Poësie en popkultuur: oor enkele gedigte van Joan Hambidge

• Main Author: A. Nel
• Format: Article
• Language: Afrikaans
• Published: AOSIS 2003-08-01
• Series: Literator
• Subjects: Joan Hambidge; Identity; Cultus Figures; Popart And Poetry; Marilyn Monroe; Poems In Afrikaans
• Online Access: https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/304

Poetry and pop culture: Some poems by Joan Hambidge The influence of pop culture as a general movement, as well as pop art as a specific art movement, can be seen in the work of Joan Hambidge. In a number of her poems Hambidge enters into conversation with Andy Warhol as the most prominent pop artist. She comments through poetry on Warhol’s life and work method and also presents her poems in the idiom of Warhol. This entails, inter alia, a repetition or duplication of the content, a deliberate intertextual conversation with verbal and visual artists and a reuse of existing material. Hambidge follows Warhol’s representation of popular cult figures from the pop era by creating a number of word portraits of famous people such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. This “gallery” of word portraits becomes part of the (well-known) literary conversation which Hambidge conducts with other poets and artists, and at the same time communicates her own poetics as well as her own view on the construction of identity and death. Ultimately this pre-occupation with cult figures becomes a mask for the self.