Poem on Badalisha Website

A podcast of my poem on Badalisha Website.

A New Poetry Prize for African Poets

Brunel University African Poetry Prize

The Brunel University African Poetry Prize is a major new poetry prize of £3000 aimed at the development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa. The prize is sponsored by Brunel University and partnered by Commonwealth Writers, the Africa Centre UK, and the African Poetry Book Fund USA.

British-Nigerian writer, Bernardine Evaristo, who has initiated the prize, describes her reasons for a new prize exclusively devoted to African poetry:

'I have judged several prizes in the past few years, including chairing the Caine Prize for African Fiction in 2012, an award that has revitalised the fortunes of fiction from Africa since its inception in 1999. It became clear to me that poetry from the continent could also do with a prize to draw attention to it and to encourage a new generation of poets who might one day become an international presence. I am particularly interested in new voices who are exploring poetry that perhaps draws on the poets' own cultural aesthetics - doing something original, something different. African poets are rarely published in Britain. I hope this prize will introduce exciting new poets to Britain's poetry editors.'

Prairie Schooner, one of the leading literary presses in the USA, having published continuously for eighty-five years, has committed to publishing some of the work of the winning poets of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize.Wasafiri, the leading British journal of international writing, will also publish the winner. Similar arrangements will be pursued with other major literary journals in the United Kingdom and the US.

Rules

·         The prize will be for ten poems by an African writer who has not yet had a full-length poetry book published. (Self-published books, chapbooks and pamphlets are exempt.)

·         The prize is open to poets who were born in Africa, or who are nationals of an African country, or whose parents are African.

·         Only poetry written in English is eligible. Translated poetry is accepted but a percentage of the prize will be awarded to the translator.

·         The prize opens for entries on October 26th 2012 and the winner will be announced in April 2013.

·         There will be a distinguished panel of judges including the poet Kwame Dawes and the academic Mpalive Msiska. There will also be an advisory committee. All to be announced.

In collaboration with the African Poetry Book Fund, the Brunel University African Poetry Prize will develop a series of poetry workshops and courses in Africa in its efforts to provide technical support for poets writing in Africa.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

For more updates and additional information go to the Facebook page of the Prize or contact Bernardine Evaristo at Bernardine.Evaristo@brunel.ac.uk.

Website: http://africanpoetrybf.unl.edu/

A poem: The Exile’s Lover

It is the night we beg for dawn to break that

we live the realities of hell the most—all becomes false.

And as this garden of hell burns truth into cinders,

so much to rehearse sombreness in us,

while we eat berries of lust as loins bite at dusk, wishing

the morning is a new testament.

Today, I watch the future sneak

out from borders of dusk’s aperture,

trusting nature to solve the riddles of lightning

into crashing shimmers across the skies.

It is raining paints, but the soils of the son—vendors of this land

can only paint as much as nature’s colours allow,

he sketches out things imagined from deprived realities,

long before the warmth of a land’s embrace will come.

Today, I am the lover: a sea of strayed riddles

settled in shuttling latitudes of liquid and sleepless nights.

I wonder if this is that middle season, that time of ends,

when I should betroth hope as an even better partner.

                               

So like the riddle of the soil in the veins of leaves;

culinarily delivered as vegetable into willing mouths,                                                                                 

the riddle of the berry is solved on this lover’s eyelids.

Waiting for the night to call the day to function,

it is with blinking wet lashes I stake claim to land,

I’ve found rainbows are in human tears; the sun is in the soul.

(c) Jumoke Verissimo 2012

A poem in Ann Arbor Review

DISTANCED


Why didn't I get swallowed in the wind that blew our way,
standing aloof uninspired by people's sympathies?
In sun's heat, under the tree--exchanging smiles for pity sighs;
You in the shade, I in the sun, learning the language of departure


as it escapes the anus of selfless labourers.  There's absence in watching
dust hit dust as shovels scrape ground, around peeking memorials,
watching silence sing choruses we daren't; re-theming the past;
as we, in the median time, visit our desires and let our eulogy tarry.

Read More 

Tade Ipadeola's Quatrains

Well, there's a certain literary accomplishment that posterity may use as the reference point for a poet or which the poet will assert to her(him)self as an intellectual pivot. Well, in the course of achievements, it is my pleasure to showcase Tade Ipadeola's latest poetic pilgrimage. Four Quatrains from Sahara Testaments.


Tade is currently working on 1, 000 quatrains and our share to that fame which posterity would grant him is that it appears here first. (Okay, aside the facebook appearances of the poems).

