Rough Music
Ari Sitas
Rough Music: Selected Poems 1989-2013 is a selection of poems from the nine books and manuscripts written by Ari Sitas between 1989 and 2013, in poetic forms that range from exuberant jazz-like improvisations to astringent political observation, humorous dialogues and diary-like narratives.
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[Sitas’s] close involvement in the workers’ movement is evident in [his] own poetry: it teems with references to the lives and spaces of the marginalised, but not as artifice, a nod to political correctness. Rather, there is a fulsomeness to the world represented in his poetry that teems in contrast to the almost misanthropic silences and blind spots of much South African poetry caught in narrow, unseeing class perspectives. And it carries the ring of truth of someone who moves through these spaces, who knows the people.
The poetry is alive with much else as well – the grotesque and the carnivalesque, the smells and sights of the world as it obtains in South Africa, especially Durban (most of his poetry), Ethiopia in Slave Trades (2000), or Cyprus and Greece in Rhythmskewed (1991); Sitas was born in Cyprus.
– Rustum Kozain, New Coin
Date of publication: 2013
ISBN 978-0-9870282-2-8 / ebook ISBN 978-1-928476-18-4
160 pages
215 x 150mm
R180.00
Ari Sitas 2022 © Rhoda Isaacs
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Ari Sitas is a sociologist, a poet, a multi-genre artist and a civil society activist. He has been a university social science teacher and thinker, and his contribution to humanistic scholarship in this field has received widespread recognition. Books published
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Additional information
| Weight | 0.5 kg |
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Interviews & Articles
Interview with Ari Sitas by Robert Berold New Coin, 1995 text PDF
Interview with Ari Sitas by Jan Trude, Marcia Trude and Jonathan Mandel New Coin, 2015 text PDF
Article on Ari Sitas’s Notes for an Oratorio on Small Things that Fall (like a screw in the night) by Nicos Trimikliniotis The Trim, 2024 text PDF
Other Links
Introduction to Ari Sitas and his work South African History Online (SAHO), 2013
Full list of Ari Sitas's books text PDF
Interview with Ari Sitas
Discussion with Ari Sitas by Zoe Boshoff and Sabitha Satchi: “Love, War and Insurrection - A discussion about poetry with Ari Sitas” Herri #09
Poetry by Ari Sitas
"Hooding" by Ari Sitas Almost Island, 2018
"Marikana" by Ari Sitas translated into the Greek by Elli Peonidou Dialogos (includes English version), 2013
Music and Performance by Ari Sitas
"Cold was the Ground - A Requiem for Elephants Too" (Parts I & 2) by Ari Sitas (voice) and George & Debbie Mari (piano) Herri #5
"Ari Sitas’s Music Notebook: collective cultural work across oceans": by Gwen Ansell sisgwenjazz, 2023
"Notes on the Music" by Ari Sitas Insurrections Ensemble website, 2023
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