no amount of looking would make that pilgrim's art / make sense

When I approached Daniel Karasik with a request to republish his poem "The Pilgrim Looks Up" on One Ghana, One Voice, I mentioned that I was also considering writing a “How Poems Work” essay on it. Daniel sent me a reply confirming he was happy to have the poem republished, and even went so far as to offer me his own take on a “How Poems Work” essay for “The Pilgrim Looks Up.” It was two words long: It doesn’t.

So begins my new How Poems Work essay over at One Ghana, One Voice. Needless to say, I reject his summary (almost) completely, and go from there.Thanks to Daniel for being a sport with this.

You can read the whole thing here:

How Poems Work #7: Rob Taylor on Daniel Karasik's "The Pilgrim Looks Up"

Inspired? If anyone out there feels like writing How Poems Work essays on poems written by Ghanaians or about Ghana, check out our submission guidelines.

Ghanaian Poetry's Influences

Over at One Ghana, One Voice we recently completed our series of memorial poems for Kofi Awoonor (which we organized following Awoonor's shocking death as part of the Westgate Mall shooting in Nairobi. Awoonor's death, and the tribute that followed, delayed another project we had been about to launch: "Ghanaian Poetry's Influences".

Over my years running OGOV I've received many questions about Ghanaian poetry: who's writing it, what they're writing, what shapes/influences their work, etc. Most of these questions seem hopelessly unanswerable to me - the explosion of writing, publishing and interest in Ghanaian poetry has made it a world too large and diffuse to be pinned down with clean, simple answers. Still, I realised, I did have some hard stats that could help with one of those questions.

For the past seven years, I've been asking Ghanaian poets whose writing I've published on OGOV the same question: Which poets have most influenced and informed your work? In total I've asked this question to 93 writers, the vast majority of them Ghanaian (some are international writers, writing on Ghana - such as myself). I decided I would take a stab at tracking Ghanaian poetic influences by tallying up the answers our various poets had given to that question. The results were fascinating to me, and I decided to share them over a series of posts, published throughout the month of November. They have all now been posted, and you can find the results here:

Which continent's artists most influence Ghanaian poetry?

Which country's artists most influence Ghanaian poetry?

Who influences Ghanaian poets more, men or women? By how much?

What types of artists are influencing Ghanaian poetry?

Which female artist most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist from Ghana most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist from Africa (non-Ghanaian) most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist from Europe most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist from the Americas most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist, generally, most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Take a guess on each question, then click the link. Some of the answers may surprise you!

Anyone feel like doing something like this for Canada? I'd be curious to see the answers for that, and to contribute a vote or two.

pause to relearn the wisdom of our fathers

We have found a new land - Kofi Awoonor

The smart professionals in three piece
Sweating away their humanity in driblets
And wiping the blood from their brow
We have found a new land
This side of eternity
Where our blackness does not matter
And our songs are dying on our lips.
Standing at hellgate you watch those who seek admission
Still the familiar faces that watched and gave you up
As the one who had let the side down
'Come on, old boy, you cannot dress like that'
And tears well in my eyes for them
These who want to be seen in the best company
Have adjured the magic of being themselves
And in the new land we have found
The water is drying from the towel.
Our songs are dead and we sell the dead to the other side
Reaching for the Stars we stop at the house of Moon
And pause to relearn the wisdom of our fathers.

Robert Serumaga: This is one of your poems. Does it sum up your opinions about the Africa before, the present Africa, and the Africa to come?

Kofi Awoonor: Yes it does, to a very large extent. You can see I was talking and what I was saying in this poem is really that the problem of adjustment for the new African, if there is anything like that, the new African who is caught up in the world of Europe, in the world of the white man, with a ballot-box, with a new outfit, clothes, and with a parliament, with a national anthem, and a song, what is he going to do about the wisdom of his fathers? And this is what I was trying to mirror in this particular part.

Serumaga: And what do you think he is going to do about the wisdom of his fathers in the new circumstances?

Awoonor: This is a very difficult question. I have a strong feeling that on whatever level you are going to discuss a subject like this, the political, or the social, or the economic level, one invariably returns to a certain basic aspect, which is the technological advancement of Africa, and all the things that are added on to it: what are we going to do with some of the basic traditions of African life, African communal life, the general spirit that did motivate African societies long before the white man came? And I see in this a simple answer which is not going to be described in political terms, that one has to adjust one's self to the thinking, the way of life which has almost died, to marry it to this new technology; I am thinking particularly about the traditions and customs and observances, and also positively about relationships to one another.

