Ecca Poets: Poets in the audience

The Ecca poets at their newest book Unplanned Hour's launch
in Grahamstown (back row, from left) Cathal Lagan, Silke Heiss,
Norman Morrissey and Quentin Hogge.
In the foreground Brian Walter (Photo by Ruth Woudstra)

Article of Ecca's book launch, 9 March 2013 - By Ruth Woudstra

Poets in the audience

Norman Morrissey is not put off by a small audience. Even less by the fact that the majority are poets. On the contrary, he welcomes the “very good number of fifteen people” who attended the launch of Unplanned Hour, the 17^th Ecca poetry collection.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had so many poets before,” says Morrissey of the launch held at Yellow House in Grahamstown on 9 March. As editor of the collection, he considers the evening to have been a very pleasant experience, because he felt the audience as inclined to “get what we’ve got to offer.”

But the Ecca poets didn’t start out with the intention of writing for poets. Named after the pass between Grahamstown and Alice, where founding members Norman Morrissey, Brian Walter, Cathal Lagan and the late Basil Somhlahlo were based in the eighties, the group identified an acute need to make poetry interesting for people who were unfamiliar with it. According to Morrissey, the four saw that English poetry could and did enrich students at Fort Hare University who were unfamiliar with the tradition. This sometimes happened against their own expectations. Walter adds that the poets were naturally writing for themselves, each other, and for the joy of collectively developing their own creativity.

Since 1989 they have published nearly one collection of poetry a year and have read for varied audiences, mostly in the Eastern Cape. The collective has expanded in number and gender to nine poets, four of whom are women. Eight of the poets contributed towards the latest collection, with five of them reading their poetry at the launch.

Environmental and reflective themes were very evident in the poems that were read, as well as the close relationships between the poets themselves who are clearly drawn together for the love of the art. Declining to place any emphasis on selling the collection to the audience, Morrissey closed the evening by simply thanking those present for “putting this last book of ours onto the waters.”

He was referring to a poem in Unplanned Hour entitled ‘To the audience’ by Silke Heiss, who joined the group in 2012. It was written in response to the audience reaction to an Ecca reading at the Wiles Gallery in Bathurst in October last year:

Your ears

made the boat,

and they made

the water –

your listening

rocked me,

and I thank you.

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Here the five poets in action at Yellow House in Grahamstown (photos by Ruth Woudstra) >