A Two-Day Poetry Workshop with Yours Truly
Between July 7 and 8, 4—6 pm (WAT) each day, I would like to teach a poetry workshop to about twelve or fifteen poets, especially Nigerian poets.
I have been trying to create a workshop titled “Composed Wonder” for a particular literary platform (the title of the workshop comes from an essay of the same name by James Longenbach, from his collection of critical essays The Resistance to Poetry) and I need to create a syllabus for the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program, which commences in two days and ends when July ends; my mentees this year are from Singapore and Germany, I am excited to learn with them. But also, I have been thinking about teaching an independent workshop since last year: I promised a few poets who reached out to me last year that it would hold in the fall of 2022, but there goes failure. Although I had a brief, spontaneous workshop with the poets last year (we talked about science and poetry), the workshop did not continue, and I believe not much was achieved from the single one we had.
Between 2022 and mid-2023, my work has taken on a fresh resolve, and I have become much more humble about my own work. The other day, I read some of the fifty-something poems I have published in various journals, trying to find poems that might work for a collection I am still dreaming about, and I could not find five. A man does not decide the worth of his own work, but not many of those poems are to my taste now, some of them I can’t bear to read with patience. What has happened? I was saying to myself yesterday that when we talk about growth as artists, what we mean could be this: Realizing how bad of an artist you are, coming to see the inadequacies that riddle your work, the portholes, the weak corners and corridors of your little aesthetic house. Grace is “seeing” how to fix that; and I think that grace is what makes a great writer, grace is what makes him wrestle. The luxury of trying is the gift of grace. For now, I want to be a good (not a great) writer, to make poems that fulfill a promise they make to themselves. I am eating Roget’s Thesaurus.
Between July 7 and 8, 4—6 pm (WAT) each day, I would like to teach a poetry workshop to about twelve or fifteen poets, especially Nigerian poets. The fee is 10,000 naira, and it would be on Zoom. 5000 Naira would have been a good spot if the workshop would be a single session, but I find it difficult to teach anything meaningful in two hours. With four hours, something can be done, something worthwhile: that is why I have fixed the fee at 10,000 naira. However, I have room for three people who cannot afford the workshop: that is, the first three people to reach out and let me know that they cannot afford the workshop. Please send an email with a packet of three poems attached: ogunyemiernest@gmail.com.
The first workshop I ever attended was taught by Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, the Nollywood critic (the only critic that there is in Nigeria, by the way, I don’t know any other: there are music journalists, plenty, but no critics), the first workshop I attended was taught by this man; it happened somewhere around Ikeja, not very far from Ouida Bookstore. It was in two sessions and it cost 25,000 naira—Kola Tubosun sponsored me (after the workshop, I visited Olumo and wrote an essay for ktravula.com). What did I learn at that workshop? I learned standard; that a man can love literature and take it seriously, that you can go your own way and do your own work and do it well; I was also gifted a love for the New Yorker. I can still see Oris standing there, his head bare as a poor man’s plate, which probably reflected light, sharing stories in-between tips on how to do prose. The workshop was about style: he said Chimamanda is not a stylist, her prose—in my own words now—is just there; Teju Cole is different from Chimamanda, he can make a sentence signify what it contains. I have forgotten all the rules he shared (I remember he said something about what number of quotes from a movie or song or book to put in your review). Someone who was at that workshop wrote an essay for the Guardian and they quoted me as saying Arinze Ifeakandu is my literary idol or something like that, which is far from the truth. Oris had asked us who we thought were good stylists, and in response I mentioned Arinze’s story “God’s Children” as being stylistically impressive (of course, I cherished that story, I still think it is a masterpiece), and Oris waved it off, asked how many stories Arinze had written. Now I don’t think Oris was looking down on the work of this writer I cherished (I was seventeen), instead I think Oris’s attitude was caution, and it was also a consequence of the writers he had read; it is an attitude I myself now carry. The contemporary writers you think are great are not really great when you measure them by those who came before them, most are whack. Call it elitist. I have read a good deal since 2018 and I find that Oris was not wrong.
If you take anything from this workshop (should you join in), I hope it is a deep love and respect for literature. A lot of people who write poetry don’t have any respect for poetry, they think it is their plaything; anyone who can string words together and who has confessions to make can make poems. Well, that is not true one bit. The writers whose work I hope to engage with in the workshop: Leo Tolstoy (passages from “The Death of Ivan Ilych”), Elizabeth Bishop (“The Fish”), Tomas Tranströmer, Francis Pogne, Robert Frost (“The Most of It,” “The Death of the Hired Man”), A. R. Ammons, JP Clark, Richard Wilbur, W.B. Yeats, Christian Wiman, Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare, essays by Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Cleanth Brooks, Robert P. Warren. Don’t worry: only about 17 works in total.
Note that Christian Wiman is the only contemporary poet included, I think he has written one or two of the great poems of this century (in essence, he is not contemporary at all); we’d also read an essay by him. The older writers have a lot to teach us, Shakespeare has more to say to you than you think. Much of what we are writing today, I believe, is unabashed hokum. And Nigerian poetry has not realized its potential. What writers like Soyinka and Clark began, it died with the writers who came after them. This is also one thing I hope to do in this class: to say a few things about what happened to Nigerian poetry after the Civil War, to share what I know from the reading of, and steady looking at, Nigerian literature that I have been doing, and continue to do. I think we, those of us writing today, can realize the potential that slept with the greats. I have said it before—and you may not like me for it—but it is not enough that Nigerian poets are appearing in every magazine, what is needed is that we get to a place where Nigerian poetry has substance. Now: it does not look to me like it does. Much of what we are producing is stale salt. But—let’s leave the talk for the workshop; I hope I can make those who participate angry enough.
The materials will be forwarded to the participants a week before the workshop, by the end of this month. Once you send a payment, just drop me an email (you can send an email before you send a payment, too). Also, if you’d like to pay for a couple of poets (the same way Kola Tubosun did for me), please drop me an email to let me know: that would be greatly appreciated. For those who cannot afford the workshop, please drop an email as soon as you can. Only three slots. Please drop me an email if you have any questions.
If you are curious about my work as a poetry “educator,” please visit my website and download my CV: www.ernestogunyemi.com. You can also read my essay on the workshop I taught at the Poetry Foundation last year, “The Poetry of Glossolalia,” here.
In nuce, here are the necessary details:
Date: 7—8 July, 2023
Fee: 10,000 naira
Account details: OGUNYEMI ERNEST OLATUNBOSUN. 0434779782. GT Bank.
Send an email: ogunyemiernest@gmail.com.
All the best,
Ernest.