Serumaga: How much are you yourself, first as a person in your society, and secondly as a writer, influenced by the old traditions of the society in which you live?

Awoonor: Tremendously. I have always felt, perhaps involuntarily, I should take my poetic sensibility if you like the word, from the tradition that sort of feeds my language, because in my language there is a lot of poetry, there is a lot of music and there is a lot of the literary art, even though not written, and so I take my cue from this old tradition, and begin to break it into English, to give it a new dimension as it were.

...

Serumaga: Now here... you have the writing within which certain people are trying to forge a new kind of African writing in English or in French. Do you think they are succeeding very much? Can you point to particular examples which in your view have succeeded in doing this?...

Awoonor: Well, I would say yes; there are a lot of African writers who have really succeeded. I think readily of somebody like Wole Soyinka. I read Wole Soyinka and have a feeling that he's not exactly writing English - he's got a hybrid of Yoruba strength which is married to English which he uses very well; and I think about Chinua Achebe, and I think of J.P. Clark; I will not mention others, but I feel that African writing is moving; it's moving about say four or five generations into a new field which is going to mean that African writers are going to go back and find materials and inspiration in their own societies to write about. They move from the period of Osadebay and Michael Dei-Anang and so on, the political writing, to personal writing which is going to be defined as writing committed to a certain positive aspect of African life.

- Kofi Awoonor, sagely predicting the future of African writing, a future in which he and his writing would become towering influences, in a 1967 interview with Robert Serumaga. The interview was originally published in African Writers Talking (Heinemann, 1972).

Kofi Awoonor died on September 21st, 2013 in the Westgate Mall shooting in Nairobi, Kenya. He was seventy-eight. Over at One Ghana, One Voice we are preparing to run a series of memorial poems for Awoonor. You can read more about that project here.

Canada + Ghana + Poetry

In the Venn diagram of everything, few people sit at the intersection of the "Canadian poet" and "lived in Ghana" sets (though there are more than you might guess, as I've learned through One Ghana, One Voice). One such Canadian poet who's lived in Ghana is Daniel Karasik, who recently also joined me in the "Cormorant Books author" set with his newly released collection of poems, Hungry.

Needless to say, with so many Venn intersections shared between us, I'm excited to read the book when it gets to me. As a sneak peek of sorts, I've published a poem from Hungry and a short interview with Daniel over at One Ghana, One Voice. You can read the poem here and the interview here.

I hope you enjoy them - and may your interpretations of them float away like the little blue circle in the diagram below:

Some Comforting Ghanaian Info

Of all the areas of my writing life that fell behind while I travelled, my work with One Ghana, One Voice probably suffered the most. It turns out that being away from internet access has a negative impact on one's ability to run an online magazine.

Once Marta and I began traveling in Tanzania and Malawi, posting on OGOV came to an abrupt stop, which was both sad and ironic - my reintegration into African life and writing resulting in an extended hiatus on my African poetry site. But it did lead to one of the cutest and most heart-warming comment-section exchanges I've ever read (not that there's much competition in the "cute and heart-warming comment exchanges" category):

4 Comments - 1 – 4 of 4

Philip Nsiah said...

Have you closed shop on poetry?

March 19, 2013 at 3:34 PM


Rob Taylor said...

Philip,

No - we're sorry for the extended hiatus. We'll be back with more poems soon!

Rob

March 23, 2013 at 1:45 AM


Nana Agyemang Ofosu said...

Nsiah, Oneghana cannot close.

March 23, 2013 at 4:01 PM


Philip Nsiah said...

I am comforted.

March 29, 2013 at 3:52 AM

I'm very pleased to say that OGOV is back up and running. Our first posting is Prince Mensah's poem for, and reflections on, Chinua Achebe, who died late last month at the age of 82. You can read the poem here and the reflection here.

In addition to getting OGOV back on track, I've volunteered to be part of an exciting new initiative from Poetry Foundation Ghana - the inaugural Ghana Poetry Prize, a $1,000 prize sponsored by the foundation and open to anyone on earth.

I will be one of the judges for the contest, along with Adams Bodomo, Fredericka Alice Dadson, S.K. Okleme, and Martin Egblewogbe (whose short story collection, Mr. Happy and the Hammer of God & Other Stories, is fantastic). You can read all of the judge's bios, and discover just how much larger my face is than anyone else's, here.

