How Should One Read a Poem?

A persistent flaw in contemporary Nigerian poetry is that many poets perceive criticism as hate. Despite the well-founded critiques from literary critics pointing out defects in contemporary Nigerian poetry, these critiques are often met with resistance.

When I started writing poetry in 2021, squeezed in the slipshod generation of Facebook poets, I had no profound knowledge of the essence and technicalities of the genre. Even as I write this essay, I am in the process of educating myself about the particularities of how a poem should be written. I didn’t know what odd relations that language, to paraphrase W. H. Auden, must achieve with poetry, unlike other genres where you could easily subvert diction. I also did not take a considerable amount of my time to learn the utmost importance of prosody and other essential traits of poetry such as subject matter, form, content, and lineation. Like many beginners who showed keen, yet impatient interest in the art, I was only fascinated by the writers whose glib nature of poems made a delirious impression on me and the thrilling reality of being published in journals. Enthused by this chemical rush, I would write slovenly on papers, using words with a jab of catchy diction masqueraded as poems, often about mothers and fathers, and submit them to magazines—just as many still do today.  

It is not that these writings are entirely useless—at least they strive to score some points for their relatable instances, often told in pert prose, broken into stanzas—but that they, in great due, lack substance and poetic merit. In some, the subject matter is shattered, possessing no direction; while in others, the prosody is not well internalized...