Of course, there are many poets who have attempted grand works like this, either as an attempt to searching self, or Self.  Nostradamus wrote 942 stanzas to predict the future. The sections were grouped into centuries and each century had 42 quatrains. Rumi, the famous mystical poet of the 13th century was credited with writing 2, 000 quatrains and then there is the well-known translation of Omar Khayyam's poems by Edward J. Fitzgerald, popular as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. 

For now enjoy Tade's poem.... 

CHAPTER XXXIII

I

Clinical light scrubs reinforced glass at the atrium
Where Goldschmidt and his brood meet death
In elegant equations, the amplified abecedarium
Pregnant as protocol, tasks mortal breath.


Spirit and men sail through rafts of bevelled books
Expounding the calculus of atoms, elemental speed
Degrees at which rarefied neutron cooks,
The right mantra to make electrons bleed.


One day, midsummer, their guarded onomasticon
Registered a name so French, the atrium brightened
With romance. The fellow brought a lexicon
Radiant as radium, to the table, he enlightened


Rapturously, on a world as yet untouched
By the miracle of the atom bomb, a perfect
World in which to test death. He clutched
Proprietorially, a map of my Sahara like a prefect.

Two poems by Niran Okewole (Nigeria)

CONFESSIONS OF A CAMERA REEL

These spools trafficking before limp eyes

Like the passion of Roman Polanski,

What new line spectra, how tell

What torrid eyes have seen?

The lens bloodied by shrapnel

On the plains of Sudan, children smoked

Out by Janjaweed.

They have known good times too,

Village festivals where newly foreskined

Boys dance to the delight of young virgins.

Does it matter that in the same clearing

I have shot a baby learning to walk?

Kodaked parchments of skin sagging over bone,

Old hags marching for peace

With bare wrinkled breasts

While rival warlords claim the rights?

I live to shoot another day.

RANDOM NIGHTS

I am explaining a few things about nights,

Anodyne nights, nights gelid like cold oats,

Nights of acid drop,

Nights of camouflage and boots and border patrol,

Nights when Time, history’s mongrel, slinks away

   on Kafka wings,

Nights when pyramids of hate scribble

Their signature against the sky.

Nights ticking away like larvae under the skin. 

(c) Niran Okewole 

BIO

Niran Okewole was born in September 1977. He is a senior registrar at the Psychiatric Hospital, Lagos, Nigeria. He won the MUSON Festival Poetry Prize in 2002 and 2003. He also won the ANA (Oyo State) Drama Prize in 2000. He is the author of Logarhythms, published in 2005 by Khalam Editions.  

You can read an interview with him HERE

Poetry by Tal Nitzan (Israel)

 

Something quiet

Nothing is quieter
than blows inflicted upon others,
nothing threatens less
the satisfied soul’s calm.
The defeat in their eyes is mute,
their arms
drop quietly.

What a pleasant silence.

Except for a tiny piercing sound
that bothers mainly in the mornings
but can be dimmed easily
by the relaxing rustle
of newspaper pages.

Before they’re buried under ruins
they disappear under the Entertainment Section
the half full cup of coffee
the slamming door

in our house
that stands firm.


In the time of cholera

Facing one another
we turn our backs to the world’s calamities.
Behind our closed eyes and curtains
both heat and war
erupted at once.
The heat will calm down first,
the faint breeze
won’t bring back
the boys who have been shot,
won’t cool down
the wrath of the living.
Even if it tarry,
the fire will come,
many waters won’t quench etc. *
Our arms as well
can only reach our own bodies:
We are a small crowd
incited to bite,
to cling to each other
to barricade ourselves in bed
while in the ozone above us
a mocking smile
cracks wide open.

*(Song of Solomon, 8:7) “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it”

(c) Translation from Hebrew:
Tal Nitzan with Vivian Eden 

Bio  

Tal Nitzan has published four collections of poetry: Domestica, An Ordinary Evening, Café Soleil Bleu, The First to Forget and won many awards. Nitzan is the editor of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984 – 2004. 

The fate of faeces is a sewage debate

I

It is November that time of the year  we are stingy

With  desires, we make little time to get ourselves

New dreams, drenched in the rain of old ambitions.