Contest entries are due in by June 30th. So get submitting!

new homes all around

One Ghana, One Voice has a new look! Check it out here.

Former High Altitude Poetry webmaster Sean Wilkinson volunteered to take on the project of clearing up the cluttered that I had accumulated on the old template - and wow, did he do a great job! Thank you, Sean!

And while I'm on a refurbished-website kick, Marta and I have revived and redesigned our defunct travel blog, robandmarta.blogspot.com (last used when we lived in Ghana in 06/07). And that can only mean one thing...

Yes, for those of you who haven't heard, Marta and I are temporarily moving again, this time to Zambia for three months, followed by two months of travel throughout Southern and Central Africa. We're leaving next week. Needless to say, while I intend to maintain this site, the updates for the next few months will be sporadic at best (and if the internet is even slightly less reliable than advertised, I might be forced to go silent entirely). If you're interested in following along with out travels, do keep an eye on our travel blog, which will be updated more freuqently than anything else.

I'll be back in March. Everyone play nice while I'm gone, alright? (Or at least have fun playing dirty!)

a flurry of random little tidbits that don't deserve their own posts (with photos!)

Tidbit #1: That radio interview I mentioned earlier is now online. You can listen to it here (my part is the first fifteen-minute segment).

On it I talk with Stephen Buckley about High Altitude Poetry, The Other Side of Ourselves and the Dead Poets Reading Series. Thanks so much to Stephen and the Politics Re-Spun team for the interview, and congrats to Coop Radio on moving to their new frequency (and getting a new Seattle Sounders-esque logo)!

Tidbit #2: Remember how I mentioned that my poem "The Slave Castle of Elmina" had been "found" by Geist. Well, now their website has found it too! You can read it online here. Thanks, Geist!

Tidbit #3: Have you heard about 49th Shelf? It's a Canadian Goodreads - a place to keep track of all the books you've read that are set in 1955, and give them polite, encouraging reviews.

Ok, you've probably already heard of it. It's been around for a while. But I'm bringing it up now because a certain book has recently been added to the site, and it could really use your polite, encouraging reviews! And because I still think those 1955 jokes are funny and I was looking for an excuse to make one?

Tidbit #4: Literary listings in Vancouver just got even better. If nofuncity.com, Pandora's Collective's Community Calendar, and the FBCW's Vox Blog weren't enough for ya, the Vancouver Book Club has you covered. Their calendar, which is probably the most complete calendar in the city, can be viewed here. Thanks, VBC!

Tidbit #5: Over at One Ghana, One Voice we've wrapped up our series of poems memorialising late Ghanaian President John Atta Mills (I blogged about the series a while ago). You can read the whole series of 35 (!) poems here.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to making this series such a success.

the great oak has fallen

As I'm sure most of you are aware, John Atta Mills, the President of Ghana, died suddenly last week.

Over at One Ghana, One Voice we've opened a call for poems memorializing the late president. Already over a dozen have flowed in, including poems by Prince Mensah and Darko Antwi, with more arriving daily.

I've been most touched by the personal notes that have begun arriving in our email inbox thanking us for posting these poems. Many readers (often Ghanaian expats) have found that reading the poems on the site has helped them feel connected with others who are just as shocked and grief-struck as themselves.

Prince Mensah puts it best when he says, in our press release about the submission call, that “across Ghanaian cultures, when a great man goes to the village, there are several events that commemorate that man's life. There are dirges, dances, discussions and dedications. Out of all the literary genres, poetry tends to be the kind that symbolizes, and captures, the brevity of our sojourn on earth, together with an appropriate summary of our deeds. The various poems on One Ghana, One Voice evoke the essence of this patriot worthy of emulation.”

We'll be publishing poems daily on the main page of the site until we run out. It would be wonderful to have some international contributions, if anyone feels so moved. There is no length limit (a haiku would make the cut), and the poems don't have to be hyper-specific to this particular situation, so there's space for you even if you don't feel overly qualified for tackling the subject.

