining camp a hundred and forty years ago, its wealth was generated by ultra cheap black labour in the service of Anglo-American capital. It is a city that still reflects this tortured and unequal background whilst harbouring the expectation that it will one day recognise itself as a truly pan-African city and do justice to its position as a key economic and cultural hub.
As such, given its importance but precarious identity, World Cities Day should focus on the massive challenges facing the contemporary metropolis, particularly in the global south. On the global level, it should examine the general failure to deal with migration in a way that incorporates newcomers in a holistic manner instead of abandoning them to the periphery or allowing them to congregate in poorly serviced inner city areas that quickly become slums. The diversity and energy that such cities offer should be highlighted as well as their degenerating infrastructure. Urbanization is a key feature of capitalist society with the result that mega-cities are mushrooming. As an artist, these giant cities both excite and frighten me: their scale is daunting and the sense of alienation that comes with expansion and competition for resources is a real drawback. World Cities Day should seek to introduce all urban residents to these issues and not just point to tourism as a vital feature of metropolitan life.

One of my favourite poems here is Thank Full, in which you imagine an unequal conversation between two men, arguably two storytellers. Would you like to say more about this particular poem, and how it came to be written?

‘’Thank Full’’ was based on a ‘real’ incident. I live in Yeoville, Johannesburg where poverty is rife though not on the scale of the ‘ínformal settlements’ that ring the city. In this poem, the middle-aged, white man calling me to my front gate gives me a well-rehearsed pitch for money. In this case, it is based on a fabricated emergency involving a sick son and lack of petrol to get him to hospital. I, being generally sympathetic to such requests, gave him R20. But when he called me back pleading for more, my patience was exhausted – charity can only be dispensed to a limited extent. And so, still full of the clamour of my barking dogs, I sat down to write out this encounter (and poem) and explore the fraught and tenuous relations between those who have some resources and those who have little or none and try to cajole/extract (extort!) from the haves.

In the second-last poem, you are driving bac home after a political education workshop in a poor area. Remembering a young man’s comment that humans are “rotten with the apple we ate”, you think: “perhaps we haven’t eaten enough…” Clearly you are thinking of action-driven, activist political education at that moment, but of course a poem like this is also meant to inspire and feed the imagination. Would you like to say something about the relationship between poetry and activism in your work as a whole?

The urge to write poetry generally wells up from a need to express and/or unburden the ‘’soul’ of its sense of beauty, sorrow and love of life. This urge to make art can restrict itself to the struggles/celebrations of the individual ego or also embrace solidarity and concern for others. If the poet has a social conscience, then s/he will intuitively begin to write about both the joys and the suffering of others. This will not necessarily follow an ideological line but will seek to immerse the poet in the lived experience of his/her subjects. Such an approach should be imaginative in that one is projecting the experience of others and doing so in the hope that such projections are accurate and authentic.
As a product of the early apartheid period (I grew up in the 1950’s –60’s), I witnessed the absolute immorality of a fascist-type system; this was augmented by my mother having survived the Nazi extermination machine. I was therefore very sensitive to social injustice, if not calamity, brought about in the face of apathy and enforced by violence. I was obsessed with the seemingly random nature of evil that could overnight deprive entirely innocent civilians of their homes and possessions, if not their very lives. Over the past two years we have seen how this has happened to hundreds of thousands trapped in the concentration camp named Gaza. I find myself very opposed to the aesthetic of ‘’art for art’s sake’, in that responsible human beings ought to make some effort to transcend subjectivity and engage with those living with them. This does not mean ignoring the intimate and the personal – but does require showing sensitivity to wider issues so that the saying ‘no (hu)man is an island’’ is practised by artists as much as social activists.

Is there a question I haven’t asked that you would like to answer? What is that question, and what is your answer to it?

My chosen unasked question is: what chemistry makes every reading, whether of seasoned or raw poets, ignite with at least some moments of unique intensity and truth? Why is it that this type of verbal expression (poetry) has the ability to capture these rare and beautiful ideas/atmospheres?
And my answer is that the mystery of language, gesture and tone continues to fascinate me and ensure that I never tire of readings, and always anticipate those special moments when the Word is magnified, and the audience breathes as one with the poet who ushers them into a unique zone that amplifies material reality, and provides a sense of unity and insight into human situations and emotions.