All down the line: Permutation poetry in three South African journals, 1965–1975

Abstract

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the literary journals Wurm, Ophir and Izwi published a significant amount of formally experimental poetry by several local as well as a few European writers. This work included the specialised forms of procedural and permutation poetry, which were popular internationally during this time frame, but which also fall into a longer tradition of concrete poetry and related forms. In the following article, I explain these specific forms in relation to a global literary-historical framework. I then provide an overview of all of the permutation and procedural poetry published by these three periodicals within the decade, 1965–1975, and offer a descriptive analysis of the texts concerned.

Keywords: South African poetry, constrained poetry, procedural poetry, experimental literature, South African literary journals