I
The question is still being asked about why people are not enamoured with poetry anymore, and why they do not give a hoot about its supposed literary and cultural importance. Over the years, many poets from different poetic traditions and cultures, whether in an anticipatively defensive move, or just as a routine validation of their art, have often raised up to the defence of poetry. In doing so, what is often stressed and highlighted is what poetry is or ought to be. From Christopher Okigbo to Chris Abani, from Robert Lowell to Randall Jarrell, poetry is seen as either a verbal effort to inscribe and memorialize what humanity has failed to say; or as an attempt to underscore that which is important in life, preserving it in some linguistic permanence. Therefore, poems are the things that people say; or, as Robert Pinsky cheekily proposes, poetry should be at least as interesting as good gossip. Indeed, a poem is seen by many poets as a series (not just a set) of verbal surprises, as being more a mode for joy than happiness; a mode of grief than grievance.
Nowhere are the above assertions seen clearly in recent Nigerian poetry than in Umar Sidi’s The Poet of Dust, which in its experimental style has forcefully shows that indeed poetry is based on the assumption that whatever a poem is, it is also indubitably what Matthew Arnold calls, in a memorable phrase, “a criticism of life”. Of course, as is the case with all critical propositions, a counter claim could also be made that even those poems which openly appear to “interpret” a reality; in effect they attempt no such thing. The Poet of Dust in its prosaic, meta-poetic movements contains poems (such as “The Peninsula of Poets”, “In Lieu of a Preface” and “Things Poet Do”), which quite patently announce themselves as having no bone with any reality other than their own textuality, flaunting their linguistic and aesthetic consciousness, and are equally equivocal in their reference to extra-lingual reality which their diction portends, but only appears to directly name.
Why, despite all the effort to the contrary, is poetry still not better up? One probable answer is the assertion many times made to the effect that a poem much more than just represents an intrinsic relationship between the poet and the reader. As the prose/prosaic poems in The Poet of Dust shows, a poem is an avenue through which something other than “meaning” is encountered. The poems in the book call for and make possible the existence of the reader. Indeed, The Poet of Dust underlines powerfully, if that poetry is to survive in the current climate of cultural amnesia, it must reinvent itself in the realisation that readers are, in the last analysis, the ultimate makers of poems.
II
Modern Nigerian poetry from the 1980s to early 2000s was in a way divided roughly into two distinct periods with probably a differing preoccupation of what poetry ought to be between practitioners of the art on the either divide. First, Nigerian poetry was still dominated by what could be called the mainstream, orally mediated, less modernistic lyric as seen in the works of Niyi Osundare and Tanure Ojaide and other loose members of the established poetry culture.
Second, there was a developing poetry by other younger; increasingly Diaspora based poets whose oeuvre could be defined as constituting a fresh poetic counter-culture (to the more established poets). For where the dominant poets see their “models” even if as reluctant ones as Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and J. P. Clark as their poetic stay and influence (again even if distantly and begrudgingly), the new “avant-garde” poets weaned themselves on an experimental and innovative tradition of poets elsewhere whose works could hardly be seen or regarded as the conventional poetry.
Belonging to this experimental loose grouping of new Nigerian poets is Umar Sidi along with Ahmed Maiwada (Eye Rhymes, 2013 and We’re Fish, 2017),Onyeka Nwelue (The Lagos Cuban Jazz Club, 2018), and quite possibly even Uche Nduka (especially Chiaroscuro, 1997, Eel on Reef, 2005). Since his debut collection, Striking the Strings (2013) to the present collection, Sidi’s poetry shows what the American critic Marjorie Perloff says about some recent American poetry that the poetic today is to be found not in the conventionally isolated lyric poem (so dear to the Romantics) but in poetic texts not immediately recognizable as poetry, or texts which deliberately present themselves as against poetic.
Though the book is divided into two unequal sections, the titular “The Poet of Sand” and “Poetic Manifesto”, but the book has a feel and indeed the look of a single, book length poem. The opening poem, “The Peninsula of Poem” with its rich allusion and familiar and not so familiar references to mostly American poets: Martin Espada, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Allen Ginsberg, the Syrian poet popularly known as Adonis, the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, the mystic Rumi is dense take on what has poetry become in the globalised world. Using these poets, the poem (itself divided into two parts), the poem sketches a poetic vignette about who is a poet rather than the more expected of a meta-poetic what is poetry.
The next poem, “Instruction to a Poet”, keeping with the overall self-referential poise of the book, is also a meta-poem: a sort of metaphoric “gas lighting”, rather than innocent poetic instructions purported by the title. The poem urges poets to, among other things, “discard”, “forget” and “rise” against what it calls “the litany of letters”; and to ala Ezra Pound “make poetry that will break the rules of grammar and cripple the orders of syntax”.
The second section of The Poet of Dust, “Poetic Manifesto” which, in character, is in poetic prose called “In Lieu of a Preface” reels out sarcastically the kind of poems we would need by the year 2045, when the “Committee on Poetry” would have been established. “Soul Song or South Africa Knows” is in effect a travelogue in reverse in which South Africa (or South African letters) is an expansive backdrop whereby the poet communes with other poets whose sensibilities very much rub on the poet: the usual American suspects including, appropriately, the South African, Dennis Brutus, Leopold Senghor. The other poem in this section worth highlighting is also a piece of poetic “manualing”, “Things Poet Do” or do not do, is more of a cheeky delineation of bad poetic practices.
III
In The Poet of Dust, the personal, the private and quite often the public and the communal are memorably made to cohere. Umar Sidi is good at poems that hauntingly remind us about the need, and the necessity to once in a while, if not all the time, wax not just lyrical but sensuous (of course not in vulgar, smut sense); for it is his contention in these poems that waxing lyrical is good for our troubled hearts, and as a bonus also address our other more social and political worries.
Ismail Bala writes in English and Hausa. His poetry and translations have appeared in the UK, the USA, Canada, India and South Africa, in journals such as Poetry Review, Ambit, New Coin, Okike, A Review of International English Literature and Aura Literary Arts Review. Born and educated to university level in Kano, he did his post-graduate studies at Oxford. He is a Fellow of the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa.