Zakiyyah Dzukogi: What is the process of writing a poem like for you? Is it a lot of hard work or easy?
Isaiah Gbenga Adepoju: A very complex process. I think poetry is the hardest occupation when I think of it. Most of the time, many of the poems that I like, few of whom have been published, are written in four or three months. They take all of my time. I ruminate and sulk over lines. Sometimes a line for two weeks, staring at it as I’d admire an efficient but bitter herb. Something is just out, I’d say. Something essential, it is. I’d read again and again. I’ll hum. I’ll read some Romeo Oriogun’s, or Samuel A. Adeyemi. Cotonou, by Romeo Oriogun, holds a special place in my heart. Or Robin Coste’s Voyage of the Sable Venus. Or sometimes Louis Gluck’s Collected Poems. They show me my poem’s cornerstone is missing. They show me theirs with otherworldly lines. Often, I don’t find it. I just, during submission, send the poem off. At least, the assurance of Rejection puts me at peace. I’d swear to leave poetry to others. Yet, a line always strikes. Yet.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: Please describe your sense of identity in this world, in imagery or metaphor.
Isaiah Gbenga Adepoju: I am split between two forbidden places. So, I levitate. I’m afraid of being prodigal. I am still finding myself. But the things I see, that I want to write about, conflict with places that I know and loved. I am not supposed to write about them. Not yet, the voices in my head tell me. Grow older. A little later. When you clock thirty. Thirty-five? You’d be independent then, they say. So I’m still floundering.
I am into prose now. I can safely say I typed close to 170k words novel that failed. I dropped them. I wanted to articulate myself through sentences. I still try to. I keep on typing till I get tired, or my Mum warns me to sleep. But it gets hard, really hard, especially when I look myself in the mirror and the face of my mind differs from this excavation. So yes, I’m wandering. I read books. But I love wild, wild things. I may be wild when I grow older, I don’t know for now.
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?
Isaiah Gbenga Adepoju: I don’t write poems to save life. Maybe readers will feel something in my poems and change their own lives. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll be sceptical about the poem’s message; whether it wants to save or mar them. I don’t know. However, I write poems about people dying, twisting the ideas of death. It sounds ironic for this question. I love poems about clothes, skins; pastoral poems. Poems written in exile, for home, a form of dying. I love poems like that, and I suspect my poems are re-adjusting themselves to fit this piston. I like this, but it can be scary when it affects my life enough to cause a misfit of my mind and my image. ‘My Church,’ is an example of such a poem—where God is dolichocephalic like the Black Boy.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: What does Africa mean to you, as potential or reality?
Isaiah Gbenga Adepoju: Africa is the Nigerian mother that beats and beats, and always, when you want to leave, you feel like this mother loves you. That she loves you enough to want to beat you. You genuinely feel it. And you know she’s beautiful when she’s angry. Only that she’s always angry. Sometimes I don’t recognize her. So each year, as I grow, I am at the door’s divide. I can love her from outside the compound I think
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.
Isaiah Gbenga Adepoju: The Missing, by Roger Robinson. I think this is pure beauty like I’ve never seen before. The slowness, the transitions, the imageries, fascinates me. I return to Robinson’s ‘A Portable Paradise’ each time I feel let down, or ambivalent. Many of the poems in the book are split between two forms of catharsis. I don’t know how making-sense the previous sentence, but, as an example, in my favourite poem, The Missing, of course, the Grenfell Tower was a tragedy, but it is how the dead leaves in this poem that dazzles. As though the dead were automated, and we’re before their grim faces. The line about a husband holding the feet of his floating wife wouldn’t just leave him. It feels like me. As though I am both floating away, and I am holding myself, to avoid a tragedy. A Portable Paradise observes that there are tragedies, alright, but it puts us beside them. We cannot always be scared of hurt, it tells me.
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.
Isaiah Gbenga Adepoju: The Missing, by Roger Robinson. I think this is pure beauty like I’ve never seen before. The slowness, the transitions, the imageries, fascinates me. I return to Robinson’s ‘A Portable Paradise’ each time I feel let down, or ambivalent. Many of the poems in the book are split between two forms of catharsis. I don’t know how making-sense the previous sentence, but, as an example, in my favourite poem, The Missing, of course, the Grenfell Tower was a tragedy, but it is how the dead leaves in this poem that dazzles. As though the dead were automated, and we’re before their grim faces. The line about a husband holding the feet of his floating wife wouldn’t just leave him. It feels like me. As though I am both floating away, and I am holding myself, to avoid a tragedy. A Portable Paradise observes that there are tragedies, alright, but it puts us beside them. We cannot always be scared of hurt, it tells me.
As if their bodies became lighter,
ten of those seated
in front pews began to float,
and then to lie down as if on
a bed.
Isaiah Gbenga Adepoju, 19, studies Literature in English at OAU, Ile-Ife. He has some of his works on TSTR, Atelewo, Institute of African Studies, Nsukka, Fortunate Traveler, Poetica Review, etc. Deputy Editor in Chief of The Nigeria Review and reader for Adroit Journal, Isaiah is a fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency, and a participant of the Olongo Africa Poetry Workshop. Write him: adepojuisaiahgbenga@gmail.com
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