Tanure Ojaide on the poet: Preliminary notes on a writer’s poetics

Abstract

Tanure Ojaide’s poetry has been discussed primarily with focus on his social activism, with occasional attention paid to his deployment of the techniques of indigenous Urhobo poetry. However, a career-long preoccupation which hitherto has hardly received any critical attention is the poet’s presiding use of his poetry as metacommentary on the craft and purpose of his art. While privileging his 2010 collection The Beauty I Have Seen: A Trilogy, this article examines selections from the body of Ojaide’s self-reflexive poetry in which he poetizes the role of the poet as an instance of the poet’s articulation of his poetics. It appraises the focal poems’ status as metacriticism by underscoring their abiding correspondence with Ojaide’s vision of poetry as expressed in interviews and scholarly writings, and by examining the aesthetic implications of his firm anchorage of his work in the tradition of indigenous African poetry.