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JOY: POSTED 13/5/07     

Motivation

Through high and grad schools, I never liked poetry. Although I was a good student of literature (even as a young girl, I had always wanted to study literature), I never liked the poetry part. I avoided poetry questions in examinations except they were compulsory. However, during my doctoral research, a course in poetry was compulsory and wide reading was involved. In the process, I started liking poetry; every reservation I had about the genre disappeared. I was excited at the discovery of how poetry can carry a creative burden. My poem “Poetry” is a summary of what I am talking about. I realized that so much could be said in few words through the medium, that a novel I had written half-way could be summarized in a single poem. I did not only start writing poetry, I also changed my research focus from novel to poetry.

Purpose

My poetry, the Mma Collection, is an effort to tell people (readers) why certain things are certain ways; that a widely held opinion could have more dimensions to it than people would ordinary think. “The Wounded Heart”, “Stolen Inheritance”, “The Hypocrite”, and “Happiness”, among others, are some cases in point. Again, Mma aims at appreciating institutions and individuals who touched not only my life but that of humanity. And in sharing my appreciation of them, I was hoping that a sense of responsibility, the seed for a better humanity, may emerge. The idea of literary entertainment is also there in such poems as “Zoomed” and “Joy”. 

Environment

 My society could be compared to a child learning to walk today and tomorrow morning decides to crawl, only to attempt running in the afternoon. Policies are not stable; they keep changing depending on the prerogative or interest of policy makers. It is an environment where values are constantly redefined, positively or negatively. The immediacy of the poetic medium is most suitable for me as a poet/scholar in this kind of environment. I can easily move with the “train”. Poetry could be written in the market place, in the church, in the bus, anywhere. In fact, I have written poetry while receiving visitors or while doing some chores in the kitchen. A whole experience could be summarised in one line or even in a word and this means so much to a poet like me in this kind of society.

Joy's Profile

CHIN: POSTED  15/12/06    

Motivation

Might have been an incident in early college days which gave rise to “The Cow Chase” and its presentation in the Calabar ELSA Press or a childhood recall of church sermons where the preacher grips the audience with very pious quotations from an elevated pulpit inspiring “The Preacher” much later in college press. There were quite a few gallant lines that we scribbled for our ladies of seemly virtues then. One never did take these things seriously but some of our learned critics and colleagues such as our departmental chair, Ernest Emenyonu, thought they were promising efforts and encouraged us to do more. I think, by later editing The Quill and a few other college publications in the years of military dictatorship, one had begun the commitment toward engaging truths and ideal convictions against the foils which martial brigandage and pious civilian deceptions both amounted to in our time.

Purpose

My collections are efforts to engage anyone who happens to listen to them in virtual dialogues where opinions, convictions, and a lot many active speculations can be tested and applied to specific or general situations. At a time in the Eclipse the conditions of military and civilian buffoonery in the political underdevelopment of African countries necessitated direct and provocative pronouncements. Other times in Full Moon brought the chance to share with the reader subtler human sympathies and some truly romantic experience. Millennial was a product of several years of experience in which past and present dialogues were resumed with more hindsight and awareness wrought by those disappointments and joyful surprises that only time could furnish us. All these go into the continuing dialogue in time and, maybe, one individual is touched in a way that alters one's -and thereby the whole of the human collective- consciousness for the greater good. People who say writing changes nothing only underestimate the power of thought from which spring those apparent realities that induce public obeisance.

Environment

There is the immediate family and community awareness which is where most average general consciousness resides. In spite of national or racial identities, hardly many local -or world- leaders have risen beyond attitudes guided by closely discernible gains to self and like minds. But there is a global awareness of a new age in the understanding of a few world citizens who mean well for humanity. Now they begin to rouse our attention to issues of space, of earth and her capacity to repel the havoc we are wittingly inflicting on ourselves and future generations. I seem to subscribe to the view that beyond these lies the reminder that we belong to a vast multidimensional universe in which the apparently many are authentic representations of the whole. While our fragmentation has been the bane of contemporary religious and ideological oppositions, yet poetry is capable -in fact, poets have been the most capable- of the unified, interactive engagements of our existence in a way that can bring greater understanding and fulfilment to human existence.

Chin's Profile

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