Eneh Akpan Writes: Sylvia Plath

Showing posts with label Sylvia Plath. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Wait For The Angel

I wait for the angel

Hope they got wings for a rebel,

To fly me away from this hell

I’m tucked into like a tunnel.

I wait for the angel

Of righteousness to cast a spell

And boost me till my fears dispel

And rain down vowels like a bell.

I wait for the angel

To bring me hope in my Bethel

And in this despair raise a citadel

That thwarts the pace of shrapnel.

I wait for the angel

Come and deliver this Abel

Before my sacrifices compel

The Cains of this age to rebel.

I wait for the angel

Right here at the foot of the stairwell

I will wait to meet my Gabri-El

To filter out the lies of Jezebel.

Akpan

Chronic Encore

History is a stuck record

History is on chronic encore

History is recurrent cancer

He asks the question

And he gives the answer,

History is a broken record.

History competes with himself

He strives to best his record best

History is stuck in a flawed groove

Cause history’s got something to prove

History makes the grand opening

He takes the baton in mid-race

And cuts the ribbon at grand closing

History never gives time a break

History is on repeat

Like a radio request hit

He improvises

…and revises

And yet rotates on his axis

So the fallout's always the same

Then begins his game

Like a game of spades

Played for higher stakes

All over again.

Akpan

Sunday, October 21, 2012

What Do Writers Do?

When you pick up your pen to write, what thoughts dance to the edge of your mind? When you sit to think on paper, what ideas drive your muse? What devils you?

In writing, a ransacking of the faculty is set in motion like the turning out of pockets of a school kid would reveal what s/he’s been up to. It’s an adventure into the still small things that run deep. Because a writer is the freak who would not let sleeping dogs lie.

Sometimes, a writer may present answers to nagging issues. But, much of the time, writers raise dusts that are impossible to still. They are literary mischief-makers with a knack for exhuming best forgotten matters. It is the writer’s business to guarantee the dust does not settle on a matter.

Writers seemingly crave for knowledge that’s never theirs to attain. Desecrating history’s sarcophagus like Time’s own tomb raiders yet, trying their very best to be quiet about the whole subject (as if that was possible). As time goes by, they become fairly successful at keeping the peace like woodpeckers in a forest of silence boring deep circlets into the trunk of century old trees. And in a manner similar to these species of avian activities, always taking quick peeks between pecks, glances that were they words could mean, ‘Am I disturbing the peace, now?’ or ‘Am I prodding a raw nerve, yet?’

I don’t need to draw you a picture, do I? Writing is a gift. A blessing as well as a curse. Not if you’re Sylvia Plath who predicted her own demise in her poetry and effectively closed that chapter. Taking her own life.

Writing is also savage pleasure. A trespassing if you like that word better. A mending of broken links and a crossing of boundaries, unlocking of painful memories, stripping it right down to its birth suit and taking heart-wrenching moments to nibble at minutiae.

This obsessive streak has a way of turning on the writer. Stephen King said he wrote his novel, The Shining out of a personal simple phobia that he might harm his own kids. (Owing to his state of mind at that time.) Just because writers ain’t marching up and down blowing their own whistle doesn’t make their job any less quiet than the last minutes of new year’s eve.

The pen is louder than the boom of a nuke on impact. What’s more, the scenes are reenacted through all generations every time a reader cuts into the meat of the words. The power at the fingertips of a writer pushes the lip of eternity. Chew on that for a minute. And you might come to grasps with what could possibly be the greatest power available to wo/men on earth.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

Friday, June 22, 2012

DAY 22: Creeping Easy

It was Mark Twain who said a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything.

My story doesn’t run the length of a novel-that’s at least 50,000 words last time I checked. Nevertheless, it’s a confession of sorts by a man who had done nothing through inaction or if I had to go the whole nine yards, through indifference.

I used to teach at a troubled children school just down the block. Let me tell you something, I knew a lot of kids back then who would have come to nothing if they were given ten shots at life placed the length of their noses. And then, there were those kids who were in the box because their family couldn’t keep up the love. Victims of a home that’s gone to hell in a hand basket.

Gary fell into the second group. A ruddy, solemn, tall drink of water who had his future cut out for him right from the word go. But Fate has us in the palms of his hands. The day Gary came to Queenstown College I knew a gem was about to be lost. I don’t know how I knew but I did know. The kid didn’t belong in that place.

It was like Gary also knew something was up because he did try to turn over a new leaf. I’d know more of that, if would were could. But before that time, he ran with the wrong pack and made a real mess of a pitiable existence.

I watched that kid through the windows of the staff room from up the second floor of the Administrative Building of Queenstown College. Watched him carry on through like tomorrow was here. I should have stepped in and curbed his enthusiasm when he started hanging around that kid from the Double B Fellowship. But you know they didn’t call that college a school for troubled children for nothing. Some of those kids would be serving time if they was old enough.

I don’t know how he managed it really, but Gary stopped trucking with that cult completely. In Queenstown, when a student decides to stop culting and start a new life, we called it creeping easy. I saw him in the library a few times, reading poetry. He was always going through the works of two great poets. It never ceased to amaze me how he was able to work out such chemical imbalance (the poets’). One was totally off the bend and living next door to hell’s industrious crew (Sylvia Plath) and the other always had a song flung up to heaven and still she rises (Maya Angelou). Maybe, Gary believed the works of these poets helped him understand both the light and dark side of his personality. If so, I prayed that he wouldn’t throw all his weight on the Sylvia Plath Option and tip over the tables all the way to suicide.

