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Gbanabom Hallowell
African Verse & the Cultural Forces in World Poetry
I do not write about the culture of versification in poetry in the rhythmical sense, but rather with a geographical, linguistic, and emotional interpretive analysis. I want to associate versification with the accents of oral speech. Versification in poetry makes for a poem’s exclusive “non-otherness” when compared to other kinds of poetry. Anthropologists, for instance, tend to think of culture as divided into high and low contexts, meaning collectivists and individualists respectively. Western and African poetry have developed their accents of versification accordingly. A simple formula for the distinction is conceptualized in how Western poetry is “I” oriented, while African poetry is “we” oriented. I shall return to this issue later.
At times, Western poetry, particularly American poetry, tends to accompany Western politics abroad by way of policing world literature. The British had that role (proselytizing, but not policing) long ago until the Americans rose to the center of world order and changed the face of politics from an empirical outlook to capitalistic framing. In modern times, during the reign of Shakespeare’s much younger cousins, Yeats and others, America sent a batch of missionary poets abroad. Those who made inroads into Africa included Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others. While these poets didn’t sound much different from their British counterparts, they, nevertheless, occupied the African literary scene with a forceful political nature. I have heard it said in many quarters, literary and otherwise, that African poetry did not develop an accent of its own until the complete enslavement, colonization, and neo-colonization of African poetics by Western poetry—(the Western poets themselves have nothing to do with this political conquistador arrangement). To imply, as stated above, however, is to suggest that regarding African poetics, there was originally only poetry of silence before the big bang!
At the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College, I met many fine American poets—sometimes, among them were European poets also—all of whom occasionally cut across in their poetry with beautiful lines referencing some African images. However, further discussion with these poets usually solicited only grand innocence of a continent that has breathed its unique versification into poetry since its creation. To many of these poets, Africa does not exist as a continent of soil and water, but only in their modern imagination as otherness. Being the only black student at Vermont College at the time, for that matter, being an African reading my way into American poetry, I felt poetically estranged.
I approached contemporary American poetry with the accent of contemporary African poetry. When I read David St. Joan, I echoed David Rubadiri; when I encountered Charles Bukowski, I saw Dambudzo Marechera; and when I examined Lynn Emmanuel, I visualized Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. For two years as a student poet, I found the traffic of poetry too heavy on my way. At the time, I had also discovered Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, both of whom wrote with quite other forms of versification: the Latin American forms of versification. Because exile has a way of growing a solitary tree in the heart, I found solace in the surrealism of Latin American poetry. As bad luck would have it, North America hated abstract poetry. Because I was an exile, unless I wrote via the culture of the host, my abstraction was going to remain abstract. Adrienne Rich, an American poet, captures one such probable clash in a similar setting:
I had bought a dress with a too-long skirt. The shop employed a seamstress who did alterations, and she came in to pin up the skirt on me. I am sure that she was a recent immigrant, a survivor. I remember a short, dark woman wearing heavy glasses, with an accent so foreign I could not understand her words. Something about her presence was very powerful and disturbing to me.1
What was it about this immigrant woman’s presence that was “very powerful and disturbing” to Rich? Sometimes, when we cannot easily permeate a cultural divide, we see everything about it as making no sense, yet the silent wall holds a sacred stillness that transmits a powerful newness even of the unknown and the undiscovered. The poetic experience makes for an even more disturbing case: readers of a “foreign” work of poetry first have to accede to certain internal alterations before they can pass through the abstraction. Reading a work that is culturally challenging requires a deeply interactive process. Perhaps the first step requires the poet and the reader to demystify the meeting. The next step calls for honesty. An open door policy is the guiding principle for a truly universal relationship.
I considered American poetics in a similar fashion. I came into American poetry as a survivor. I left Africa with only one dream: to be a poet in America. I have since encountered one big problem in my dreaming, and that is to be a poet in America! Part of the problem results from Americans not suspecting that, having arrived in exile in my mid-30s, I could only be an African poet in America and not an American poet. Like Rich’s recent immigrant, I stood out in Vermont “with an accent so foreign” that hardly anyone understood my poetry. Perhaps it was the manner I had reached to pin up my poetry on the Americans, for I met with many who wanted to, but could not find me palatable. Poetry requires the patience of the reader, especially poetry with a foreign accent. In such poetry, a reader has to tread cautiously, otherwise, an unfamiliar accent can make the reading experience catastrophic!