If you know of anyone who might be interested in this, please do help spread the word!

to wa / and back

Photo by Marta Taylor

As I've mentioned here before, in September 2010 we started up an Arc Poetry inspired "How Poems Work" series over at One Ghana, One Voice . The series gave OGOV poets an opportunity to write short essays on some of their favourite poems (either published on OGOV or elsewhere). Fourteen months and three essays later, I'm finally chipping in with an essay on Nana Agyemang Ofosu's "18 Miles to Yeero". It is rather unimaginatively entitled:

How Poems Work #4 - Rob Taylor on Nana Agyemang Ofosu's "18 Miles to Yeero"

I decided to write on this poem not because it is my most loved on the site, but because it's a poem that slowly won me over after I was initially disinterested - a phenomenon that I find much more interesting to think and write on. I hope readers are at least somewhat as interested as I was...

If you read the essay and find yourself inspired, I encourage you to read through the OGOV archives (and all our past "How Poems Work"), find a poem you love, and send me a proposal for "How Poems Work" #5!

some days all i startle

It's been a while since I mentioned anything about One Ghana, One Voice here on the blog. This is in part because I took a hiatus over the summer, my first in five years. Well, we're back at it, and I'm very pleased to be able to present two poems by one of my favourite Ghanaian poets, L.S. Mensah, over the next two weeks. Both poems look at Nigerian literary characters from the perspective of their mothers (whose stories were overlooked in the original texts). The first, Mother of Ikemefuna, is already up on the site, along with a Q+A with L.S., which is, as always with L.S., both thoughtful and informative. My favourite answer of hers this time was in response to a question about her opening line (the title of this post):

Looking back, I believe that phrase started life in one of my Congo poems but it always impeded my efforts to do anything with it. It became the starting point for this poem, but even then I wouldn't say the outcome was guaranteed. Seamus Heaney makes a point about how the right opening line can lead one to generate a whole poem, but one does need some luck too. A lot of the time I feel like an Accra cobbler, making shoes out of those worn car tyres, hammering them into place with oversized Kantamanto nails!

Photo Source

The second poem in the series, along with another Q+A, will be published next Saturday.

To see more of what OGOV has been up to of late, check out the archives. And if you, or someone you know, is somehow connected to Ghana + poetry, get those submissions coming!

FIVE videos + fundraiser + Project Space

FIVE was OCW Magazine's fifth birthday party, which took place back in April. It featured a gaggle of artists from various disciplines giving PechaKucha style talks on their work. I was honoured to be one of them (before the event, I blogged about it here).

The presentations from FIVE were recorded, and the videos have just been posted online. Highlights include Barbara Adler's love song to her accordion and Kevin Spenst's twisted world view. All of the videos from the evening can be viewed here.

I spoke about the first meeting between myself and my One Ghana, One Voice co-founder, Julian Adomako-Gyimah, which was entertaining in some typically Ghanaian ways, and one very atypically Ghanaian way:



It was quite fun to be able to tell a Ghana story to a Canadian audience, and an extra challenge to try to compress one into five minutes (and to dig up photos that even vaguely fit with the story I was telling). Thanks for the opportunity, OCW!

Speaking of OCW, they are hosting a fundraiser this Saturday at The Cobalt. The details:

OCW Summer Benefit Concert
Saturday, August 13th, 8:30 PM
The Cobalt
917 Main Street, Vancouver
Featuring: music by The Stone Pines, Sunny Pompeii and Ailsa Rose
$8

The crazy kids at OCW will be putting the fundraised money to good use, as they're about to take on their most ambitious project to date: Project Space, a "curated bookshop, programming space, and studio" on Georgia Street in Chinatown. It's scheduled to open in September. I'll be sure to post more details about the grand opening as they come in.

urgency and simplicity - An Interview with Kae Sun

One of One Ghana, One Voice's finest poets, Kwaku Darko-Mensah (aka. the soul/folk/rock/pop/reggae/just-about-everything-else musician Kae Sun), is performing in Vancouver this Friday:

Kae Sun in Concert
Friday, July 15th, 9:00 PM Doors, 10:00 PM Start
Calabash Bistro
428 Carrall Street, Vancouver

It's a rare treat when I get to promote an OGOV poet here in Vancouver, but Kae Sun is exceptional in many ways. For one, as my intro noted, he is a musician as well as a poet, though the dividing line between the two arts is often a blurry one (we profiled one of Kae Sun's songs, "Lion on a Leash", on OGOV, for instance).

