MY ENCOUNTER WITH POETRY
It was on a certain night in September 2014, when I was on holiday from the university that I truly fell in love with poetry. It did not happen because I had come across one of those poems of apartheid which we studied in secondary school before I abandoned literature for science, and with an eye of retrospect, fell in love after rereading. It is possible that if I had come across one of T.S Eliot’s poems that evening or that of W.B Yeats, Christopher Okigbo et. al, it would have been far easier to just skip through and forget afterwards. The poem which caught my eye was a poem titled “I know their fates could be mine” by a very young poet named Oduwegwu Kanma who at the time neither had any publication but only published her works on Facebook and Hellopoetry. All these I came to know when I connected with her.
The poem I fell in love with was a political poem which dealt with the forthcoming elections and reasons why the incumbent government should not be voted in, the Chibok girls saga which was quite the news then and other contemporary issues. Here is an excerpt:
“My heart is broken. as i try to help/ they seem to be soft/ but no not them/ for the pain that strengthens even the lame/ has come to them/ and given them speed/ but help they need/ and without the us it might get to us/ This faith that says /Yes or death/does it bring peace? /or more of death/ to innocent fools that believed their pranks..”
I was held spellbound by the use of language to express the many pressing issues of the country and the emotional undertone with which the poet expressed them. That poem has gone on to become a prophetic poem since the government it campaigned against won the election and went ahead to become every bad thing the poems said they would be. The profound effect which Kanma’s poetry had on me had had me going back to read some of the poems in my younger brother’s secondary school syllabus, in search of that same magic. I came across different poems which had that effect in various measures to me. The problem was that I still had problems deciphering some complex poems which employed intricacies of language and so I related mostly to simple poetry and ones which narrated familiar experiences. I had contacted Kanma and made sure to let her know how her poetry had made me fall in love. Luckily, she was not — as I feared — a snub, but gracious enough to discuss poetry with me and tell me one day after seeing some of my writings on Facebook, that we all were poets and all we needed to do was ‘go get the words”. And that was the epiphany for me.
It was not long before I began to meet some writers on Facebook who wrote funny stories and some absolutely relatable poetry. Some of them included Farida Adamu, Ayoola Goodness Olanrewaju, Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau, Aremu Adams Adebisi (whose first collection of poetry, TRANSCEDENCE has just been published by Authorpedia), Brigitte Poirson, Uzo Nwamara and even the legendary Chijioke Amu Nnadi, whose poems have had very profound effects on me. And the journey began, of writing poems and tagging ninety-nine other poets, some of who responded and others who did not, and some who at my request, offered valuable criticisms and my journey began as a poet who wrote inspirational prose-poetry, some of which I can hardly bear to look at today. The profound effect of the assistance offered to me by these poets in my very heydays, most notably, Ayoola Olanrewaju has taught me the importance of helping other writers from a point of higher experience. The social media has undoubtably become a precursor of literary enthusuiasts today because it serves, today, the purpose of uniting people from across the sphere who share a similar interest, and also serves as a medium of communication where they can help each other get better. Today, I look back at how lonely that journey might have been without the assistance of some of these virtual friends — many of whom I have gone on to meet — and I have indeed come to appreciate the role of the social media and not despise the tag, ‘Facebook Poet’.
This profound chronology of events which set me on the path of poetry is one of the few things that like poetry, stays with me for a very long time. It is the most effective way in which the power of words is portrayed because it has a way of creeping into the heart and remaining, stubbornly, there with you. It was in my final year in the university, a few years back that I had read Warsan Shire’s poem, WHAT THEY DID YESTERDAY and the words “dear god, I come from two countries/ one is thirsty, the other is on fire/ both need water” stuck with me for days. I was both amazed and astounded as to how the Somali and Kenyan tragedies could be captured so aptly in a few lines. It shook me so much. I remember showing the poem to a friend who complained to me that her poem did not have enough big words and thought simplicity was childish. It gave her a gut feeling to encounter the power of simplicity through the eyes of the poem. Or how coming across this except of Chijioke Amu Nnadi’s poem, Sorrow: : “ahead mirage forms a coy pool/ wings beating harder, harder still/ on renewed gusts of longing/ lonely hearts find no succour in roads/ all hard and metallic, all pitiless/ trembling with heat and deception/ on which lie the casualty of dreams..” made me see how futile search for dreams in life related well to the total internal reflection, a case of illusion which we studied in O level physics. It was through little things like this that the revelation of poetry began to take deep root upon me, my person and my writing.
Now, I am at a stage where poetry is for me, a deep meditation of self and society, an art that touches the deepest parts of human existence. Many times I have read my poems, and found them mostly to be expressions of how I see myself and — albeit less so — the society. The latter aspect is a source feelings of inadequacy because sometimes, I feel that I do not reflect, as I would love to, my views of the world in my poetry. But then, I have written about the effect of the world on me and how I try sometimes to affect it, mostly through my love poems and so I have only been mostly local, not that the world is totally inexistent in my art. I remember having read somewhere — a timely read indeed — of T. S Eliot having said, “A writer must first be local before he is universal.” And so I have learnt to look at it all as points in growth. Perhaps, at a later time, I shall be able to capture external emotions in my poetry.
Poetry is a network striving to string together, the network of the heart of humanity. Its thread is words. Different poems affect us in different ways. Sometimes, the words crawl in immediately and stay with us for a very long time. Sometimes, the words become a part of us forever. Other times, it has no immediate effect until the words come back either through memory or rereading and metes a more profound effect. A good poem is never fully understood, it has a new meaning each time it is read again, just like life whose meaning renew according to our renewed experiences with life. Indeed, poetry is life.
