Recently, I have been thinking about how poems begin. The more I look at this poetic substructure, the more convinced I become that the beginning of the poem is its most important formal aspect. Samuel A. Adeyemi agrees because many of the poems in his debut chapbook, Heaven is a Metaphor, first published by the now-defunct Praxis Magazine in 2021, begin with interpretive intent. While most contemporary poets see it as their compositional necessity to arrive at a memorable, if sometimes superficial, conclusion, Adeyemi is one of the few poets who see the beginnings of their poems as equally important for attaining memorability.
THE PROEMS
The poem that opens the chapbook, ‘Flight’, begins rather casually, although with a dark undertone: ‘I live inside a plummet’. ‘Correspondence to Self’ starts with the apostrophic commonplace of the Elizabethan tradition: ‘Oh, Love’. And ‘Babel’ commences with the supplicative proper, synchronizing prayer with command while deviating from his primary linguistic medium of expression, as though a change of language might have an influence on the prayer being answered or the command being obeyed: ‘Ọlọ́run, fún ìyá mi ní ìlera tó dára.’ God, give my mother good health. The speaker of ‘Libertine’ restored religious nonchalance from ecclesiastical decline: ‘I built apathy from a ruined church’. In ‘Against Introversion’, ‘So much of the world is violent.’
Essentially, these self-contained and semantically self-sustaining beginnings suggest the poet’s self-confidence which is further accentuated by the proliferation of present tenses, implying the poems as not merely recollective artefacts, but as a specular continuum, projecting the ever-present conditions of man back to man.
The mark of any decent poetry is its seemingly effortless accommodation of expressive strangeness, and these poems exude it with exquisite exuberance. When I read ‘Good Arsonist’, in its slick delivery of narrative sophistication through simplicity (from the mordant self-commendation that begins it and the struggle through the hopeless reality that follows), the poem, as an expressive medium, is not essentially a hiding place. Nor is it a space unwelcoming of vulnerability, or condoning pretence, the poet’s coping yet gradually destructive mechanism (read ‘Correspondence to Self’). Rather, it is the literary equivalent of ecclesiastical confession or psychotherapy as the poet’s blunt rhetoric reads as if the speaker is talking in those environments, both of which assure confidentiality. ‘Quiet reader’, the speaker of the second section of ‘Babel’ commands an imagined audience, which is the only kind of audience these poems entertain:
permit me. This is where I come to seek catharsis. I convince myself each line is a tourniquet, folding my beloved into the page.
These poems, exemplified by ‘Good Arsonist’ in its oxymoronic intent and ‘Rimrock’ which follows the Christian rhetoric for apostasy, are more asides than soliloquies. In the former, the poet’s fear of addressing his transforming reality heads-on is transposed to a poem of and for everyone at the margin of religious spectrum; a song, sung out of desperation as much as out of frustration.
The latter, however, is the speaker’s lamentation against the divine ostracization, or ‘deafness’ as the poet calls it in ‘Epiphany’, which brings the speaker to corresponding himself, his cosmic importance, with that of spatial entities:
I sit by my aunt’s terrace: My eyes, fingertips inspecting the sky—its skin, bluer than a larkspur. I watch the choir of stars basking in their radiant hymn. Lord, where is my brilliance?
Questions like this proliferate the poems (there are forty-nine questions throughout the book). Most of these questions are, however, techniques for examining the poet’s empirical processes, sometimes even an exposition of his need for assurance. ‘Rimrock’ contains five such questions: one is addressed to something as incapable of communication as a ‘room’, magnifying the poet’s pitiable loneliness: ‘why don’t you stutter when I ask for air?’ The following three are as much self-interrogation as they are rhetorical ones while the last, quoted above, is addressed to the book’s foremost agonist, the ‘Lord’. In ‘Every Gen Z Poem is about the Body’, the speaker questions if you know what it is to be happy and free as the ‘wind’, delivered concretely through a sartorial trope. The question goes: ‘Do / you know what it is to wear the wind as colour?’
A TRIUMPH OF FORM
In this book, Adeyemi understands that it is not the passion for self-expression, but the conscious command of language that makes poetry that is worth rereading. The best metaphor in the book, for example, appears in ‘Evanescence’, in which the poet’s ‘mind, [is] a sieve’, selective of memory, doubtful of the prodigious, furious of the fleeting, and curious of the yet unnamed. Situated in the middle of the poem, the figuration elects the mind as the confluence between remembering and forgetting.
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