Preamble, no signifying:
"Painters use their eyes to show us what they see
But when that canvas dries we all see it differently" ( Ain't no song)
"You, art critic are so boring and sad
When was the last time you praised anything?
And have so much to say later , that the colour is wrong
Don't bother about it
You know what you know
Do you understand it then Jack? Do you understand them? "
They are nothing to care about" (Cornelis Vreeswijk – Hajar'u de då Jack?) Sweden's great Cornelis Vreeswijk , like Tomas Tranströmer ( another genius)
When someone publishes poetry // spoken word poetry , sometimes treasures from some people's innermost treasury that some dare to share, a well worn cliche coming up here, in some cases it could sometimes be akin to casting precious jewels before swine as unwittingly it becomes a free-for-all and even the piggy, he has something to say, not to mention artists , other poets and the self-made critic who can be quite vicious too, especially if there is some kind of rivalry between him and the poet being criticized/ the poet he is critiquing when it could be an artistic rivalry, as the alleged rivalry between Mozart and Salieri . Who is Mozart and who is the windbag-Salieri in this case , it's up to you to decide. As to what may be published posthumously, well, as has been said in this forum, you can't talk bad about the dead and when it comes to the lashon hara jazz and all that holier-than-thou and the more-poetic-than-you stuff, especially in politics and literary gossip, as someone once told a holy Jew, " You can't say bad things about the dead". For the holy Jew it was no sin as he replied smugly, "Arafat is dead : Good!"
I don't like splitting poetry into distinct national categories ( not that much) , even the categories of those I am most familiar with, some through translations, English, American, Irish, even Welsh ( Dylan Thomas) Swedish, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Iranian, Arabic, Portuguese, Ghanaian, Congolese, Ugandan, Senegalese, South African, and considering their population that jumped from 33 million in 1960 to 180 million just yesterday, the little trickle of poetry from Nigeria...
Let's start with the idea "Crooked timber" itself, its origins in Kant ( "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made" at least that's where I ended or shall I say that's where I began when I googled CROOKED TIMBER (For Fela) in search of the year of the poem's publication, Obi having derogatorily dismissed an earlier poem by Odia Ofeimun one of Nigeria's great poets (by any measurement), dear Obi having relegated dear Odia's "The Poet Lied" to a much lower status , he says, "considering that The Poet Lied, may now be considered his juvenilia " as by self-confession Odia Ofeimun himself made clear " The first of the Fela poems was written before I was twenty years old and published in The Poet Lied." ( Just as we must not forget just as I read in his " Between Man and Man" Martin Buber wrote " Thou and I " when he was 43 years old ( it was published a little later in 1923) - the mensch who sold me the book some thirty years ago had wrongly informed me that Buber wrote it when he was in his early twenties ( must have mistaken 1923 for Buber's early twenties or I must have misheard and what the mensch actually said was " Buber wrote it in the early twenties ( of the last century of course, the century in which I bought the book - and adduced the difficulties to his " being in his early twenties when I thought that he had written it) The point I want to make is that (a) according to Robert Graves , you write your best poetry before you are thirty five - could Dylan write the magical Mr. Tambourine Man today? ) and ( b) therefore it is a little premature to dismiss the first poem in " The Poet Lied", as "juvenalia", unless the lying poet is " Rex Marinus" otherwise known as Obi Nwakanma, in which case you can be sure that just as with the Biafra War, that apart from his versions of the poetic truth, not even an "Ode to all that was lost in the War" etc) he cannot be relied upon to be telling the truth the next time, the time before , the time during or anytime after that war ended. Baba Kadiri has confirmed that.
This is just a little preamble before I take on Obi's latest, the kind of stuff that could have issued out of the pen of Derek Elders ( First class Hons from the University Of Leeds) in his very early twenties, my once upon a time lecturer in Modern English poetry…
I'll leave you here, for the time being, but I want to go to bed with a clear conscience , so let me clear it ( the conscience ) by adding that among the other Nigerian martyrs to be counted are Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and all those who were assassinated with him and shortly after, and more recently, Gani Fawehinmi who lost the battle but won the war , " died in the early hours of 5 September 2009 after a prolonged battle with lung cancer."
On Friday, 3 November 2017 21:26:08 UTC+1, Olayinka Agbetuyi wrote:
To put things in the correct context you should ask what Obi Nwakanma has ever had to say about Chidis poetry whose 'magnificence' lulls him (Obi) into beatific silence!
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>Date: 01/11/2017 15:28 (GMT+00:00)To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com >Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: MY FELA AND GUEVARA POEMS
--Chidi,
I'm surprised at what you say since you Chidi are always responding ( with some tittle-tattle) to comments on your own works.
How do you feel right now? Better? Worse off ?
At least you could should only show appreciation for the poet's illuminating response to Obi's ritual knee-jerking, jerking off like one of Naipaul's mimic men.
Not intellectually lazy or yet brain dead per se, but here, paintpot imagination was only wondering, trying to figure it out (like confronting one of the wonders of New Testament Scripture testifying via the immediacy of the printed word, since Obi is totally there or half there with his reading glasses on, in his "mind's eye" at least to see Jesus "turning" water into the kind of wine he loves to guzzles down - or after the ten plagues taking a deep breath to take or make that existential leap with Moses in flight across the Red Sea, the murderous Egyptians giving chase and what do we have to show for it ? THIS
You know the life of Fela don't you? Even the fate suffered by his sweet mother
That most poignant line, read it again and read what follows:
:
"it was the knife stuck in his back that gave him eyes"
Obi turning his back on the Judeo Christian foundations of Western ( English Language Civilization) of course he's never heard of Judas and so Obi wonders, Obi is not a sucker for mystery, and that's plain to see :
Obi : "One ( i.e.Obi) is forced to wonder, say, how a knife stuck at one's back gives them eyes. Even when we make that metaphorical leap…"
By "One" he means Obi of course because he is certainly not wondering on behalf of Cornelius Agrippa
Without any other guidance or clue from Odia Ofeimun I could see, hear , feel the anguish, that can not be fully understood because it is individual, understand and share, but no stigmata dear Chidi even if you would like to see a sign that I could see, feel, hear and understand because as the man said , " A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign!"
How could Obi the poet ask such a question ? Stick a knife into Obi's back and he will probably be forced to see and some time before the rigor mortis set in perhaps say, Et tu, Brute? The state of course , your Judas
# RE - A Sierra Leone poet Elvis Gbanabom Hallowell . In 2004 when his Drumbeats of War was released it made quite a splash - touched by Ob's babby babble about "dearth of unity," etc etc ete etc , I recall Professor Eldred Jones comments on ""Drumbeats of War"
"By peering "into the dark liquid of the calabash to discover clues to the way forward, but the calabash often gets broken and like the other recurring image of the mirror that looks inwards into the poet and outwards into the world, its broken fragments are painfully pieced together in an effort to compromise his entire vision"
Some good news to cheer us all ( not exactly bad news is it)
FG agrees to pay N88bn compensation to victims of Biafra war
On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 11:36:32 UTC+1, Chidi Anthony Opara wrote:Well, good rejoinder, but I favour no rejoinders from poets on critiques of their works. That to me, would give room to other interpretations that may enrich the works.
CAO.
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