Sing for our Execution, TLS and TS by Wopko Jensma to Wilma Stockenstrom

Author: Jensma, Wopko 
Title: Sing for Our Execution 
Publisher: Ophir/Ravan 
Date: 1973 
Place: Johannesburg 
Dimensions:  8vo, 24.5cm x 17.5cm 

1st and only edition. Pictorial wraps. iii+123pp. 
40 poems interspersed with 12 (+1 duplicate) woodblock engravings, the artwork on single-sided, Glastonbury watermarked laid paper. Woodcut design and title to top wrap and titles to spine. 

A very good copy; the spine is slightly cracked, the wraps with some discolouration, creasing to the lower wrap. 

Association copy, inscribed: “Vir Ants en Wilma/Beste wense” and signed ‘Wopko Jensma’ to the title page.

Additionally, a typed letter, signed, dated 6-12-70, from Jensma to the Afrikaans poet & novelist Wilma Stockenstrom and her husband, Ants Kirsipuu.
9 sheets of Canadian extra rag, printed on the rectos only.

The letter offers the couple one of Jensma's “best” Afrikaans poems - this poem does not appear in any of the 3 collections published in his lifetime. It also contains the poems ‘Onder Andere’ (unchanged) and 6 parts from his ‘Lopsided Cycle Rewritten’, published in Sing for our Execution, with the following notable changes and omissions:

Part 1 with an additional line which significantly changes the socio-political tenor of the poem.
Part 3 not published in Sing for our Execution
Part 4 (For W.S.) and Part 6 (For A.K.) – possibly Wilma Stockenstrom and Ants Kirsipuu - neither part published.

Sing for Our Execution was the first of Jensma's major collections, followed by Where White Is the Colour, Where Black Is the Number (1974) and I Must Show You My Clippings (1977).  Some of the poems in the present volume first appeared in print as a 19 page special issue of the journal Ophir in 1971 (Sheik, 2002). William Saunders, who edited the journal, is the Saunders in the letter and “die klein bundel” (little bundle) which Jesma promises to mail the couple is in all likelihood this 1971 publication. The “Botes” mentioned in the letter is the Afrikaans poet David Petrus Matthijs Botes, a known associate of Jensma’s. (Kleyn & Marais, 2010).

The letter is headed with the postal address of the Information Department, Gabarone, Botswana, where Jensma worked as a graphic artist in 1969 and 1970. Jensma was posted there to escape Apartheid reprisal under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, for marrying and having children with Lydia Thandie Thabete, a Zulu woman Jensma had known since he was a student (Kleyn & Marais, 2010). According to Phil du Plessis quoted in the same work, the poet Casper Schmidt would, only a few months after the present letter was written, drive up to Gabarone to rescue Jensma from Lydia, who would “hit him over the shins with a broomstick” if he did not make enough money. When he arrived, Schmidt apparently had a physical altercation with Lydia involving the use of a toy waggon as a weapon, before making off with her husband.

Included also are two unsigned typescript poems.
2 sheets on white bond paper, printed on the rectos only.
The poems are ‘Ja Baas’ with a wholly different third stanza, and ‘Letter to Thelonius’ both of which appear in which appear in Sing for Our Execution.

Wopko Jensma (1939-?) was an enigmatic and fugitive figure in the South African art world of the 1960s and 70s. His output of graphic work, maily in woodcut and screenprint, was more prolific than his writing, but it is on this writing - and his mythologised personal life - that most comentary centers. 
Jensma experienced cripling schzophrenia and dissapeared from Salvation Army assisted care in the 1990s.

Wilma Stockenstrom (b.1933) is an South African, Afrikaans novelist and poet. Twice winner of the Herzog prize, once for prose and once for poetry, her novel The Expedition to the Baobab Tree was translated by Nobel Prize winning South African author, J.M. Coetzee. She lives in Cape Town.