Here's a sample of his recent work, entitled "When the Pot":



From Toronto via Accra, Kae Sun is at the end of a West Coast tour (he'll be in Alberta and Ontario in August - dates here), and took a bit of time out of his busy schedule to e-chat about writing Ghanaian-infused poetry and music in Canada:

Rob: An interview with you that showed up recently on YouTube features a funny moment in which you are talking about the influence of Asante gospel music and the interviewer thinks you are referring to Ashanti, the pop singer. Likewise, one of the poems of yours that we’ve featured at One Ghana, One Voice, “Ananse’s Grave” is more likely to be interpreted in Canada as a poem about the demise of one of this country’s leading small presses than as a poem about Ghanaian folklore. These are only a couple specific examples of how the same words carry different meanings in Africa and in North America – when you move into more fraught terms like “poverty”, “development”, etc. the gulf between the meanings of words is potentially even greater, and certainly more complicated.

There’s a good deal of talk in the poetry world about whether writers should write for themselves or for an audience (and if so, a specific one or a general one). As a Ghanaian writing about Ghanaian/African subjects in Canada, is it possible for you to write without considering an external audience? Can you write about the Asante without worrying about people thinking you are talking about Ashanti (in the interview, for instance, you clarify what “Asante” means before the interviewer brings it up himself – you can sense his confusion before he even says anything), and if you can’t, does that in some way limit or compromise your work?


Kae Sun: One of my favorite artists, Mos Def, said something in an interview that really stuck with me. He said in order to be universal you have to be really specific. In other words you can only be genuine about your own experiences, views, etc. and if you go deep enough with it you're bound to strike a universal chord. We're essentially pretty similar as people, the difficulty is cutting through the external cultural differences. To write for an audience requires the almost impossible task of guessing what that audience wants to hear and that's not something I'm interested in doing at all. Plus it's easy enough to research new information or cultural references that one is unfamiliar with, in fact I think it's important. I mean I had to do it in order to live and go to school in Canada, so other people can do it too.


R: Does the same hold true for your music as for your poetry? It seems to me that your poetry is more closely tied to Ghanaian/African themes than your music. Would you consider that a correct assessment? If so, why do you think that is? Do you consider your poetry and music as having different audiences, or as being written for different purposes?


K: Not at all. I haven't really analyzed them separately. I mean my writing is evolving and I find that especially with this most recent EP, a lot of the themes within the songs have to do with Ghana, going home, etc. It has a lot to do with where I'm at in life when those poems or songs were written and right now I'm very connected to home, for the first time since I left.

R: That seems like a good segue to talking about your new EP. "Outside The Barcode" is an acoustic EP that you've made available for free download. What inspired you take this route (both "acoustic" and "free")?


K: Urgency and simplicity. I'm very much against the pure business approach to bringing music to an audience. There are few things I hate more than being all formal and businesslike especially with art. It's just not cool to me. Being professional is good to some extent but I find that some people take it too far. In my case my vocation is to write songs and share them, so I really didn't see the need in making the issue more complicated than that. These particular songs were ready to be shared so I just went with it. Thankfully I have a very supportive team so I can do things a bit more creatively.



R: Speaking of bringing your music to an audience, I recently came across a cover [posted above] of your song "Lion on a Leash" by a couple guys in France (and a cutout of some dude leaning on a broom?). Was that cover a YouTube first for you? How did you feel about the first time you saw your music covered? Did it feel like a milestone of sorts?


K: Yeah, it's a good feeling for sure. One way of knowing if a song resonates with an audience is watching at shows to see how people respond when they first hear a song without the hype. The other way is when people actually go out of their way to cover a song. It's a blessing.


R: Have you been to Vancouver before? To the West Coast in general? How have you been finding your time here? What can people expect from your show on Friday night?


K: Yes, I have. It's my third time here. It's beautiful out here, I love the pace of things. I'll be playing some of the new songs this time around. I'm still trying to decide if it'll be all acoustic or if I'll have a band with me. We'll see.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to see Kae Sun play in an intimate setting this Friday - and if you aren't in Vancouver, be sure to download his new EP (for free!), and stay "on the lookout" (sorry, couldn't help myself) for when he comes through your town.

take care to lean / far in

The Art Bar event last night was wonderful - a packed, generous crowd (including more friends than I expected!) and some very strong readings, highlighted by Julie Berry reading from her latest collection, the walnut-cracking machine. You can read the title poem here - it's well worth the time.

I'm reading again tomorrow night at the Misunderstandings Magazine final issue launch (details here). Apparently, there will be cake. I hope that's not the kind of thing people in Toronto joke about. No one should ever joke about cake.

