Zakiyyah Dzukogi: What is the process of writing a poem like for you? Is it a lot of hard work or easy?
Flourish Joshua: To be quite honest, there is no particular process by which I write my poems. The majority of the poems I have ever written came as scraps; a line in the bathroom, a line in the kitchen, another on Lagos roads, another in the dead of the night. I am always scribbling things—the noise in my body, the curtains closer to the light than I am, the piano’s seduction every Sunday, the chirping of birds by night, the ambushes my father lays for the rats eating our foodstuffs, my not being photogenic, how I like the fashion sense of some beautiful ladies in my church but can’t tell them because they may mistake a simple compliment for a sense of interest, how my butt holds faeces better than my country holds power, how I overthink about my ambitions and the better days dancing ahead, how I fear to graduate from school, get a job, marry, grow old and die like everyone else, how nocturnal I am, how much I want to say for how little everyone wants to listen—whatsoever, I put them down. I have dozens of written scraps. I keep a journal of imageries [as every writer should]. Then, when I feel like it, I return to see if these scraps can behave themselves into a poem or something readable.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: Please describe your sense of identity in this or any possible world in imagery or metaphor.
Flourish Joshua: Grace. Mercy. Light.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: If any of your poems could literarily save a person’s life, which poem would it be and can you describe the person whose life you think it would have saved?
Flourish Joshua: Aubade with Hope in Palette Poetry.
The depressed, faint-hearted, the one in whose heart unrest leaps.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: What does Africa mean to you, as potential or reality?
Flourish Joshua: A rifle. Look well, you will see it.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: Could you share with us one poem you’ve been most impressed or fascinated by? Tell us why and share your favourite lines from it.
Flourish Joshua: Has to be Pamilerin Jacob’s Anti-Elergy. I still recite the poem off hand, here and there, as it is now a part of me, and I, a part of it. The poem is gentle, vulnerable, and moving. Something I would have written.
Learnt recently butterflies drink crocodile
tears. O, may I be as beautiful
as the metaphor.
Flourish Joshua is a Nigerian poet, and a member of the Frontiers Collective. He is the winner of the 2021 Salt Nation Poetry Prize, the 2021 Young Writers and Creatives’ Award (Poetry Category) and finalist of the 2021 NO CONTACT Poetry Prize. He is Associate Poetry Editor at miniskirt magazine, Founding / Poetry Editor of Olúmọ Review, Interview Editor at Eremite Poetry, and a Best of the Net nominee. His works have appeared—or are forthcoming—in London Grip Poetry, Indian Review, miniskirt magazine, Olongo Africa, Blue Marble Review, the Indianapolis Review, Agbowó, Poetry Column-NND, Five South Journal, East French Press, Isele Magazine, Magma Poetry, Pepper Coast Lit, Lumiere Review, the Shore Poetry, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. The Frontiers Collective
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- Poet’s Talk: 5 Questions with Zakiyyah Dzukogi - August 19, 2023
