Onomatopoeia: Observations, Moments, Poetry is a poetry and digital art collaboration resulting in a coffee-table and e-book and an e-commerce site for selling artworks and profiling contributing artists.
Produced by poet and writer Amy Shelver, it features a collection of her poems, written over a 20 year period, enriched by works of art, photography, and multimedia from a global community of artists and creatives.
Onomatopoeia is an exquisite, sometimes harrowing, story of the author’s coming of creative age. Covering the many phases of young adulthood, it is as much sentimental and naïve as it is inspiring and sophisticated. Amy journeys through her “mortifying” early teenage angst and self-discovery, and along the breadth of travels to both far-away lands and those a bit closer to home.
In Onomatopoeia, she documents, observes and distills the experiences and moments of life. She also tackles difficult socio-political issues, embracing a whimsical feminism, and an acute desire to reflect society’s human face and bounteous urbanscapes.
There is also a healthy dose of that which makes poetry, poetry: love, loss, fear, frustration, broken hearts, anger, and goodbyes, embodied in catchy one-liners, intimate prose and several quirky anecdotes. Over 100 artists contributed to the project, drawing inspiration from the poetry and adding another dimension to this unique collaboration.
Amy Shelver was born in Johannesburg in the early 80s, an ongoing extension of the Clan McEwan, Emslie and Amm families, who arrived in South Africa as colonisers and settlers more than 200 years ago. She is both of the Cape and the world. A journalist, anthropologist, and development specialist, Amy plies her trade in words and by making meaning out of life’s complexity. Over her 18 year career, she has worked on major development and communications projects, campaigns, and strategies to drive narrative change, tell compelling stories, influence opinion, and manage crises and reputation, taking her from creative industry basements to world industry boardrooms.
Amy spent her early career as a journalist for Times Media and freelancing as both a writer and researcher. Later she moved into public relations, running Meropa Communications’ national corporate division, while also dedicating her time to her social entrepreneurship initiative, the n_mb city project, which nurtured and skilled young creative talent in Nelson Mandela Bay. Then, she joined the South African Cultural Observatory to help establish it as a statistical office for measuring the size and impact of South Africa’s creative economy.
In the latter half of her career, Amy has worked at the United Nations, pivoting between substantive and communications roles, for UNCTAD’s creative economy and communications teams. Amy has not only written thousands of journalistic stories, but she has also spent the past 20 years kindling her poetry and essay writing. This led to the idea of Onomatopoeia Publishing, a collaborative digital publishing house that brings together artists and writers “anti-ekphrastically”; and the publication of her first poetry collection, Onomatopoeia: Observations, Moments, Poetry. Amy also co-authored Rogue, Rebel, or Revolutionary? The Life and Times of Dawid Stuurman with Bill Krige, and Feel It Forever: The 2010 World Cup in Nelson Mandela Bay by Traci Mackie, which she edited.
Difficult to box, Amy is extremely creative and collaborative, and when she is not communicating about the trade and development issues of our time, doing research, or working on her MarTech start-up, Briefmapp, Amy seeks to make meaningful connections, explore stories, and create positive social spaces in the digital dimension that nurture creativity. She has lived in Johannesburg, Gqebhera, London, Tokyo, New York, Geneva, Berlin and Cape Town, her happy places and sources of inspirations.
Hometown
Johannesburg, Gauteng
Date of Birth
May 16
Place of Birth
Johannesburg, Gauteng
Education
Studied Socio-economic Development at Nelson Mandela University
Studied Psychology at The University of South Africa
Studied TV Journalism and Anthropology at Rhodes University.
Websites
www.numbcity.co.za
www.onomatopoeiapoetry.com
www.briefmapp.com
When I started out on this project, I began arranging a sentimental meal prepared for but a few. I had no idea of the scale it would reach and how many important hands it would pass through. The table of gratitude is large for the many people who sat with me through what would become not my simple meal of sentimental nostalgia, but a long-running feast of conversation, connection, beauty, fear, perseverance, honesty, vulnerability, and much fun.
I would not have been able to do this without my partner in “de-crime,” aka design, Reiner Swanepoel, who injected a needed enthusiasm and waved the project management stick a number of times to get the final design, layout, and overall project done. I am so grateful to him. Gavin Sterley’s hand in the original design concept also cannot be under-appreciated. Without the artists, photographers, designers, videographers, and many creatives who contributed so generously and imaginatively, this project would simply have been a summary of my angst. Somehow I tricked everyone into joining this table. Onomatopoeia is a work of art because of you. There are over 100 contributors, too many to thank personally here, but a flip through the following pages allows any reader to understand the breadth of contribution that makes Onomatopoeia a creative banquet. Thank you for agreeing to break bread with me.
To my limbo lady, Stacey-Leigh, thank you for being a guide, an extra pair of hands, and for believing in this project, even when I could not anymore, and making it your own. Then there are those who have shaped my creative and emotional lives, and thus my poetry, and whose footprints are invisible but so profoundly present in Onomatopoeia. These are my many friends and personal fans who hold me up daily. Often my greatest critics but most relentless supporters, this would not have been possible without the love, support, prodding, pushing, questioning, and sustained interest of my closest friends and family.
– Amy Shelver
