Poetry needs patience: Advice from a Storymoja masterclass

I come from Machakos County, where we have a ‘People’s Park’ complete with an amphitheatre, so I felt at home settling into the amphitheatre at the Nairobi Museum to listen to a Storymoja ‘Poetry Masterclass’ on ‘Grounding Your Work in Reality’, led by Sitawa Namwalie (Kenya), Liyou Libsekal (Ethiopia) and Duduzile Mabaso (South Africa).

I arrived slightly late for this session, wearing an excellent new hat, but this is not relevant to this article.

I arrived to hear the brilliant Sitawa, one of our more exciting performance poets and author of the successful shows Cut Off my Tongue and Silence is a Woman, informing us that ‘Ideas come to her while driving’ and that she ‘Jots down ideas as they come to her’.

This struck me as dangerous, and I considered reporting her to the traffic police. Later in the week, perhaps as a form of Karma, I was pulled over by a traffic cop while chauffeuring one of our best 20-something poets, Clifton Gachagua, to a meeting; I had apparently missed a red light.

We tend to blame matatus for most of our road accidents, but clearly it’s poets who need to be kept off the road. A poetic licence should not be mistaken for a driving licence.

Sitawa was right: Ideas, even whole lines of poetry, can come to a writer at any time, and there is a desperate need to write these down as they come; this is because, like dreams, snippets of poetry can flash in the dizzy poet’s mind momentarily and then disappear, forgotten.

 There’s nothing more infuriating to the poet than having an apparently ‘great idea’ (it might not be) just as your head hits the pillow, thinking ‘Oh, I’ll remember it in the morning’, only to wake up and everything’s gone.

I keep a pen by my bed, and write my ideas down either in a notepad or the margins of a book I’m reading.

All the three poets equally stressed the need to write ideas down as they come, either on paper (Sitawa), a laptop (Liyou) or ‘any digital space’ (Duduzile, who says that she’s written the first drafts of some poems on her mobile phone).

Sitawa gave an additional piece of useful advice: If you write on a laptop, as she sometimes does, still print the draft poem out on paper, also, because, as Duduzile added, ‘paper and screen activate different parts of your brain’.

Certainly, when I write on my laptop and think a poem done, I often find that on printing it out, I want to do more to redraft it, as if the screen alone creates a sort of purblindness.

But all poets, from Liyou (who modestly described her prizewinning work as that of someone ‘just starting out’) to the more experienced others, rightly advised that poets must always redraft.

This is useful counsel for the audience, which featured a number of older writerly and theatrical types on one hand to, on the other, the young Sanya Noel, a student at JKUAT, who rightly won the wider festival’s prize for ‘written’ or ‘from the page’ poetry.

The issue of debate then turned to what poets ‘may’ write about. Duduzile spoke powerfully about how she can have ‘many years of drought’, during which she writes very little. This again rang true: I can go for months without satisfyingly putting pen to paper.

Even leading poets from history and the present confess to this occasional inertia. The most recent ‘big namer’ I have read saying this is the fine Irish poet (now living in the USA, as so many poets do, and as too many of this year’s invited Storymoja guests do), Paul Muldoon, who admits to writing one poem every two or so months.

Dirty word

Duduzile continued: If individual poems sometimes need to gestate, taking time to reach birth, then so too the courage and ‘right’ to write on certain issues takes time.

She gave the example of poems that she has written on the Rwandan genocide, which she says she had to research in great depth before feeling that she could responsibly engage the debate through verse. Sitawa hinted at something similar.

She suggested on the level of gendered writing that although she believes that ‘a man can write from a woman’s perspective’, this needs to be done after he has set aside his prejudices and engaged fully with women, listening prior to speaking.

Liyou agreed, stressing that as writers we should ‘empathise’ and ‘put our egos aside’ and be honest in our attempts to write about or for others.

I personally feel uncomfortable writing ‘for’ others, but felt that I had been given a little more permission than I have ever previously felt to enter debates through others’ perspectives.

Certainly, poetry is always about empathy, about selflessly trying to understand others. Whether this extends to being permitted to speak for/as others, well, I’m still not fully convinced. Can I write with a full conscience that I have the right to compose poetry through the persona of, say, an African American woman? I can’t; or at least, I can’t definitively, and shouldn’t pretend that I can.

Finally, this wisdom from the three women, which again they seemed to agree on: ‘Poetry needs maturity’.

This wasn’t a dig at young poets at all, for these were young writers speaking. But poets do need, they all suggested, to identify what is merely fashionable in the world of poetry, joining in if this fashion has value (‘fashion’ is not necessarily a dirty word) but resisting and ‘rising above’ if this fashion is constricting, lest an individual writer or even an entire nation’s verse becomes stuck in a rut of The Conventional.

 This, I suggest, is a difficult ‘maturity’ to achieve without the poet indulging in massively wide reading, which will be the topic of my next Storymoja article, following invited poet Kwame Dawes’ initiative to establish ‘poetry libraries’ across the continent.