RESPONSIBLE JOY
Studying Accounting in Babcock University, my most memorable moments involved sitting in Laz Otti library after classes reading poems by Keats, Neruda, Eliot, Dickinson. They would prove instructive in the following years when I had to deal with extended visits to the psychiatric ward.
Poems kept me, you see, & I have lived with this notion ever since. For this reason, I am evangelical about them—those tiny (or long) things. I want poems everywhere: in banks, beaches, bus-stops, churches, homes, internet, malls, markets, mosques, parliament, parks, schools. I want poems everywhere because, often, they are the antidote to cruelty. They spur us to action, they embolden, refurbish the heart. From this desire came the birth of EREMITE POETRY.
Joyfully, I extend my heart to you in these dark times. It is this same joy that went into the creation of this journal—I must admit the exhaustion too. We worked tirelessly to bring you these voices. The mails went back and forth, over and over and over and over and-
Compiling this issue came with great responsibility & joy. I had the most fun when I went to visit the secondary school students. It reaffirmed in me that urgency to create spaces, to build our poetic futures.
I did not have the time to workshop their poems with them, so these here, are poems pulled out of raw desire for expression. All I had time for was to help draft their fun bios. And they loved it! We discussed pen names and I asked them to tell me what poetry is to them. The responses were utterly fascinating:
Poetry is a way of expressing my feelings, mood towards something
Poetry is the deep thought a person expresses through writing
Poetry is fun
Poetry calm(s) my nerves
Poetry is the mind
I consider this a sign that we must persist in our doings, we must pursue diligently the proliferation of poetry in all spaces, we must build, we must sustain.
//
I could talk all day about the power of poems, most haunting however, is the uselessness of all efforts if we do not work towards preservation. The poems that saved me did so because they were archived. The Abrahamic religions are a good example of what happens when archiving is taken seriously, taken as holy, divine work. According to one legend, while translating the Septuagint the 72 scholars were on a fast.
//
Two weeks ago, while working on an article for Poetry Column-NND, I stumbled upon this piece of scholarly work by Aderemi Raji-Oyelade and Remi Raji-Oyelade that catalogs 50 Nigerian women poets from 1985 to 2006. It’s called “Notes toward the Bibliography of Nigerian Women’s Poetry (1985-2006).”
50 women! 50 poets, whose works remain outside the domain of communal memory. We owe the coming generation a duty of preservation. Our cute, powerful poems mean nothing if they have the lifespan of an election cycle due to our inability to create an archive. This is why we must involve all aspects of society. This is why EREMITE POETRY seeks to focus on tomorrow—students: secondary, tertiary.
Always, I am grateful for the team who helped make this possible—Omolola, Eyimofe, Oluwatosin, Chisom.
//
Dear poet,
I am proud of your mind-bending metaphors, I delight in your awards/prizes/fellowships, I am grateful you are getting the required recognition for putting in the work. Please, remember to work with others in the community to preserve it all.
Poems kept me, you see, & I have lived with this notion ever since. For this reason, I am evangelical about them—those tiny (or long) things. I want poems everywhere: in banks, beaches, bus-stops, churches, homes, internet, malls, markets, mosques, parliament, parks, schools. I want poems everywhere because, often, they are the antidote to cruelty. They spur us to action, they embolden, refurbish the heart. From this desire came the birth of EREMITE POETRY.
Joyfully, I extend my heart to you in these dark times. It is this same joy that went into the creation of this journal—I must admit the exhaustion too. We worked tirelessly to bring you these voices. The mails went back and forth, over and over and over and over and-
Compiling this issue came with great responsibility & joy. I had the most fun when I went to visit the secondary school students. It reaffirmed in me that urgency to create spaces, to build our poetic futures.
I did not have the time to workshop their poems with them, so these here, are poems pulled out of raw desire for expression. All I had time for was to help draft their fun bios. And they loved it! We discussed pen names and I asked them to tell me what poetry is to them. The responses were utterly fascinating:
Poetry is a way of expressing my feelings, mood towards something
Poetry is the deep thought a person expresses through writing
Poetry is fun
Poetry calm(s) my nerves
Poetry is the mind
I consider this a sign that we must persist in our doings, we must pursue diligently the proliferation of poetry in all spaces, we must build, we must sustain.
//
I could talk all day about the power of poems, most haunting however, is the uselessness of all efforts if we do not work towards preservation. The poems that saved me did so because they were archived. The Abrahamic religions are a good example of what happens when archiving is taken seriously, taken as holy, divine work. According to one legend, while translating the Septuagint the 72 scholars were on a fast.
//
Two weeks ago, while working on an article for Poetry Column-NND, I stumbled upon this piece of scholarly work by Aderemi Raji-Oyelade and Remi Raji-Oyelade that catalogs 50 Nigerian women poets from 1985 to 2006. It’s called “Notes toward the Bibliography of Nigerian Women’s Poetry (1985-2006).”
50 women! 50 poets, whose works remain outside the domain of communal memory. We owe the coming generation a duty of preservation. Our cute, powerful poems mean nothing if they have the lifespan of an election cycle due to our inability to create an archive. This is why we must involve all aspects of society. This is why EREMITE POETRY seeks to focus on tomorrow—students: secondary, tertiary.
Always, I am grateful for the team who helped make this possible—Omolola, Eyimofe, Oluwatosin, Chisom.
//
Dear poet,
I am proud of your mind-bending metaphors, I delight in your awards/prizes/fellowships, I am grateful you are getting the required recognition for putting in the work. Please, remember to work with others in the community to preserve it all.
Pamilerin Jacob
Sango-Ota
February 2021
Sango-Ota
February 2021
Fun exercise I did with the secondary school poets.
