‘The internet has made the work of writers easier’

Peter Akinlabi is a poet who specialises in penning poems on places he visits. In this interview, he speaks on his style of poetry and how it has made him popular among literary lovers. EXCERPTS.

Do you have some unfinished poems you look at sporadically?

A whole lot of them. In a sense, all poems I have ever written, until they finally appear in a book, are still work-in-progress.

Does your poems get completed at a snail’s pace or at full tilt?

I am a ‘snailman’ in the sense that I really never finish writing a poem; I keep chipping off or adding new elements – syntactic or line realignments, a lot of sculptural reviewing, until the poem is out, after which I become sad again in dissatisfaction.

Would you say poetry has brought you to the limelight as a writer?

Surely, that’s only thing I do to get some attention, otherwise, I was just your regular John Doe.

Have you ever attempted a very long poem?

I prefer relatively short poems. Long poems can be unwieldy as far as imagery compactness goes; you can easily lose sight of your trajectory in them. But I have written a number of long poems too.

Do you remember what your first poem was about?

Definitely, it was about sunrise over a small river called Nana, which I had to pass daily to go to school.

In a country full of talented writers, how do you cope with the challenges of reaching out to readers in Nigeria?

There is no challenge of reaching out to readers at all now with this business of the internet and social networking. You just need to post a poem on your social media page.

What impact did being on the shortlist of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize bring to you?

More renown, I guess.

Do you travel to actual places to write your poems, particularly  Ouidah, one of your shortlisted poems?

I have been working on a series of poems that reflect on the mythologics of places. ‘Quidah’ is one of them. You also have ‘Ijaye’, ‘Oyo’, ‘Takoradi’ and so on. You really need to visit these places to be able to track down the order between map and its mythology.

‘… that men caress like sadness’. That’s a beautiful way to end ‘A Walk on the Plateau’. What led you to write this poem?

The next time you see that poem anywhere, it would be titled ‘Barkin Ladi’. It is actually the first of the series that I mentioned just now. I wrote that poem during my service year in a small town called Barkin Ladi, a few kilometers from Jos, where I lived. It was a small, little rustic, but a home to the Plateau State airport. I lived in the premises of St. John Vianney Junior Seminary. But there’s something magical about the name of this town, about the scenery- the rocks, the slender trees and the artificial lakes abandoned by miners years before –  and the social behaviour, the unremarked actions that blurred a separation of individualities of men and matter… there was something here that enlivened a  mythopoeic imagination. I am not sure if such magic could survive for long amidst the daily carnage in and around Barkin Ladin at present.

What kind of audience do you think of when you write?

Any reader who enjoys my kind of poetry. You know there are different types, modes if you like, of poetry. I myself don’t enjoy certain kinds.