It is important that we ask ourselves some pertinent political questions regarding the poetry we write and the poetry we read, as Louis Simpson has posed: “ . . . does poetry have no power in itself? No reality? What would happen if instead of trying to write poetry one allowed silence to speak?”2 On the human survival pyramid, poetry maintains a significant place. I posit that any nation that has not produced a great tradition of poetry will certainly not boast of a healthy tradition of great novelists, dramatists, and leaders—again, this reality ought to be given political consideration. The novelist, dramatist, and leader feed on the political poesy of the poet, who enjoys the power of the trinity of god the word, god the image, and god the metaphor. Being the spiritual form of all human art, poetry establishes a people’s accent upon which every other agency builds an aesthetic. Poetry could be a benevolent spirit. Although I doubt its benevolent temperament, it is indeed a spirit. However, poets who migrate beyond their cultural domain usually encounter other accents of versification that infiltrate their art. Nevertheless, they do not compromise their nurtured accents. After all, any poem that misappropriates its value system becomes “impure.” The reader should be able to discover the genetic uniqueness of any one poem when a DNA-like test of it is run. Simpson succinctly summarizes this uniqueness in the following way:
If poetry is to matter, we must put in our poems those elements that have been excluded as impure. This means breaking with the standards set by the academy, by those who have made emptiness a virtue—who have elevated Stevens above Frost, above Williams and Pound and Eliot . . .3
My earliest workshop advisor at Vermont College was a seasoned poet—Jewish by orientation, American by accent of versification, and author of many exemplary poems. This poet pruned the pretentious confidence I had, with which I had walked into his Vermont College workshop, of already being a poet at ease. My advisor helped me to realize the state of my literary emergency at the time. My enjambments were a cliff I could have dropped off from; my closures, a dungeon I could have been trapped in; and my poetic license was eventually going to be revoked for ignoring the road signs on Poetry Avenue!
There are poets, and there are teacher-poets. My advisor was a teacher-poet whose technical wealth sometimes couldn’t hold him back from invading other people’s accents of versification. “The Dining Table” was a poem on which my advisor and I had worked back and forth for a period of two weeks. While we did not necessarily agree that the poem was finally finished, we certainly had to move on to other things in our six–month-long semester. However, just as we were about to do so, he saw one last thing! He read the line and said to me, “You know, we don’t speak like that in America. We don’t express it that way in the English language.” This one last issue on this poem certainly placed us in the tension-filled space where colors separate. Two poets, one a teacher-poet and the other a student-poet were about to be divided by the politics of our different accents of versification. In the end I allowed the poem to appear in my first collection in my own accent of versification, the first stanza of which I have reproduced below.
Dinner tonight comes with
gun wounds. Our desert
tongues lick the vegetable
blood—the pepper
strong enough to push scorpions
up our heads. Guests
look into the oceans of bowls
as vegetables die on their tongues.4
The line that separated us was, “—the pepper/strong enough to push scorpions/up our heads.” My advisor, a passionate poet, grew up in a community whose culture taught him to say, “Pepper will go into your chest.” I was brought up in a community whose culture taught me that “pepper goes into the head.” The disagreement was not only between two words, “head” and “chest,” but also between the biological, cultural, and nutritional accents of the words. Was science an argument either of us could have used in poetry to appropriate the line? Do political and scientific accuracies matter in poetry? Does falsehood in the accent of versification affect a work of poetry in world cultures? Can cultural forces undermine the universality of a poem? Can a poem really be universal?
