No. 22 | And when there is no one...

October 23, 2024

Hey y'all, it's been a minute since I've sent a post out.  I've been grappling with purpose, wondering what's next. Realized recently that what's next is what's now.  Please pop in the chat below comments, emojis, questions, all the things, Let's go. n

Reflecting today on the words of Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare:

“Without an audience, a song dies” - One of the first ideas that comes to me here is a rephrasing of this risk; without you, the listener dies, a word dies, without you, a singer dies. A singer goes silent, a song ceases the emission of sound.

Without the two to the two, there is no one. 

I think as well of a poetic philosophy I picked up in a workshop at Cave Canem led by writer and novelist Tiphanie Yanique. She shared three pillars of poetry:  the idea of generosity, the need to communicate, to connect with an audience, and the notion of joining a lineage of writers teaching the writing through their writing. Osundare offered these words on audience and song at the start of his reading at Furious Flower this past September, a black poetry conference that takes place at James Madison University every ten years.

I think more so this notion reminds me that poetry is also mode of transportation, a way into or out of, a way between two things.

Osundare goes on to say that “Western Poetics have not really been able to deal with what we are doing in Africa.” That, he lives and works and sleeps in the interface between [Yoruba and English]. What all of life has the West not been able to deal with what all of blackness, black tings, black art? In that space of unknowing, what lies?

I think here as well of Mama Nia Love and the reality she shared many years ago during an African roots class she taught at Smith College, a class of which I was enrolled. Spirit, she echoed to us as we prepared to go across the floor, does not operate in a collegical way.

If the English language could be seen as collegical, and Yoruba language as spirit; you can, I can, feel what Osundare intimates or suggests in his comment on Western Poetics, and in the span of the dance class, perhaps Mama Nia was admonishing and coaching us to rise up rhythm, rise up song—eeeYAA– to lay down the stricture and structure of our lives in the academy, to lay down the bone, rise up the spirit.

Is this Osundare what Western poetics cannot capture or has yet to capture? 

Osundare shares more. When he wants to read poetry; translating that desire, is as if to say, I want to chant ewe. To chant brings to mind the poetry I most like myself. A poetry that lifts , a poetry that flies, this the poetry I seek. I cannot recall now but somewhere, someone spoke of the people who could fly. Why, I think it was Toni Morrison in her documentary, The Pieces I Am. Osundare shares that this way of phrasing I want to read poetry is to speak to the old communion between the mouth and the ear, between the mouth and the ear.

where that writer at

cook this: roasted butternut squash

  • my heart is full (Me and Mama Kim)

  • New hair tho

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With best wishes,

n