This week I'm talking to Kerry Hammerton about making your own way, and the power of poetry and feminist choices.
Kerry Hammerton is a Cape Town based writer who has published prose and poetry in various South African and international literary journals and anthologies. Kerry has an MA in creative writing and is a lecturer and supervisor for the Masters in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. She is also a PhD candidate at the University of the Western Cape.
Kerry has read her work at many literary festivals, and her prose work has recently appeared in The Looking Glass Anthology: Through the Single Gal’s Lens and Living While Feminist, which we’ll talk more about today. She has published three poetry collections - the Secret Keeper (2018), the Weather Report (2014), and These are the Lies I told You (2010). During the COVID-19 lockdown Imphepho press featured her as one of 21 poets for 21 days, and you can see a few of her poems in a creative mixed media format on her YouTube channel – links to all of these in the show notes.
On her website, her poetry manifesto says: “My poetic voice arises out of the roles that I play in life: woman, friend, lover, wife, daughter, godmother, aunt, writer, poet, carer, seeker…At times I wish I could hide behind the artifice of a deceiving and deceptive language, a soft language; but that is not who I am. My language is simple and unerring. I like to step cleanly into a poem and its meaning.”