Simpson talks about poets having the task of putting “into words the message that form[ed] itself out of our silence.”5 By silence, Simpson is referring to our consciences, individuality, and biological make-up. He appropriately quotes Maria Rilke who writes, “But listen to the voice of the wind/and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.”6 A poet in exile feeds on exactly that: voice, message, and silence. Whenever poets are torn between two cultures, more like threatened by a foreign accent, a challenge is posed to them about whether they could articulate their own accents of versification for international consumption. Poets who fail to take this challenge, whether from a superior or an inferior culture too often write poems, as Joan Aleshire observes, that “are bits of filigree rather than true bridges from the poet’s consciousness to the reader’s, carrying essential information.”7
Wole Soyinka, a pioneer African poet, articulates with ease the culture into which he was born. Soyinka is a poet who, from the birth of his talent, sought a universal identity by feeding on the traditions of Western literature. At the time, literarily and culturally famished as he was, he was thoroughly bred on the Western canon in his home country of Nigeria, and in England where he studied. At the height of his education, he sought to break open his path on the backs of both his native literary oral tradition and the written tradition of the West. Soyinka, throughout his career, is not the kind of poet a critic would say developed his philosophical outlook. Instead, it could be said of him that he evolved in his cultural and philosophical outlook after he discovered his voice, so that his earlier plays and poetry, like his latter ones, have insisted only on a classification and universalization of his accent of versification. In a poem called “Dedication,” he writes:
Shield you like the flesh of palms, skyward held
Cuspids in thorn nesting, insealed as the heart of kernel—
A woman’s flesh is oil—child, palm oil on your tongue
Is suppleness to life, and wine of this gourd
From self-same timeless run of runnels as refill
Your podlings, child, weaned from your embrace8
Poets are separated one from another when the kinds of pictures they conjure help to explain a concept or a situation. How do love, hate, pressure, and anxiety run in a poet’s accent of versification? What images does a poet use to heighten or reduce fear? Would a Western poet have used the expression “a flesh of palms?” What esoteric importance does “skyward held” have in Soyinka’s accent of versification? Do these words transfer to a Western accent of versification? Could that expression be made a world culture? If so, does it need to carry over its esoteric meaning to be effective, or must people of other orientation only stumble upon strange accents in poems and not bother to question their esoteric presence?
Soyinka’s poem is the promise of an experience, not one the persona is about to go through but one that the persona is currently going through. Discovery comes along with information. Amidst an accent of cultural images, ignorance is frightened by the face of a new dawn. Would a Westerner imagine a woman’s flesh as palm oil on the tongue? Does a Westerner think about palm oil when experiencing a woman’s flesh? Is a child weaned from its mother after a period of breastfeeding? Does weaning a child hold any significance in the West? In Soyinka’s accent of versification, weaning a child could be cause for celebration at the family or community level. Does Soyinka want his readers to perceive any significant concepts and not just read his poem as one man would bawl a “Hi” to another on a Western, winter street? Poets, like any other professionals, have contributed to the construction of the global village; but like it is with politicians, poets rain on each other’s parade. Ali Mazrui warns that “part of the price of having the world transferred into a global village is that incitement can become transterritorial.”9
Writers on both sides of the Atlantic reserve their opinions about poetry from the other side. Apparently, the West remains the biggest funder and promoter of all literatures. Every Asian and African writer who has won the Nobel Prize for literature probably owes the Western world a debt. The literature of the West continues to make significant in-roads into African schools and colleges. These Western books come in handy, for books written by Africans are hard to come by, even if printed in the continent. They don’t circulate too well in the West either. Charles Larson captures many of the problems plaguing African writers and their writings. Among them is the following: “Books simply cost too much in Africa . . . and therefore fall within the domain of luxury items.”10
Abioseh Nicol, a Sierra Leonean poet, brings a deeply savannah accent of versification to African poetry. In his exilic poem, “The Meaning of Africa,” Nicol discovers only the continent’s “sombre green challenge” while living in the West, although he was seeking to discover the full-blooded Africa as a way of understanding the continent of his birth, which was “once just a name to me.” Writing in the style of a more popular poet, David Diop, Nicol shows snippets of his Western proselytizing, which make him less knowledgeable of the Africa that he should have known all too well about. Descended from freed slaves who returned to Freetown, Sierra Leone, Nicol is familiar with only peripheral Africa. He, therefore, cautions that to discover the real Africa, his fellow Africans should
Go up-county, so they said,
To see the real Africa.
For whomsoever you may be,
That is where you come from.
Go for bush, inside the bush,
You will find your hidden heart,
Your mute ancestral spirit.
And so I went, dancing on my way.11
What heightens Nicol’s accent of versification in the poem is the expression, “Go for bush.” Using a non-Western expression by every imagination, Nicol goes beyond the cosmetic nature of African urbanization to explore Africa as an object of its forests. He describes Africa of the living as well as of the dead, Africa of ancestral essence, and Africa free of foreign values!
Richard Jackson is an exciting contemporary American poet who dares to cross the American border in order to engage foreign readers. In his poetry, Jackson circumnavigates the world, and from the recesses of ancient Europe to the natural plateaus of sub-Sahara Africa, he draws his images. His poetry asserts itself well in an African aura. Its familiar images are used in ways unfamiliar to an African. He writes in “Teiresias” that
The sky is beautiful because it has no memory.
