‘Writer, Write.’

For Moyosore Orimoloye, poet and author of ‘Poet in the Time of Buhari’, poetry does more than ‘wrap the mundane in arcane language’; sometimes, poetry gives us ‘“simple” words by which to articulate what we think is a complex experience.’

Written by Moyosore Orimoloye

Feb 5, 2020

Moyosore Orimoloye OJIMA ABALAKA

Our questions are italicized.

Growing up, did you read a lot of poetry?

It depends on whether the nursery rhymes of my childhood and the poetry of some portions of the Bible count. Discounting them from the assessment, my first contact with verse was with the poetry of Olusola, my elder brother. He had written a poem in his half-formal, half-cursive handwriting at the back of his Bible and something—boredom, perhaps—had led me to stumble upon it. I was ten or something close. I then started spending time trying to create a poem of my own. I haven’t stopped since. Finding his poem, however, did not lead me in a frantic search for other poems and it wasn’t until starting Literature classes four years later that I read more poems. And even then, my readings were limited to the syllabus, the poetry of my friends and a dusty copy of West African Verse.

If you could rewrite a classic poem, which would it be and why?

I was thinking about William Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ recently. The poem tells of a ‘solitary Highland lass’ working in a field and singing ‘a melancholy strain’. The poet-speaker then tries to guess what could evoke such sadness in the character. His options—‘old, unhappy, far-off things’, ‘battles long ago’, and ‘some natural sorrow, loss, or pain’—all seemed, to me, insufficient. The unexplored option was the most obvious! She was ‘single in the field’, and a ‘solitary Highland lass’. Loneliness. Something the poet-speaker could have remedied, you know? Instead of just ‘gently pass[ing]’.

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About the Author

Moyosore Orimoloye

is a poet from Akure, Nigeria. His poem, 'Love is a Plot Device and your Insecticide is Not' co-won the Babishai Niwe Poetry Award in 2016 and his chapbook of poems, Love is a Plot Device, was published in 2019. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowo, an online literary and visual arts journal.

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‘Writer, Write.’