In the midst of all the excitement (including Dionne Brand's Griffin win [congrats Dionne!], Vancouver's win [congrats Vancouver!], and my being in a town where I can walk between five different independent bookstores in ten minutes [congrats Toronto!]), I'd forgotten to promote this week's One Ghana, One Voice feature, Daniel Karasik - until now!

I got to know Daniel's writing through Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry, which I'm currently reading through and thoroughly enjoyable (which shouldn't come as a surprise, as it's selected and edited by my editor, Robyn Sarah). Daniel's contribution to the anthology is particularly strong - if you're in a book store, flip to his poems "Old Men Running", "Sanctity" and "Others Will Be Remembered" to see what I mean - so I was excited to read in his bio that he had spent some time in Ghana. I shot him an email in hopes that he had been writing poems back then, and sure enough he had. The first of the poems that he sent me, "A Wrapping Ceremony" is up on the site now, and another will follow down the road. You can read "A Wrapping Ceremony" here, and Daniel's bio and Q+A here.

And now, because at some point I need to post a picture from the trip that isn't of either A) someone standing at a microphone or B) a bookstore, here's a shot of me warming up the Canucks' spot for the engravers:

If you're in Toronto, I hope to see you on Thursday night. If you're in Vancouver, keep the place together until we're back in town for games six and seven, ok?

anything going on tonight?

As the HYPEcycle pedals along, I have posted a poem from The Other Side of Ourselves over at One Ghana, One Voice. It's called "I Have Gone to Keta: Daytrip", and you can read it here (and my bio and Q+A on it here). If you're wondering where in the heck Keta is, you can find out here.

For those of you exhausted by all the HYPE, don't worry, it will relax soon, as my Vancouver launch is tonight and Montreal launch is on Monday. I will also be doing some readings in Toronto in late-May - details (and HYPE) on that to follow. If you live in any of those cities, I hope to see you there.

There are a number of lit events in Vancouver tonight. If you're a Van-lit-lover, here's my proposed itinerary for the evening:

5:00 - 7:00: Cross Pollination Reading Series
7:00 - 7:02: Reckless speeding across town by car/bike/hovercraft
7:02 - 9:00: "The Other Side of Ourselves" Book Launch
9:00 - 9:02: Reckless speeding across town by scooter/airplane/marsupial
9:02 - 12:00: OCW #19 Release Party
12:00 - 12:02 AM: Reckless speeding across town by rollerblade/moonboot/catapult
12:02 - 3:00 AM: Reading is Sexy Memewar Fundraiser
3:00 - 3:02 AM: Quick ride home from a designated driver (never drink and hovercraft!)

Hope to see you tonight, Vancouver!

african writing + the internet

One of the great things that technology will give us is an outlet for our own critical perspectives which will help moderate skewed Western perspectives. An example: recently the Guardian had someone do a blog piece on Ben Okri's "The Famished Road" and he said the book was a waste of space - within minutes respondents from across the globe were taking him to task, letting him know that he didn't understand the context or the subtext, and because of this he found he had to moderate his tone. Something as simple as that can change the way the world reads, and can expand the readership for writing from Africa. In the "print only" days, that Guardian piece would not have had those responses and would have become "law" in print, with everyone heralding it as authoritative; with the web, it became dialogue.

- Nii Ayikwei Parkes, as part of a two-part Roundtable Discussion on African Writing and the Internet that we've been running over at One Ghana, One Voice.

The discussion has had a number of highlights, including a reference to Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap), which I hadn't heard of before, and plan to use liberally in my future defences of poetry. You can read part one of the Roundtable here, part two here, and participant bios here.

five!

OCW Magazine is celebrating its fifth birthday on Tuesday, April 26th with "FIVE", a PechaKucha-style series of five-minute talks on writing and art and who-knows-what-else. I'm honoured to have been asked to be one of the presenters.

Presenting with me will be, among many others, Barbara Adler, Cathleen With, Kevin Spenst, TJ "dear-god-don't-make-me-follow-him" Dawe, and Robert Fougere, who I don't really know, but whose website just gave me a seizure.

In keeping with the theme of magazine anniversaries, I'm going to be talking about the founding of One Ghana, One Voice, which just recently turned four. Spoiler alert: it involves a high-speed car ride and inter-species screaming.

If that isn't enough to entice you, I may have prepared some of my slides using MS Paint. Oh yes.

The event is $10, and tickets can be bought here. Each ticket includes a free subscription to OCW.

