Interview by T. Liem with Ockert Greeff // Winner of the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award (No. 39)

Congratulations on winning the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award with A Mass Choir of Little Things!

T. Liem: In this work images and memories accumulate with a weighted pace, whole stanzas repeat like time-slowing refrains, and certain words become chant-like as in “A Letter from The Sea” with sea and see. This feels like a particular kind of musicality. Would you talk about where your experience as a drummer intersects with your experience of composing poetry?

Ockert Greeff: Thank you.
I often try to write poetry that can be read as spoken songs. For me the key to shape poetry into a song-like state is time. I use time to carve out a riverbed through which the poem can flow.

I’m taking this word “time” from my drumming vocabulary. Time is a lot more than just metre and rhythm.  Words and melodies themselves have their own internal rhythm—but that is not exactly what I’m referring to. Underneath the metre of the words, which is what most people reference when they talk about rhythm in poetry, there is a pace and a feel. Musicians commonly talk about this as “time”. For drummers, and probably all musicians, this is foundational. Drummers want to be able to feel the time and dictate it. This concept of time is also more than tempo, as the tempo can change within the time. If you listen to Tony Williams with Miles… some of those tunes finish a good twenty beats per minute faster than they start. But it is not noticeable. You literally have to move the pickup, or jump forward in the song to hear it. So, I try to write poetry that implies a time that runs under the words. One can think of it as the flow of the poem, and the metre and rhythm of the words are the ripples on top.

TL: A Mass Choir of Little Things examines its subjects the way one might examine old photographs, revealing grief and awe, but also, somehow, slight movement within the frame. A man is observed so carefully that “His feet hanging motionless in the air / Frozen for brief moments / Before coming down on the earth / Softly, carefully.” How do you think about stillness or, what is important about capturing it?

OG: Many of my poems play like small movies in my mind. Or slides from a slide projector. I try to capture those images as simply as possible, without getting in the way with word gymnastics. I try to make the words permeable—a thin membrane between the images and the reader. I think our experience of the world is in the first instance bodily. As our bodies move through time, every single moment implies the time before and points towards the time ahead. There is probably a reason that the phrase “A moment in time” is so pervasive. I think that narrowing in on the frames in a series of events, is a way of boiling the experience down to a thought or feeling that is so strong in its simplicity that is does not lose its link to what went before and what might come after. It is strong, partly because of its simplicity, not despite its simplicity. I think it is because the stillness, the simplicity, removes detail and noise which might obscure the link with the past and what comes after.

TL: I’d like to ask about the connections between the “dark mass” in “The Boy Who Could Not Give Up,” the “mass choir” of the title poem, and perhaps the “wayward choir.” There is a sense, in these moments, of being subsumed in sound, but also in the unknown. The speaker in one poem notices how his mother “turns her eyes away / as if she knows or feels something / That she does not want me to see.” Would you talk about the mass and the choir, or, perhaps, this intuitive tuning of your poems towards things that can feel unknowable?

OG: This is such a good question. I know that I do this in my poetry, but I have never tried to explain it.

I’m happy to call the dimension that I’m trying to tune into the unknowable.  Although there are of course many different types of knowledge. We can think of knowing-that, knowing-how, empirical knowledge, etc. Of all the different types of knowledge, I’m least drawn to what Foucault called power-knowledge and discursive knowledge.

I would rather be the one that grabs readers by the hand and pulls them along, to show them something I think I’ve seen, or heard, or felt. And if they come with me, I will take them closer to this thing we cannot know, right up to it and say “Now would you look at that…”

One might call this unknowable dimension the un-sayable. Not in the sense that we are not allowed to say it, but that we cannot say it. And if we attempt to, we might vaporise it. But we can try to take people there and show it to them, without telling them how to think about it. The attempt to articulate inherently changes the nature of the observed. I prefer to tread lightly when I approach the unknowable.

TL: Another thing that struck me about your chapbook was the attention to the body. “Shoulders bend forward,” “his belly drooping,” “Butterflies in his leathery face,” and so on. These close-up views of skin and limbs seem to connect to a confrontation with aging and mortality, but also intimacy. What draws you to these kinds of images?

OG: Yes! I’ve referred to the body in an earlier answer as well. At the risk of stating the obvious, we do experience the world, and even ourselves through a body. Perhaps there are other dimensions, but this is the dimension I am most acutely aware of. For me, it is simply the best and most accurate way to describe the internal world, as well as our histories. I try not to insert myself in between the reader and the scene. The shape of a limb can often tell us far more about a person’s emotions and life than speculating about their thoughts. I’d rather to leave my own speculations and beliefs out of it. And of course, a body can be so sad and fragile that you simply cannot NOT write about it.

TL: In your bio, you write that “in some sense, [your] work is Afrikaans but written in English.” This is an interesting idea as it leaves me wondering if you are thinking of syntactic structures or cadences, vocabulary, idiom, etc. or, of course, something else entirely. Would you elaborate on this?

OG: Andries Bezuidenhout, my friend and bandmate from Die Brixton Moord en Roof Orkes, made me realise this.  Andries is an Afrikaans poet, musician and painter and he said that it felt like he read Afrikaans, after he had read some of my English poems.

I think the most obvious influence has to do with tenses. There are only three tenses in Afrikaans: present, past and future. That does not mean Afrikaans cannot convey the idea of other tenses— we simply do not use tenses to do it (mostly auxiliary verbs and context). My poetry for the most part sticks to those three tenses and I love using the simple present tense, as I feel that it implies all the other tenses and allows the reader to get closer to the scene. One can describe Afrikaans as a modern language that has rid herself of many seemingly superfluous trappings, such as conjugations. For me, Afrikaans feels like a scaffold, a skeleton onto which I can climb and get to places. That is how I write English poetry as well. And then the sound of Afrikaans does have a percussive and guttural quality. Many Afrikaans people, including myself, carry that over into the sound of their spoken English. When I write, I’m still keenly aware of those strong consonants (the trilled and rolled “r” and the softer “s” and the bright “c”) which I experience as a kind of clave embedded in the sound. Most importantly, however, I feel that Afrikaans has a no-nonsense earthy quality to it. That’s why I try to use the simplest words I can muster, to tell on things I’ve seen, while allowing those things to remain un-sayable and only lightly touched by my telling.

Thanks Ockert!

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T. Liem is the author of Slows: Twice(Coach House 2023), and Obits. (Coach House, 2018). Their writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Malahat Review, The FiddleheadVallum, and elsewhere. They live in Montreal / Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.

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Photo Credit: Surah Field-Green

Ockert Greeff is a South African Canadian poet and percussionist inspired by the early traditions of storytelling and drumming. He uses language and chorus as a thin membrane to connect to scenes and tellings, often stripped down to archetype and rooted in his Afrikaans mother tongue. In some sense, his work is Afrikaans but written in English. Born in Namibia and raised in a small town in the Kalahari Desert, he earned his BA Hons. in Afrikaans Literature before settling in Johannesburg, where he was co-founder and drummer of the Afrikaans cult band Die Brixton Moord en Roof Orkes. In Montreal, Canada, he has recorded with underground bands such as Light Bulb Alley, Sawtooth, and Death Drive. His poetry drumming work can be found online and has been shown at various poetry film festivals, including the Raleigh Film & Art Festival and the Small File Media Festival at Simon Fraser University. His poems have placed with honors among the Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards and as a finalist with New Ohio Review and Vallum Poetry Awards. His poetry can also be read in New Ohio Review, Literary Review of Canada (forthcoming), Ons Klyntji (South Africa), South Florida Poetry Journal, Permafrost, Thimble Literary Magazine, and others.