The Eliot of Lagos Workshop: May 17, 2025
“Key Details”
Date: May 17, 2025
Time: 11am—3:30pm
Fee: N25,000
Class size: 18—23 people
Venue: Physical
Address: No 3 Allen Avenue, Ikeja, beside Mama Cass Restaurant, opp. Odyssey Hotel, Toyin Roundabout
Bank details: 0434779782, GT Bank, Ernest Ogunyemi
Email: ogunyemiernest@gmail.com
“Words Matter”
During the workshop I took late last year, one of the participants confessed that they’d never heard any of the things I was saying before: it all sounded strange. Which was not surprising. My thoughts about poetry run counter to what is generally considered “poetical” in our age.
The English critic F. R. Leavis, writing in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), after saying that “something has been wrong [with poetry] for forty or fifty years at the least,” makes the following statements—“For it seems unlikely that the number of potential poets born varies as much from age to age as literary history might lead one to suppose. What varies is the use made of talent. And the use each age makes of its crop of talent is determined largely by the preconceptions of ‘the poetical’ that are current, and the corresponding habits, conventions, and techniques.”
It is noteworthy that Leavis says “potential poets,” because we know, as Randall Jarrell said in a review somewhere, “Whether we live in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth I, there is one law we can be sure of: there are only a few good poets alive.” The problem with our age is that those who have the “potential” to become one of the “few good poets alive” have had that potential ruined by current expectations about poetry.
Those expectations are what Leavis calls “the preconceptions of ‘the poetical.’” What are some of those preconceptions? Geoffrey Hill had a number of answers to that question. One: “The poem as ‘selfie’ is the aesthetic criterion of contemporary verse.” Two, there’s “the belief or habit of thought that, in order to survive an age of commodity, the art of poetry must itself become a commodity—that is to say, a vehicle for entertainment . . .” There’s superfluity: “Poetry in the 21st century perhaps needs to be especially on its guard against redundancy, since we are so accepting of the redundant and are already choking the ocean with our discarded plastic and inconveniencing the heavens with space-junk. It really is incumbent upon poetry not to add to the amount of plastic and space-junk.”
Hill was not joking. Poetry in our age deals in excess (too much talk, a flood of gross emotion, words whose weight have not been checked); is lacking in control; has no sense of the artificial working of strings needed to earn something true and genuine. We think our memoirs are the natural in poetry: when, in poetry, it is artificiality (handled with mastery) that creates a natural effect. The art is about innovativeness. Not cheap thrills.
Once, poetry had serious bearing on the institutions of state, because it provided a rich substrate of consciousness. Today, that richness has thinned—dangerously; and, as Christ said, “If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?”
Much is at stake with regards to poetry. The other day I was learning Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863) by heart, and I asked myself: “What’s the point? Why does it matter? What use is Lincoln’s address, given a century and a half ago, what use is that to you?” I am not sure if I gave myself a response or what I said in response. But by learning that address by heart, I began to see what Hill meant when he said, “I believe that there is an extensive central area—a grand nexus—where prose and poetry are subjected to not dissimilar pressures. These pressures being inter-connectedly ‘techne’ and ‘polity.’”
The crisis of democracy (whatever one takes that to mean) is rooted in a crisis of language and of thought. One reason why democracy has yet to work in Nigeria—in my view, the most important reason—is that we are not a people who have due reverence for words, and, consequently, we are not a people of serious thought. It may sound like a stretch, but it is not at all: social contracts are written with quill dipped in ink. Words matter. And nowhere else do words matter so much as they do in poetry.
“The problem with our age is that those who have the “potential” to become one of the “few good poets alive” have had that potential ruined by current expectations about poetry.”
Some Notes
I have been teaching poetry now for four years, and my perspective has changed across those years, and it still changes—though these days the changes take place within the same frame, they are attempts to get a fuller sense of my stuff. But I have found, as I have drawn it out here, that the work of a teacher of poetry is partly like that of a powerful critic: to address poetical presuppositions that are current in an age, to test them, to nominate more correct presuppositions, to show why the nominated ones are better by engaging with great works of art; and, by so doing, to help the poets she works with to see and to be able to recognize what is and is not poetry in their own work.
As best I can, I have tried in the preceding paragraph to sketch my aims for the workshop. The syllabus will be provided to those who register—prior to the day of the workshop.
It is hard to teach anything meaningful in a day, I often say. But the May workshop will be taking place in a day. However, it is two days pressed into one. Typically, I would take two-, three-day workshops with a two-hour class per day. This time: there will be two two-hour sessions with a break in-between (for small talk and some refreshments).
I have decided to press the two sessions into a single day because of transportation expenses for the participants. If it’s broken into two days, participants will have to spend money coming twice. And I know how it is with poets (I am one).
As said, there will be some refreshments. The workshop will happen on a Saturday, the third Saturday in May. The venue is at Allen Avenue, Ikeja, in a very obvious place. My bank details are at the top of this post. We will only be able to accommodate between 18 and 23 people, because of the space and so that everyone can be attended to as they ought. Once you pay, send an email with the receipt: ogunyemiernest@gmail.com.
If you have questions, inquiries, or you want to sponsor some poets, please send an email to the same address above. I look forward to seeing you and discussing poetry with you! 🔹
“For it seems unlikely that the number of potential poets born varies as much from age to age as literary history might lead one to suppose.” — F. R. Leavis
Well said, man. Enjoyed reading this and wish I had the opportunity to attend this, but the barrier is set against me with the location. I wish you the best.