We keep breaking oaths and chewing gums

Over unfulfilled moments that are reminiscences,

Also ghosts, that go to sleep to keep hearts aflame,

Not to turn problems into shame and bring us to a stop

For a small romance with loafers, singing dolefully;

               

Iwe kiko lai si oko ati ada

We too start to sing to ourselves and even make

Rice-grain foolery of our retention, for knowledge,

Soon dissolves in the embrace of a bigger hope.

It is November already; like the year of the end is now,

And we do not wish to be caught in the bankruptcy of the hour,

As posters pose as the only hope that leads our nose astray

But we don’t smell rats; we are now vermin,

And there is little need to start smelling ourselves.


(c) Jumoke Verissimo 2010

“From His Coy Mistress” by Ashley Anna McHugh

“If only we had time enough,” he said,
“Your coyness would be fine. Of course I’d wait.
But, honest to God, we don’t.” I took the bait,
and took his hand, and led him to my bed.

Once I let him have his sweet-tongued way,
time didn’t run. It yawned. Dry, dull and vast,
eternal deserts stalled the sun. Eyes glassed,
I waited while he dove on me like prey,

adoring–just a bit too much–each breast,
but never looking in my eyes at all.
Rolling our strength and sweetness to a ball
took fifteen minutes, maybe, at the best.

So gentlemen, fill me in: If there’s not time
for decent sex, how’s coyness such a crime?

Poem was originally published in
E-verse radio

Ashley Anna McHugh is the winner of the tenth annual New Criterion Poetry Prize.

I leave, River Lone

I have visited many rivers

None has brought me to my knees

Even Styx gave me no quake

The waters of the world say I’m soul

Across and wide, above and below

Where rivers met, I went there

My desires sat in a liquid strength

My course flowed into your snare

You knew my name before I arrived,

Isn’t that why you disowned me thrice

Said without me, you would be deprived

For my boundaries flooded your waters

You wished to keep me in you, I see

Yet you knew we lived in a world apart

Your grip has paralysed my legs

But on these bent knees, I depart.

(c) Jumoke Verissimo 2010

The Voyage

A journey dies a pace to the end
One step from start is the voyage

This conceit in designing a people
A vapour
Speak airs into coagulating boils
Until sweat turn pus in skin’s crinkles
Pressure becomes a whorl

A foot ahead, desires part
For no end and no beginning

The one who walks a dream
Knows not he walks a dream

A voyage
Is not the place to go
It is the place to be

As distraction wedges freedom
The journey begins along the way

No cowry to trade with the ferryman
This trip accepts and offers only bribes                                                                           

A mind relies on a mouth that’s on stilt
An Ambition to unite befriends asunder

‘tho Peace comes in knowing freedom
A little shift, the big sojourn is to change

The journey is not around for a choice
Empty promises, stay idle in flipping visions

Maybe Things {inscribed for LS}

Fairy girl like weathervane spins by the breaths of a sea
Arms stretched in a bow at red fingertips easily
As a Tamil naiad woven of elements . . . we spy her whirling
Of longing like to caress demanding waves, to wind her oneness
With fatal shells lying doomed on shorelines, with lines
Of panicky crabs hastening unto a dumb sea of signs.
We laugh at this dream of safety, fossiled in lines, knowing
Sweet specters never kept from what calls without fail.

We turn to the call of cities that swallow their young
In yawns of grey concrete and high-rise dreamcages
Where organs toll requiems for friends whilst we weary with
Crafting poems into chronic stones as trick offerings to god. . .
But our dreams of flight fritter, clogged by alleys of alternatives
Fairies by seas spread open arms; Turn Here! We stay our curse
In memory of friends past, we know we too shall meet our ends
As all do fated too late and far from butterflown, sun yellow fields

We sigh away to our carnages and let all these creep to the edges
Of poems, to fade there with the Chimera. . .amidst our maybe things.


Richard Ali (c) 2010

hold me by İlyas Tunç

            nightmares! they wake up women

            for new loves

            hold me!

the wind is raging; it forces open the balcony door… footsteps! what’s happening outside? maybe meat eating rats or vampires to suck your blood… look! a bat is tapping on the window with its wings… watch out! a tarantula on the wall is grinning at you…

            hold me!

I know why snails withdraw into their shells and why lyre birds hide deeply in the bush… but you have no shell or hedgehog spines… my worried ladybird! loneliness is an iguana!

            hold me!

out there is the wildness of tropical jungles, the depths of seas and cliffs… think of leopards, hyenas, weasels… and of well-fed carrion flies beneath your flesh…

            hold me!

unknown dangers become real, evil souls become visible, strange things happen… look! ghosts have gathered clothes from the washing line, you can see them wandering on the balcony… watch out, there is a pillow and an invisible hand over your throat! you have no friends, lighthouse keepers don’t either… my poor little angelfish! loneliness is a killer whale!

            hold me!

            hold me!

