Updated by Afapinen
During this festive season two years ago in 2022, the Nigerian critic and editor Carl Terver asked an old question in the title of his personal essay in Konya Shamsrumi: Does Anyone Care About Your Poem? In Nigeria, as anywhere else, poetry has for so long played the middlechild to fiction and nonfiction that the question seems to be worth asking each and every time anyone can muster the gut. At the beginning of the year that followed, in 2023, Terver would get his question answered quite assertively in the voice of the fourth generation Nigerian critics, in an acreage of essays, that poetry is not only something to care about but that it is something to care about to the point of constant defence against its more marketable siblings, as well as against itself. Telling everything as it is—a quality so fast departing our literary cosmos like barks departing an angry dog—the essays don’t just explain the new poetics to us like another piece of literary criticism, no; the new shifts, expectations, and perceived shortcomings of fourth generation Nigerian poetry are communicated to us in manner both serious and cutting, in style both journalistic and academic, and in range both focused and expansive.
From the pacesetting article of the young but brilliant Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí to the sharp historical bent provided by Oko Owi Ocho, fourth generation Nigerian poetry found its match in energy and èlan in these new critics. From March to December of 2023, what you learn from Terver, for example, about our new poetry is not the same as what you learn from the meretricious Bestman Michael Osemudiamen. This is not to imply that these essays are all over the place—promiscuous in judgement as well as in rationale; far from it: each new essay is not only subsidiary to the arguments of the previous ones but complementary to them. Read chronologically, these essays will give you more than an introduction about fourth generation Nigerian poetry. As a new reader of Nigerian poetry, each essay will give you a strong eye to see our new poetry: from what our poets do best to their worst, and from what we expect from them and what our times have conditioned them to give us in turn.
1. Ernest Ògúnyẹmí: “Is Contemporary Nigerian Poetry ‘Nigerian’?” Eliot of Lagos: Substack March 30, 2023
Published on the poet-critic’s Substack named Eliot of Lagos, this essay set the tone for what would become the great debate about fourth generation Nigerian poetry, and its point is quite simple: contemporary Nigerian poetry is no longer Nigerian, is it? Received to as much critical acclaim as itself succeeds to establish, the essay was equally barraged with biting criticisms and extolled with great admiration for good reasons: it is the sort of criticism that every poet in our age of niceties has been conditioned against and serious critics of this congenial epoch have been conditioned to want written but not by themselves. This is the essay to read about fourth generation Nigerian poetry, to really understand the importance of criticism with guts, to a literary tradition with a potential that can only be described as unprecedented, considering the number of talented poets we have in Nigeria that needs nothing less than frank critical engagements to take their formless potential towards a topnotch shapeliness.
2. Carl Terver: “O, Griefa” Afapinen July 21, 2023
Focused as a sniper’s sight and clear as winter sky, this is the essay that shows that there is always an important, if narrower, argument at the heart of the broader one; and it is the essay to read about the patulous canker nibbling at the bark of our new poetry. That our new poetry is influenced by the American poetics of confession, among others, had already been established to edifyingly quiet reception in the writings of the industrious Obakanse S. Lakanse and Paul Liam way before Ògúnyẹmí in 2023. However, what hadn’t been established was the means of our poets towards their new poetics: according to Terver, they come to their new textual sensibility by way of what he describes as the “imagination of singular trope”—a imaginative crime committed at the sorry behest of a single, unimaginative word called grief.
3. Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera: “The Miseducation of Nigerian Poets” The Republic July 26, 2023
In this essay, Chukwudera reminds us that the fundamental role of poets in our society is as the guardians of our cultural memory. However, the critic takes issue with our new Nigerian poets because—as his title suggests and his examples further evince—they have failed in their primary responsibility by having their sensibility and influence drawn from other places except their own, particularly from America. More than anyone else, he also articulates the role that the American literary publications, where our new writers are plying their writing trade to be both read, recognised, and paid for their works, played and are still playing in restructuring our new poets’ stylistic and thematic sensibilities towards the American, rather than the Nigerian situation.
4. Oko Owi Ocho: “The Crisis of Interpretation and the Temper of New Nigerian Poetry” Konya Shamsrumi August 25, 2023
Theoretically, this essay promises from the very first paragraph to be the most significant piece about the whole argument about what the new Nigerian poetry in our time is and should be simply because it attempts to be what every worthy argumentative essay that’s had already fine points of view established by prior interlocutors has been: a corrective. According to Ocho, the critics are missing the point essentially because they do not take history as their cynosure to logic: that there are clear lines of succession in sensibility and preoccupation as determined by the conditions of the times from the first to the fourth generation Nigerian poetry and poets—a contention quite ripe for further contentions—is Ocho’s thesis. However, you have to read the essay for yourself to measure the strength of his connective aim and the persuasiveness of his corrective arguments.
5. Bestman Michael Osemudiamen: “Much Ado About the Criticism of Fourth Generation Nigerian Poetry” Afapinen November 20, 2023
In this brilliant, well-rounded essay, Osemudiamen argues that the movement of poetry is not directed by our sense of what our culture was but what it currently is, which is often adaptive and a result of class consciousness and economic reality, a point the previous criticising essays fronting our culture as a solution to the seemingly foreign influence miss terribly. Culture, according to the Marxist critic, is a river: flexible and nimble, it flows a new consciousness to us filtered through the times in which we are currently living. So, the culture represented in our new poetry, which the other critics are arguing to be foreign and unNigerian, Osemudiamen sees as a result of globalisation—invasive as oxygen and just as irrepressible.
6. Ancci: “A Principle for the New Nigerian Poetry” SEVHAGE Publishers December 31, 2023
Though yet unpublished, this essay won the 2023 E. E. SULE/SEVHAGE Prize for African Literary Criticism. Written as a response to the whole debate about fourth generation Nigerian poetry, it proffers a principle for the age: that in order to be called Nigerian, our new poets do not only have to infuse into their work their Nigerian social, cultural, historical, as well as political conditions, but that they also have to be concerned about aesthetics, which is the fundamental concern of any poetry of staying power. Hence, being culturally conscious is not enough, Ancci argues, the poets have to meet the standards set by their literary tradition since their cultural materials still have to be executed to the properly poetic to be considered a literary fait accompli, irrespective of their national origin.
Editor’s note: We appreciate the critic Ancci’s effort in updating the first edition of this list.