The bones of the night are thinning because
they lack sufficient calcium. There is a lot
more I could tell you.12
Certainly the African reader who has a different perception of the sky and of the night is eager to hear more from Jackson. Africans tend to appreciate the spiritual connotation attached to the sky, that the spirit has long memory, and that the sky spews the night and swallows it also, a duty it has never failed to perform since creation. In my country for instance, people of my Themne ethnic group call the sky kuru, the abode of God who is called Kru. How can the sky therefore lack memory or the night calcium? Would Jackson have used these images in such a way if he were an African poet?
I don’t need an essay this long to discuss the differences in world poetry, or to argue that African poetry did not shoot from its Western counterpart. However, the diversity in our literature is itself a literary pleasure. There is beauty in the differences between the day and the night; therefore, no matter how much we stumble in the dark, the night will scare us if it pretends to be a day. Today’s poetry is different from that of yesterday’s. My generation of poets, wherever they are in the world, differ from the poets of yesterday. The 21st century poets are now reaching toward writing world poetry; however, that goal doesn’t detract from the various accents of versification. George Joseph writes:
Folklore in countries such as Italy, France, or England stands as popular literature in opposition to the written productions of an elite and indeed may be influenced by the latter. African oral literature, on the other hand, represents the aspirations of an entire people and ranges from sublime religious ideals to everyday practical advice.13
Earlier in the essay, I posited that poetry is a spirit-art, and that every nation that must produce incredible novels, drama, and leaders must first produce fine poets who have built a fountain of letters. As quoted above, Joseph reminds us about the “sublime religious ideals” of indigenous African literature. African poetry can better be understood and appreciated when articulated with the help of the African drum and the African tambourine. For instance, in Senegal, the royal poet, known as the griot, can succeed only in articulating his poetry when his instrument agrees with him. However, if the spirit-art was not particularly given to the occasion, the audience, or the organizer, the poet, and his instrument, will not make a good duet. To say that African poetry is also African music would not be completely correct because the former does not move its audience to dance for pleasure, but causes them to chant and commune with the gods and the ancestors. It is an opportunity for the audience to spend a moment with the guardians of the community.
J.H. Nketia, a Ghanaian writer, said, “The use of drums as ’vehicles of language’ is a widespread art in Africa. Drums however, are not meant to compete with human speech in ordinary everyday life, but rather to supplement in certain situations.”14 Certainly, if the griot was not compelling in words, the drum in the hand of a “favored” player could move the gods and the ancestors. In many African communities where war and pestilence usually rob the people of their great poets for some time, the drums became the only “poets” to lead festivals and other ceremonies. It is not surprising that many poetic expressions such as “kon kon ken ken ken,” which is interpreted as Asamanfo, monko, monko . . . Akyeampon Tententen (“spirits of the Departed”),15 a Ghanaian drum sound, became part of the poetic register of the land. When this development occurs, even the drummer-poet is humbled. He certainly had not achieved the moment on his own accord, for only the gods could have moved his hands to drum so well. Nketia further explains what happens:
After that the drummer announces himself and at the close he says either “I am learning, let me succeed,” or “I am addressing you, and you will understand.” He then goes on to address various parts of the drum which are also “awakened” for the festival—the wood, the pegs, the skin, the string, the drum, and says to each one in turn: “I am learning, let me succeed.”