(c)   İlyas Tunç

Translated by Robert Berold and the poet

İlyas Tunç is presently working on a translation project, where he translates poems by Nigerian  poets into Turkish, weekly, in a national newspaper.

Six poems from Niyi Osundare in African Writing-online

Adumaradan* 

Your love engulfs me
As the harmattan overwhelms the heat
I will pledge a thousand favours to the wind
To courier my voice to your ears

Adumaradan, come close to me
So you can behold the honour of my presence

Since the day I set eyes on you
Since the day I had a glimpse of your beauty
Your love has ridden me like a horse of wild winds
I cannot sleep; repose is far from my eyes

Adumaradan, come close to me
So you can behold the honour of my presence

Adumaradan of inestimable beauty
You are the palm oil, honour of the soup
You are the whiteness which proclaims the splendour of the teeth
You are camwood, deep red in the house of beauty

Adumaradan, come close to me
So you can behold the honour of my presence

What is the weaverbird’s work if not the building of wondrous nests
What is the crab’s task if not the digging of holes in the swamp
What job has the scarab beetle besides the music of the heights
What is the lover’s duty if not the pouring of honey into the ears of the beloved

Adumaradan, come close to me
So you can behold the honour of my presence

Teeth-whiter-than-new-coins, owner of the alluring toothgap
She of the bouncing buttocks, who-adorns-the-chest-with-breasts
Adufe**, paragon of beauty so full of wisdom
Come let’s play the game of the young and free

Adumaradan, come close to me
So you can behold the honour of my presence

Notes
* One-whose-blackness-is-the-beauty-of-her-skin
** The-one-for-whose-favour-the-world-competes

                                                           Read More Here

Niyi Osundare

Osundare is Professor of English at University of New Orleans, USA, and one of the best-known poets from Africa. His works of published poetry include Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Village Voices (1984), A Nib in the Pond (1986), The Eye of the Earth (1986), which won both the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize and The Commonwealth Poetry Prize in its year of publication. He was also a recipient of the prestigious Folon/Nichols Award for ‘excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa’. Other published volumes of poetry include Songs of the Season (1987), Moonsongs (1988), Waiting Laughters (1990), Selected Poems (1992), Midlife (1993), The Word is an Egg (2000) and Tender Moments (2006). Niyi Osundare has also published four plays and essays on literature, politics and culture. Orality and performance are important features of his works, which have been translated into the Italian, French, Dutch, Czech, Slovenian, and Korean languages.

White Egrets by Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1992 – and the book that earned him his reputation was Omeros, an outstanding homage to Homer written with buoyant originality. But the Nobel prize has done Walcott no favours. Stature has become a literary issue. It cannot be easy to know how to exist within your own work – where to put yourself – when you have acquired almost legendary status as a poet. I read the new collection looking for Walcott as a recognisable, distinctive human being and observed him disappear repeatedly behind his own majestic lines. He would often launch himself into the first person, then retreat into the mercy of the third, as if the exposure of speaking as himself were too great. More Here

the rose is frightening By İlyas Tunç

vases! antiques! scented clothes!

when the moon of blues went home, when the beaver ran away from the night, June became red-faced, September, forgetful… nobody told me the truth, I passed through paths, suspended gardens, canyons… in the end I read on a Sumerian tablet: the rose is frightening!

rock graves, temples, darkness of the middle ages… none of this frightened me, nor did guillotines, scissors or vampire bats… I have lived with pirates, dragons and alligators, I have survived the seismic shockwaves… but the rose is frightening!

it is something wild and stirring; away from the midnight but close to daylight… like a red snail, like a sea urchin that rolled down from the slope… it is harmless to the touch, but its smell is of hot blood… like a venus flytrap, like an infection with no vaccine…

altars! ivies! sucking lips!

the rose is frightening!

İlyas Tunç

Translated from Turkish by Robert Berold and the poet

Two writers, two poems, one title - ABIKU

The two poems below, by JP Clark and Wole Soyinka share the same title and theme. I love both poems. It was Kola Tubosun's quote from JP Clark's "Abiku" on Facebook that inspired me to dig out the poems again.

I wish you the pleasure I get any time I read them.   

