Biography:
Mark Espin was born in Cape Town in 1964. He is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. His first volume of poems, Falling from Sleep, was published by Botsotso Publishing in 2007.
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Journal Entry
I read wildly; theory and rhetoric, banal critiques disembowelled like carrion; occasionally, lyrical shards, brittle and precious like mountain water. At other times I listen repeatedly to Coltrane’s Naima; note its eternal poignancy, its rendering of compassion. I consume coffee, obsessions and paper without the means of replenishing what has been depleted. My hairline recedes. Love is difficult when ritual makes the body an object of athletic performance. Small appliances give up the ghost short-circuited by a redundant fuse or excessive use. Sleek pens run out of ink halfway through a letter to a friend. Dead revolutionaries, now more romantic than provocative, adorn innocuous fashions. During the middle of the night I hear the refrigerator’s exertions; the unreliably laboured cycles of generator, while struggling with the grave tone of prosaic lines made up simultaneously. I give up on the night; on hope of deciphering ciphers in the constellations. Redemption may not be in meanings, only in the sensuous possibilities of language.
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