He then proceeds to address the following one by one: the Earth, God, the cook, the witch, the court crier, the executioner, all past drummers, and lastly the god Tango.16
In discussing the cultural forces in world poetry, I shall like to return to the issue of persons as I promised in the opening. While Western poetry is integrally personal, African poetry continues to occupy public spaces. In Africa, the poet is “public property,” and thus remains in the service of his or her community. Whereas the African artists in other genres entertain with narration, dramatization, and graffiti, the poet appeals to the psyche. At festivals and other ceremonies, the poet and his audience are challenged to level with spirit-nature through idealistic expressions. Many American poets to whom I have spoken define poetry as a rather personal enterprise. Such is the same way their readers see the genre. A poet of homosexual orientation is almost always going to weave every experience around homosexualism; a feminist poet is always liberating a woman from the mind of a chauvinist male; and a minority poet is always going to cry foul against a bullying majority. In the West, poets are labeled, whereas in Africa only the work of poets is labeled. When an African poet writes nature poetry, it is always used as a vehicle to address a socio-political concern. Even after the numerous criticisms written on the art of African poetry, very little is known about the poets themselves. African critics have always concentrated on the works their poets produce. Leopold Sedar Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Okot p’bitek, David Diop, Tchikaya U’Tamsi, Dennis Brutus, and a host of other of Africa’s finest poets have not had any significant studies done on them as a way of examining the private spaces of their lives. Haven’t Frost and other nature poets been read only on a truly gardening or horticultural theme? American poets certainly conduct their enterprises as personal undertakings. Walt Whitman has the most appropriate example when he wrote:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you17
African poets are not categorically Whitmanesque in the way of American poets. In Africa, the poet celebrates the community. The poets’ songs are in accordance with the pulse of their communities. Perhaps because Africa has had a history of survivalism going back to the dinosaurian struggle of repelling Arabo-European exploitation, the communal has instilled in the African the sense of the whole being the measurement of our individualism. The African poets, therefore, can only assume what their communities assume and not the other way round. I have written elsewhere that neither colonialism nor imperialism changed the face of African literature. Instead, it was the oral literature that found its way into the written text. Chinua Achebe’s stories are the fireside stories of pre-colonial Africa, and Christopher Okigbo is a good example of an African poet who took after the myth of the oral charmers.
Before you, Mother Idoto, naked I stand
before your watery presence a prodigal
leaning on an oilbean
lost in your legend . . .18
Whitman and Okigbo, quoted above, serve as appropriate examples of poet of private space and poet of public space respectively. Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Okigbo’s “Idoto” are both canonic in their cultural domains. In composing their powerful openings, both establish a relationship between self and other. “Before you, Mother Idoto, naked I stand” is antithetical of Whitman’s “I celebrate myself.” Both poems are a celebration, in which Okigbo is recognizing a higher power to a point of agreeing to the concept of reductionism, and Whitman is expressing the individualism of the self to a point that everything without him suffers his deconstructionism. For Okigbo, the individual is only a part of a grander whole—the self is a part that requires the myth that acceptance is itself a source of life. At no time, therefore, could it be wise to imagine that a half (being the self) can detach from the whole. Whitman on the other hand knows of only the myth of growing, the myth of becoming, and the myth of detaching. There is no going back, no prodigalism. The two poets in their various ways are proving that the poet, wherever s/he may be, is not a myth maker, for to be a poet is itself a myth of articulation. Allan Grossman who believes that “power flows from knowledge of the prophecy” also believes that “the poetic maker is both the beneficiary and the judge of the logic of the practice.”19 While Okigbo surrenders his individualism and becomes swallowed up by Idoto’s legend, Whitman celebrates his independence. Let us entertain Michael Ryan’s view of poets of ‘primitive cultures’ to appropriate Whitman and Okigbo and to appropriate African and Western poetry:
Anthropology has shown us many cultures in which poets were “big shots.” In primitive tribes, extant and extinct, the poet is usually the central figure, the Shaman-healer. Because he is close to the gods through his “divine madness,” he keeps the tribe together by celebrating in his chants and sacred rituals its shared beliefs, ancestry, and cosmology. The tribe depends on the poet for its life.20
Subsequently, Ryan states, “This may be too difficult for Rocky, or us, to understand, stuck as we are in the middle of a powerful industrial capitalist culture in which the primacy of self and the ostensibly inalienable rights of the individual are two essential elements of the encompassing myth.”21 Ryan has made categorical statements regarding poets in ‘primitive environments’ that raise eyebrows. He has basically commented on the poet and the sacred, the poet and power, the poet and essence, and the poet and myth. In making a case for individualism in industrial capitalism, Ryan fails to capture community moments in the so-called primitive cultures. He singles out the poet and labels him a big shot, a dictator, a divine-healer, and a spiritual head. From the jungles of the Apache (Ryan’s backyard) to the heartland of Africa, no poet could be said to have performed in any of the offices into which Ryan relegated him or her. Unfortunately, Ryan did not provide evidence of any poet in primitive times being a “big shot,” whatever that might mean. However, I assume that Ryan is confusing the poet with occultists and other spiritual perverts. The rest of the other nomenclatures that Ryan argues that the poet falls under are not as well defined. As for his and Rocky’s fear of losing their individualism (were these situations to obtain in their industrial capitalist culture), Ryan needs to be reminded that individualism is never entirely exclusive of collectivism, even in industrial capitalist cultures and vice versa. David Augsburger’s astute observation specifies that the “so-called primitive societies often have . . . solutions that are more effective in bonding adversaries and blending goals than those groups who designate themselves as advanced, developed, or possessing far more data about human relations.”22 The tribe in ‘primitive cultures’ did not depend on any one man for its survival, especially in Africa.
