Damian Garside - a short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author.
Damian Garside (1953) was born in Manchester,
England. With his family, he emigrated to South Africa in
1964, went to school at Settlers’ High, Bellville,
and
thereafter to UCT, the University of Manchester and back
to UCT again. Garside taught English at the University of
Durban-Westville, has worked in university administration
and is currently senior lecturer in Culture, Communication
and Media Studies. Garside likes film, sports (soccer,
American Football), strategy games, philosophy, quantum
theory and cosmology, modernist poetry, satire and the
17th/18th century ‘line of wit’, French
symbolist poetry.
Since the early 1980s Garside has been published in
New Coin, New Contrast,
UpStream, Scrutiny2, English Academy
Review, Carapace,
Illuminations (USA) and Botsotso. His poems
appear in the following anthologies:
Poetry in South Africa/Suid Afrika in Poesie,
The Paperback of South African English Poetry,
Twenty-Five Years of New Coin and Broken
Strings: The Politics of Poetry in South Africa.
In 2004 Zoe Molver and David Basckin, who two years
previously had made a documentary film about the late
great Durban poet Douglas Livingstone, made a film on
Garside, in which he was interviewed regarding aspects of
his writing and his views on a number of issues pertaining
to the practice of poetry in South Africa today. The film,
entitled
Rough-Cut in Orange was shot at night at the the
harbour (close to the BAT Centre) and during the day at
the Umgeni River estuary. The film forms part of the
collection of films Molver and Basckin have made on Durban
writers that is housed in the collections of the National
English Language Museum in Grahamstown. Selected Work"The following poem was written about 5 years ago
and was written in a shocked response to the decision to
close the Fine Arts Department at the University of Durban
Westville (now the Westville campus of the University of
KwaZulu-Natal), where I had (at that point) been teaching
for 20 years. The bold print includes graffiti that
appeared on the walls of the Fine Art Building (now the
Govan Mbeki Centre before its closure)."
Lost City
"and in the end one learns to
manipulate bits of the system
like so many parts of a machine" Edward Said
Sleep tite
tomorrow will bring a dawn of
110% African, Ms World loveliness.
You don't need no Pink Floyd Wall to tell you
beauty is in
the eye of the sponsor;
he has
a superabundance of corporate imagination,
more than enough
for your little head
and will not cost
no Venus arm or De
Milo leg
(learn this, discard all else!).
Whilst and even as
in the former apartheid institution
of my home town
(where at long last I can safely confess
to have worked)
graffiti on the stairs leading to the (foreclosed) Fine
Arts atrium
proclaim this space truly indigenous
home-grown, with a vengeance:
philistine who enter
at your peril
welcome to
our arty world
we won't move
ons phola
hier
dis onse
plek.
It will take gallons of solvent to dissolve such
impudence
scrub the place clean of these
and other vibrant hieroglyphics
signs of a lost civilization if ever there were one. - Durban -
- Index -
For more information please visit
KZN Literary
Tourism
|
|
