‘Why my second poetry collection came 10 years after the first’

Niran Okewole is a poet, playwright, essayist and a trained psychiatrist. In this interview, he talks about his new poetry collection, The Hate Artist, his ideological and philosophical outlook, while shedding light into his work and craft. EXCERPTS:

Your new collection, The Hate Artist, is a decade break after your debut poetry collection, Logarhythms. Why is it so long coming up with your second volume 10 years after?

Between Logarhythms and The Hate Artist, there was as you observed, a decade, half of which went into my psychiatry residency training and active participation in the struggles of the medical associations, while the other half went into psychiatry research and academic writing. As such, my pace of creative writing was slow. But I don’t think the commitment to artistic duty ever really waned; it was always there.

Can you share with us your formative years as a poet?

As for the formative years, I suppose those are still unfolding, but maybe we could talk about the years leading up to the publication of Logarhythms, the years between the two books, and what is happening now. Taking that long view, poetry has always been in my consciousness. I recall copying out one of those Yoruba poems in Alawiye as a six-year-old boy. My dad liked it and pinned it up in his office, and thereafter, I was the poet to his friends. I discovered African poetry on the pages of Senanu and Vincent’s Selection of African Poetry while in secondary school, and about the same time I discovered the English romantic poets – Shelley, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats – in Children’s Britannica. That was pretty much my view of poetry at the time, and I wrote a few imitations which were eventually packed into one metal bin and burnt during that breakbetween finishing secondary school and entering university. I think by then, I had more or less come to recognise all those rhymed stanzas as just so much crap.

By the time I was in medical school, I had discovered Eliot and Auden, who came to represent pretty much the type of poetry one was striving for. My first collection was heavily influenced by these guys, and Soyinka, of course. In the intervening years, there has been a quest to evolve my poetics, and the thematic concerns came to crystallise along the lines into which The Hate Artist is divided. During this period, I have been paying particular attention to the work of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Derek Walcott. And, from an ideological point of view, Pablo Neruda. The critical essays of Helen Vendler have also been very instructive. But the process of development and self-invention is not over. Presently, I am trying to do some longer work, which is going with a study of poets like Femi Oyebode and Tade Ipadeola, together with Derek Walcott and Wallace Stevens.

How long does it take you to write a poem?

How long it takes to write is a difficult question to answer. Some poems are done in less than a month. And then, I have some ideas that I’ve been nurturing for over five years, that I know won’t be done for another decade.

There is the internationalism grip about terrorism and insurgency in the collection, and by putting the readers in the mind of terrorists, what apprehension do you seek?

The collection barely disguises the fact that it clusters along three lines: the general business of poetry, poems related to science and medicine, and poems of a political orientation. The title poem comes from that third group, and is an attempt to engage with the state of the world we live in. Half a century ago, the biggest fear of the engaged intellectual was of nuclear annihilation in the context of the cold war. Today, that nuclear threat is embedded within the matrix of terrorism along fundamentalist lines, and the reductionist emotion which governs this is hate for the other. That is very much evident today, not only in the emergence of groups like Islamic State (IS) and Boko Haram, but even in direct descendants of the Ku Klux Klan. So the spectre of hate is a global phenomenon, which goes to the heart of human nature. As Auden once wrote, ‘We must love one another or die.’

You express optimism in the world as a den of hope because it is in continuum, when do you think this hope can materialise?

That question presupposes a Judeo-Christian perception of time as linear. If one perceives time as cyclical, that hope of an eventual outcome is futile. I like the way Camus deployed the myth of Sisyphus as an existential parable. Even when hope seems futile, one defines oneself by a capacity for positive action.