I am aware of the seemingly narrow Africa-versus-the-West position I have taken in an essay that promises to examine African poetry vis-à-vis the cultural forces in world poetry, which obviously should include Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Pacifican poetry. By this position it would also seem that I am assuming that Western poetry is the universal standard by which to examine all other kinds of poetry. Perhaps a reader who agrees with me that Western imperialism is omnipresent in all other political systems in the entire world will very soon see that Western poetry has partly been used as a vehicle to achieve that goal. Certainly, no two cultures hold the same view of poetry. For instance, I found this very interesting statement on one website:
Western culture, which was influenced by Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantic poets, had a pronounced tendency to think of poems as ornate, elaborate creations made by a few men of genius. Chinese culture, influenced by the anonymity of the Shih Ching, had a tendency to think of poems as something written by common humanity for the eyes of other humans.23
Maybe that is where African and Western poetry separate and where African poetry also differs from its Chinese, or more broadly, its Asian counterpart. African poetry could possibly be imagined to fall between Western and Asian poetry. In Africa, after the Word of the poem is uttered, it becomes a community treasure. Very soon the poet goes into relative obscurity. The poet is a slave to the Word; therefore, it is not correct that the poet plays a power role in his community. Given the low-level socio-political position the griot-poet occupies in traditional Africa, African poets could be called “common humanity” endowed with the inspiration of the gods. The African traditional poet might not be a genius, but his or her society has “a pronounced tendency to think of his or her poems as “ornate, elaborate creations.”24
Endnotes
1. Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. (WW Norton & Company, New York, London, 1986). p. 108.
2. Simpson, Louis. The Character of the Poet. (The University of Michigan Press, 1986). p. 13.
3. Ibid.
4. Hallowell, Gbanabom. Drumbeats of War. (Author House, 2004). p.9.
5. Simpson, Louis. The Character of the Poet. (The University of Michigan Press, 1986). p. 8.
6. Ibid.
7. Aleshire, Joan. “Stay News: A Defense of the Lyric” in Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World. Gregory Orr & Ellen Bryant Voigt (eds). (The University of Michigan Press, 1996). p. 28.
8. Soyinka, Wole. “Dedication.” http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/-richie/poetry/html/aupoem45.html (retrieved 01/19/2006).
9. Mazrui, Ali. Cultural Forces in World Politics. (James Curry, Oxford, 1990). p. 94.
10. Larson, Charles. Under African Skies: Modern African Stories. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999). p. xiii.
11. Nicol, Abioseh. “The Meaning of Africa.” Personal papers of Davidson Sylvester Hector Willoughby Nicol (The author’s official name).
12. Jackson, Richard. Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems. (The Ashland Poetry Press, Ashland University, Ohio, 2003). p.16.
13. Joseph, George. “African Literature” in Understanding Contemporary Africa. April A. Gordon & Donald L. Gordon (eds). (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001). p. 332.
14. Nketia, J. H. “The Poetry of Drums” in From Black Africa. (ed) David Wells, et al. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). p.166.
15. Ibid. p.167.
16. Ibid. p.167.
17. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. (ed) Malcolm Cowley. (The Viking Press, New York, 1959).
18. Okigbo, Christopher. “Path of Thunder,” 1968 (in the literary magazine Black Orpheus).
19. Grossman, Allan. “Orpheus/Philomela: Subjection and mystery in the founding stories of Poetic Production and in the Logic of our Practice” in Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World. Gregory Orr & Ellen Bryant Voigt (eds). (The University of Michigan Press, 1996). p.121.
20. Ryan, Michael. “Poetry and Audience” in Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World. Gregory Orr & Ellen Bryant Voigt (eds). (The University of Michigan Press, 1996). p.159.
21. Ibid. p.161.
22. Augsburger, David. Conflict Mediation Across Cultures: Parthways & Patterns. (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisvile, 1992). p. 6.
23. Chinese Poetry. http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/chinese_poetry.html (retrieved 01/19/2006)
24. Ibid.
Copyright © Gbanabom Hallowell
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