Interview: A Dialogue with Pushcart Prize Nominee, Tares Oburumu.
By Prosper Ifeanyi
A Dialogue with Pushcart Prize Nominee, Tares Oburumu.
Tares Oburumu is a lover of God and his daughter, Sasha. A two times nominee of the Pushcart American literary prize for poetry, and the inaugural winner of GAP magazine poetry contest. He writes 25 kilometers away from Warri. His works have appeared on Connotation press, Bluepepper, Icefloes, The Agonist, Afapinen, Praxis ,Juke, Woven Tales, Kalahari, Africanwriter, Afrocritik, Expound, Nantygreens, Ngiga Review and elsewhere.
Dialogue hosted by Prosper Ifeanyi.
Good morning, sir. Thank you for honouring my invitation. Sir, how would you describe your poems and the voice it lends to contemporary African and Nigerian literature? Good morning, sir. I am one of the few writing poetry, who refuse definitions, or descriptions to things existing on separate surfaces. Giving such descriptions, to me, obfuscates it. My poetry comes through a prism quite different from the popular forms; studies, comparison, sitting down for hours, drafting, abandoning, redrafting and the final work. I don't go through all that grueling process. I am connected to quite a lot of things, past and present. It could be an experience, memory. My life is one hard drive, on a long road, towards some other hellacious forces. Once I have the connection, to a dead brother, a mother living on fishing, a hungry week, a lover's betrayal, a jail term, I take down the picture before my eyes to paper and give it, without much effort, a universal color, though not in the way people will relate to it, in the way I relate to it. Between me and the world out there, African or Nigerian, there is chasm I have not bridged, and I don't want to be conscious of it. That consciousness will strip me of my art. I think there's a word called "incipient" or rather "budding". I belong to it.
Okay, sir. So it's safe to say your poetry cannot and should not be placed in a box? Yes.
Drawing from T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) and Longinus' "On the Sublime" (1st century AD). Do you think creative-writing (poetry in this case) can be taught as a discipline to people who desire the craft? Or do you subscribe to the idea of the art being a gifting—a divine or God given craft which no one can pass on? T.S Eliot's essay cuts across many domains, so also is "On The Sublime." They cut deep into the supernatural and the natural world. Both writers tend to a paradigm shift, which I see, first, as blessings to the individual, and secondly, a curse to what lies outside the individual. Evolution is a primal and noble phenomenon. Things change, definitely. No era is ever the same. So it's with poetry. From the Elizabethan to the Imagists, poetry too, like the human society, has gone through some grandeur changes. In all these changes, the individual talent, many times tampered with MFAs, poetry classes, doesn't change with the creative adventures it has been saddled with. That talent and individual are one is incontrovertible. But there are those who are hungry for imposition. To them are the benefits or blessings of the T.S Eliot's essay given. They have to be taught the rudiments involved, where I personally do not see a basic principle. How they fare in the larger community of creative writers is a curse; the awarded mediocre explains better the emergence of Derek Walcott as the last individual talent who stood before the swedish academy to receive the Nobel prize for literature, for his poetry. After Derek, it has been a rough walk for poets. I think the creative adventures have stifled talent. The craft is no longer sublime as it was.
Can you comment on poetry being a curse? They award mediocrity now. This is the curse. I read a lot of online journals and magazines. The poetry most publish cannot be passed as poetry. And the writers of such, as I find out, are from the MFAs and the poetry classes which hold on to technique much to the chagrin, I think, of poetry if it were a human being.
What do you have to say about poetry being an instrumental tool for social commentary especially in the Nigerian context? Creative writings, generally, have less, or no hold on society. Poetry is the least of all. It's chiefly poetry that is subject to "art for art's sake." More deadening is the language it has chosen to express itself. The structures, forms and techniques used allow for lethargy on the part of the audience it seeks to give character to. Take the poetry of Christopher Okigbo to the streets that need it most. You will be treading a vain path. Or even Derek Walcott's, to say the least of Soyinka. Poetry exists for poetry alone. There's no connection, no bridge between poetry and the individual living on the streets, or in some snug circumstances, on which people can walk on. And I don't see the emergence of such bridges out of the deep if what we call poetry remains so. Rumi played a role, being the instrument for change among individuals in the American society, and minimally, compared to what a Martin Luther king Jr speech did. The valley between poetry and the people yawns so wide it's almost the size of the universe.
Since 1976, the Pushcart American literary prize has been awarded annually, and is considered one of the most prestigious in it's field. Being a two times Pushcart nominee, would you say Africans have a leveled playing field out there with their poetry? Or, do you think this generation of poets have a lot more work to do in apropos to attaining such feat? Kwame Dawes, I think, has won a Pushcart. Do we place his works on this generation of Africans writing poetry? It depends on what you mean by "this generation of poets." If you mean the Romeos, Gbenga Adesinas, Gbenga Adeobas, whose poetry I place side by side with the best poets writing in this generation, the hope that someday one of them will be awarded is no longer a grain of sand to me.
I mean in a more contemporaneous context. Contemporary, yes.
People now go on with the fad of placing pictures on internet spaces and communities, with tag: “where are the poets in the house?” in reply, people display all manner of jocularity and ludicrousness to the topicality the picture asserts. Do you find it disconcerting that poetry has found its way to the threshold of internet gimmicks and jokes? Or, this is just another way to popularise the genre across all spheres of life? It's a way of popularizing the genre, though I find it mortifying, yes. Quite a desecrated way to popularize a most canonical phenomenon.
Does your poetry share any secluded/sacrosanct affinity with your daughter, Sasha? You seem to always have her at heart when your bio is perused. I gave up on writing poetry sometime around 2014, decidedly. I swore to an oath, never to write again. Before her birth, myriad as they seem, the conclusions for suicide multipled. I woke up, each day, to find my life, or life itself blank and blurred to the grave. There came a time I had to lay bricks to survive. And these bricks belonged to someone who cannot go beyond the description " lay." I was drunk with death. After her birth, I began, slowly with the most unkind drudgeries of effort, to heal. Silently, life took a different route, bypassing the noose in a way I could not have devised. With her, came the life i sought, daily, to destroy. I don't see myself in the light of the living. I have died long ago, a few months after I graduated from the University of Benin. The life i live now belongs to my daughter. She's the poetry you read, the Tares Oburumu I have come to love.
The year 2022 is a fresh and promising year, filled hopes and resolutions. Do you have any big plans for your poetry that you wish to share? Any poetry chapbook to watch out for? And what is the first poem you ever wrote, and where was it published? The first poem I wrote, I think, has gone down into some toilets I can't remember. It wasn't published, nor was it publishable. I still remember the title: Moving Closer To God. I was a born again Christian at that time. I was in the secondary school. A vibrant preacher. So I wrote that poem in the christian fashion as I knew at the time. My first ever collection of poems will be published in London. I spent ten years writing it. It has too many rejections stories on it. Too many publishers rejected it. I am looking forward to seeing it published this year, and it's the only thing I can say of the year now.
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