Abiku By JP Clark

Coming and going these several seasons,
Do stay out on the baobab tree,
Follow where you please your kindred spirits
If indoors is not enough for you.
True, it leaks through the thatch
When flood brim the banks,
And the bats and the owls
Often tear in at night through the eaves,
And at harmattan, the bamboo walls
Are ready tinder for the fire
That dries the fresh fish up on the rack.
Still, it's been the healthy stock
To several fingers, to many more will be
Who reach to the sun.
No longer then bestride the threshold
But step in and stay
For good. We know the knife scars
Serrating down your back and front
Like beak of the sword-fish,
And both your ears, notched
As a bondsman to this house,
Are all relics of your first comings.
Then step in, step in and stay
For her body is tired,
Tired, her milk going sour
Where many more mouths gladden the heart.

Abiku By Wole Soyinka

In vain your bangles cast

Charmed circles at my feet;

I am Abiku, calling for the first

And the repeated time.

Must I weep for goats and cowries

For palm oil and the sprinkled ash?

Yams do not sprout in amulets

To earth Abiku's limbs.

So when the snail is burnt in his shell

Whet the heated fragments, brand me

Deeply on the breast. You must know him

When Abiku calls again.

I am the squirrel teeth, cracked

The riddle of the palm. Remember

This, and dig me deeper still into

The god's swollen foot.

Once and the repeated time, ageless

Though I puke. And when you pour

Libations, each finger points me near

The way I came, where

The ground is wet with mourning

White dew suckles flesh-birds

Evening befriends the spider, trapping

Flies in wind-froth;

Night, and Abiku sucks the oil

From lamps. Mother! I'll be the

Supplicant snake coiled on the doorstep

Yours the killing cry.

The ripes fruit was saddest;

Where I crept, the warmth was cloying.

In the silence of webs, Abiku moans, shaping

Mounds from the yolk.

For a Dispossessed (M.K.O Abiola; In memory of June 12)1

Moshood
this is memory

chanting and healing clots
of yesteryear's wound, from

shaming nobles wobbling
in Nigeria’s conscience cart

*

I remember you
not as the hero disrobed
in a fit of madness
but the madness death-robed
into a myth of valour
You've left a triple score
with gun trotting bumpkins
round cheeks
round necks
round heads
and round brains

Those smuggled historians with
square cheeks
square necks
square heads
and square brains

The lunatics plummeting,
drifting into bigger daftness

They have left no
grief but brief pain

Abiola
you filled our numbness, and
rebelled against the yoke of tyranny
Now, the cheat must pay the cheated

*

In this ocean of evil
I struggle to the shores of atonement

with pledge, your side I take:
the fool must pay the fooled

*

Forget their forgetfulness
Olawale
your heart is preserved

Their forgetfulness...
gathered demise for whimsies
victory for our incantations

They did not know forgetfulness
was the bane of the duck
it remembered not to part its toes

They did not know
forgetfulness was
the bane of the sheep
it left its incisor in its mother's womb….

*

Convention infuriates an insane
he’d wear clothes at night
walk naked at daybreak

Moshood,
you left venom in their midst
now lives are imbued in spite

*

They have become,
fishermen wishing to be firemen
farmers hoeing soils with the phantasm of the gunner
hunters preying to become hunted

In the demise of pride
these men eat yam tubers
sprouting from the lips of boys,
with loyalty shifted into bags of lies.

Even sons parade fathers
whose madness tow shame
to rumple the truck of peace…

Till the edges are smoothed
I will not forget.

(c) Jumoke Verissimo 2008.

*This poem was first published in my book, "I am memory".

A Season’s Trial – for Jos

the season came with its own promises

but good harvest meant more smoked asses

when dreams would be kicked into abyss

hunters jumped into the field

harvested souls not for salvation

but as redemption for vaporised love

a fertile soil for retaliation

the ground was planted with

coaled skins

breached spirits

and whipped bones

hopeful scythes detached necks from bodies

daggers dragged inside; outside as web expo

vile red - and a heavy cry-fall hit the land

women’s scream fed the soils with humour

nerves bloomed into waiting roll of bullets

fallen flowers, now wilted, littered grounds

but there is no child to pick them into leis

and on clay laid clay which the turf rejected;

tomorrow stayed awake, but in bloody clumps

amber defined the colour in the men’s eyes

demoed their dreams as un-fleshed pieces

Agony sprang up vigilantes to keep guard

But the rain of red, didn’t cease to fall

The soggy soil drew a notice for stranger

Attn: fear and anger defends this area