I MUST SHOW YOU MY CLIPPINGS

79pp

Poetry and illustrations by Jensma with numerous illustrations by Jensma. This publication has become scarce. Stiff glossy illustrated wraps which show some edge wear, especially along the spine.

There is an old water mark stain on both the front and the back cover, which affects the pages to some degree with a slight ripple. 

Wopko Jensma was a South African poet and artist. Born in 1939 in Ventersdorp in the Transvaal, he grew up in Middleburg in the Eastern Cape. Between 1961 and 1964, Jensma pursued a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree (sculpture) from the University of Pretoria. In 1965, he was enrolled in a Teacher’s Diploma at the University of Potchefstroom but had to abandon it due to a motorcycle accident. After his recovery, Jensma travelled through Africa, settling for a time in Botswana with his wife, Lydia, and their three children. The family was unable to live in South Africa during this time because theirs was an interracial marriage, illegal in the country during apartheid. Through his art and poetry, Jensma conveyed his deep criticism of the apartheid regime. He produced drawings, woodcuts, linocuts, and other works on paper in an abstract style.

Jensma and his wife split up in the late 1960s and he returned to South Africa, settling in Johannesburg. The artist suffered from schizophrenia and by the late 1980s, he was living in the Salvation Army Men’s Home in Simmonds Street, Johannesburg. He disappeared without a trace in August 1993.

In the  Part Pattern Whole: What Matters Most in Wopko Jensma's Visual Poetry Eva Kowalska discusses unpublished visual poems by Woko Jensma alongside similar work from his last collection, I Must Show You My Clippings (1977). She writes: "While Jensma is known as both an innovative writer and skilled artist and designer, it is the combined influences of these disciplines which make his visual poetry interesting. By placing these particular poems within global and local literary-historical contexts, and situating their specific modes of signification within a theoretical framework, I explain the ways in which Jensma's visual poems work as both semantic and semiotic texts".

"Wopko Jensma's visual poetry is significantly less well known than either his graphic art or his more conventionally written blank verse. He is remembered rather for his longer, stronger-voiced pieces such as "Spanner in the What? Works." However, possibly because he was also an artist and designer, Jensma's writing displays a keen sense of line, shape and texture, and a constant awareness of the typed page as a picture plane. These tendencies are well suited to visual poetry. Of the three poems by Jensma that I will discuss, one, titled "Kniediep in die Kak," appeared in Jensma's last book of poetry, I Must Show You My Clippings (1977), regarded either as his least accomplished or most experimental collection."

Source: Eva Kowalska - Abstract of Part Pattern Whole: What Matters Most in Wopko Jensma's Visual Poetry (www.jstor.org/stable/26359417)