Here are the details:

"Five", OCW Magazine's Fifth Birthday Party
Tuesday, April 26th, 7:00 - 11:00 PM
The Waldorf Hotel, Cabaret Room
1489 East Hastings St, Vancouver
$10 (includes a free subscription)
Poster:

I hope to see you there!

the makings of you

I'm very proud of our latest "Special Series" over at One Ghana, One Voice. Throughout March we're featuring poems from Nii Ayikwei Parkes, a rapidly-rising Ghanaian poet who currently lives in the UK. His most recent poetry chapbook, Ballast: A Remix, was a 2010 finalist for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets, and his first novel, Tail of the Bluebird, was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

His first full collection of poems, The Makings of You, was published in late-2010 by Peepal Tree Press, and it is certainly one of the finest books of poetry I've read so far in 2011 (and I suspect few will surpass it over the rest of the year). You don't need to take my word for it though, as all the poems we'll be featuring on OGOV will be from The Makings of You.

The first poem in the series is up, and can be read here. And here's his first author bio/Q+A. Once they are all posted, the whole series of poems and interviews will be available here.

I'm not sure which I'm more excited about: the poems or the interviews. Parkes is a sharp essayist, and a champion of Ghanaian poetry (in fact, the "Poems from Ghana" page on his old wordpress site was one of the only online sources of Ghanaian poems that existed pre-OGOV, and served as a source of inspiration), so I relish the opportunity to have a back-and-forth Q+A with him over the next month.

Keep an eye on OGOV this month - new content will be posted each Saturday!

christmas-cellanea

1. Cormorant Books' Spring 2011 Catalogue is online! See Mom? I told you I wasn't make the whole book thing up... (If you click the link, give the catalogue a second to load before scrolling through).

2. One Ghana, One Voice is now on Twitter. Follow along on all things Ghanaian + poetry at http://twitter.com/ghanapoetry. While on the subject of OGOV, don't forget to vote for your favourite poem of 2010.

3. The second issue of The Incongruous Quarterly is now online. You can read it here. If you're feeling nostalgic, you can read my poem from the first issue here.

4. Merry Christmas to you and yours, lovely readers!

To celebrate, here's a winter scene designed by Daniela Elza's uber-talented 10 year old son, Azlen:



 
I think silaron is now on vacation until the New Year. If so, Happy New Year and see you in 2011!

vote for your favourite OGOV poems

As we do every year at One Ghana, One Voice, we're collecting readers' votes in order to determine our favourite poems of 2010. If you've kept an eye on the site over the year, you can get the info on voting here. If you're out of the loop, you can catch up via our archives.

Favourites from past years can be read here.

some ghanaian poetry updates

One Ghana, One Voice is humming along nicely these days. Our latest endeavour is a Ghanaian version of Arc's "How Poems Work" series. Our first "How Poems Work" went up a couple weeks ago. It's an analysis of recently-deceased Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew's poem "The Sea Eats Our Lands" by still-living Ghanaian poet L.S. Mensah. It's great stuff, and can be read here.

Along with L.S., another up-and-coming Ghanaian poet making his mark on the scene is Darko Antwi, who has started up the new blog/magazine for African writing, Phillis Wheatley Chapter. My poem on Kwame Nkrumah, "Child of Saturday", has been posted on the site and can be read here. He's accompanied the poem with some photos of Nkrumah, including one with his wife and W.E.B. Du Bois, whose house and library in Accra I visited regularly - those can be viewed here.

Another upstart African publishing venture is Mensa Press, founded by Maryland-based Ghanaian poet Prince Mensah. The press is publishing five (!) poetry anthologies of primarily African content in the coming months. It's a great, and risky, project and I wish Prince all the success in the world in his efforts. One of the books will contain a few of my poems on Ghana, and I have written the introduction for another. I'll be sure to pass on more info about the books as it comes out over the next few months (for now, the sample cover in this post will have to do).

And while I'm on things Ghanaian + poetry, a blog post by one of our OGOV contributors, Holli Holdsworth, has been Twitted about by some local poets (small world, eh?). It's a post on food costs/consumption in Ghana and it's padded out by some... let's say "borrowed"... images and statistics from Hungry Planet: What the World Eats on the average weekly food consumption of families from various parts of the world (which were originally posted on the food blog of one of our dearest friends from Ghana [now living in Nashville] Erin McDonnell - smaller world!). You can read the blog post in question here, and a poem of Holli's from OGOV here.