What is poetry , if its worth its salt
But the bread that men can pass
from mouth to mouth
From hand to hand, across the centuries,
When systems have decayed…
when the prisoner circles his prison cell
chewing the one leaf whose music will outlast…

I forget the rest. But will check it out tonight.

Also read Zbeignew Herbert's poem: Episode in Library . It articulates most vividly and dramatically how poetry commits suicide in departments of English Literature all over the world. On the pages on the New York Book Review and Times Literary Supplement. Happily, there is a rumour going around that departments of English literature will soon be closed down or submerged under cultural studies. What a happy day that will be. It will teach the academic motherf**kers to ossify a living art in between the pages of a book with notes hanging out like the paragraphs of their own genitalia when they open their thighs like the pages of the books. 

Some poems are undeniably attempts by poets the exorcise personal demons. Other poems are just opinions written in a self-conscious, self-important fashion prescribing interactional models for the society. What do you think is the highest motivator of poets? What makes you, for instance write a poem and what factors influence your choices of subjects and the way you treat them?

If it was not for poetry I would have been in prison, in the asylum or in the grave by now.

The primary mechanism of poetry I believe is that it is a facility that allows you to live out the contradictions of your life , to balm the restlessness of the human spirit through language and imagination. So many things can trigger of the poetic process. The bitterness of exile. Memories. Memories of an ugly place like Nigeria, the only country in the world that has existed since independence without a government. Maicuntri, the ultimate miracle of the twentieth and the twenty-first century.

Other catalytic factors for great poetry include, a cantankerous girlfriend,. an unfaithful lover. A stupid or absent-mined penis that refuses to rise to the occasion unless you light a black candle and a stick of sasarobia incense. . These are all little irritations that can trigger off the mechanism for writing poetry.

There was a time when I wrote my best poems with full erections. That was when I was walking on the forthcoming collection : The Cry of Orgasm which as you will see when it is published later this year is full of spunk. Then, at a time I could only write when I was depressed. Why I Don't Like Philip Larkin came that way. I was broken open again by pain in Great Britain where everything rhymes with pain. Friend, the four years I lived in Liverpool were the four saddest years of my entire life.


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