Sunday 3 January 2021

Donatella du Plessis : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Shabbir Banoobhai. 

When I first started reading Banoobhai’s work in high school, the images in my head would always appear as through a lens made of blue glass. He made me see that poetry could have colour in ways that were different from what I expected, or from what I had been taught to expect. I should point out, however, that since then I have never had the same experience with any colour other than blue, and that only certain poets have this colour. Ezra Pound's rip-offs of Li Bai are blue. So is Pound's own poetry. Li Bai, on the other hand, is not blue at all; at least not in any of the translations I have read.

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