And yet the devil came. The cult Gary once belonged to had a clash with some other gang. These kids around these parts used weapons for gang fights-clubs and daggers. Luckily, none of them was ever spotted carrying firearm through out my stay at the college.

This is a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything to rescue a promising young life from the clutches of his own peer group.

Three teenagers are being questioned after a 15 year old boy was stabbed to death near his school. – News.

Notes to myself:

Of course, I’m gonna get this story smokin’ n’ tokin’ in the final draft:

Give the narrator (teacher) a name;

Name at least, one of the cult members.

Is there a need to state the family feud that created Gary’s emotional state?

Monday, December 6, 2010

How You Can Write Poetry I

Poetry is reflecting what you feel deep inside.

Be it on paper or by verbal altercation, it’s as simple as that. Now, I’ve had people say, “Poetry isn’t my thing”. Or “No matter how hard I try I just can’t write poetry” and so on and so forth like that.

Well, excuse me; I’ll have to disagree with you on that single score. Anybody, and I mean just that, anybody can write poetry if they put their heart to it. But not too much of their heart or they look like they taking an entrance exam for the School of the Great By-and-By. Loosen up, buddy. You can’t write no poem with your muscles all tensed up. Relax.

Now that we got that out of the way, I should add that we must come to the garden of verse with an understanding that mastery comes in varying shapes and sizes. And that’s exactly where many potential poets stand or fall. I’m using the word potential with the utmost care because you are either a poet or you’re not. The quality of your line of verse matters not as the fact that you write poetry. That’s all you need to be a poet. Write poems.

When I was younger, I got myself worked up a lot because I believed a standard poem required a large dose of big vocabularies. You can’t blame the kid I was though. You should have seen my first collection of poetry books besides the Nursery Rhymes which I regarded as childish and substandard poetry. One of my favorite poetry texts was A Pageant of Longer Poems edited by E. W. Parker and that’s just one among numerous skull-cracking, mind-racking collections of poems by classical poets, in my personal possession. So, I grew up with a belief that was as staunch as it was childish that reading standard, acceptable verse ought to pay in migraine or at the least, a mild headache. Any poetry that missed that mark was low on the ratings, mine.

From Milton’s Morning of Christ’s Nativity to Arnold’s Balder Dead, my young escapades took me through the works of my favorite classical poet, William Wordsworth. Here’s an excerpt from a personal favorite,

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God Who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

William Wordsworth,

Intimations of Immortality

Can you imagine how easy it would be for a ten year old to get lost in between those few lines of verse? Lost and totally wrecked out my mind, such was my dilemma on the road to the mastery of verse. The years, like foam-tipped breakers have blessed me with a few gifted poets, men and women through whom I’ve gained my footing and a lot of stamina in the field of cadence. Maya Angelou (my favorite), Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Audrey Lorde, Ezra Pound, Laurence Dunbar, Sylvia Plath and many more masters of the art.

I’ve done my share of reading up on works attributed to these greats, did a little extra as a matter of fact, dug up the BGs (that’s short for Background) and worked the poetic interpretations with those. And I assure you it’s been non-stop pleasure. I’ll give my thoughts pause, presently. Next time, I’ll be sure to pick this up right where I left off. Until that time, read a lot and I mean A LOT of poems.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

Helpful Links

http://www.allpoetry.com

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com

http://www.poems.com

http://www.poetry.com

http://www.poemhunter.com

http://www.americanpoems.com

http://www.africanamericanpoems.com

http://www.poetry.org

http://www.writing.com

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Writer's Role

Writer's Stop (Photo credit: Stephh922)

We live within our characters. When they bleed, we bleed. When they die, a part of us-that part that stirred them into existence in the first place-dies with them. Our emotions meld and erupt as our stories reach a climax. We are gods who share; partake in the sufferings of his creation. Who feel what they feel in order to associate with their ideas and views of their 'imaginary' universe.

A place in which they are as alive and real as we are in our own world. An existence so real that a stroke off our pen could mark a fatal mistake or an irreparable loss in someone's previously perfect life-a tangible mortal sin that wakes to hubris.

In the roles we write, we are alive and present. We matter. . .

Larry Brooks.

The responsibility of a writer can not be played down.

Like bite marks on fossils identifying probable cause of extinction of a species, our scribbles outlast us. They become our voices and direct the imaginations of our readers, influence what they think they know about us.

We all must push towards a point in our personal lives where we appraise our works through eyes of a reverence that's not arrogant. Pure and deserving of wo/men who create believable universes from the simple creed of creative thinking.

As chroniclers we define how the world we live in interprets the history of its people. The burden we've received can not be exaggerated.

When we pick up our pens to create a world through the power of the imagination, we ought to do it with the respect it deserves. The ideas we represent live forever. They will survive us long after our bone is dust to dust.

Laurence Dunbar, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, Audrey Lorde and the army of writers who are no longer here with us did their share creating works of art for which readers and writers hold these in untamed reverence through the years.

We ought to live for something that will last. We ought to breathe our souls on the pages of our journals, weave our essences into the 'dots and slashes' and allow the waves of inspiration to muster the letters that form from the blots of our pen into phrases.

We are not to assume we will be up to this task when we are perfect.

We are writers. Writers write!

Like right this minute!

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan