I read a very beautiful literary critical review in which the author, a scholar I truly respect said that I am the most renowned African woman poet in the world today, and you can disagree with him, I do not care, and this is not my point here. I am glad he thinks so, and I am honored he wrote that. But here is my point. If I am going to be the poet that I want to be before I die someday, I will not be happy, will not believe I have achieved anything, will not believe this statement if I do not leave behind at least two other Liberian poets who can write as good as I write or even better than me. I say this because I have been really disappointed that for the last year I have been trying to put together Liberian poets works for a poetry project a good friend of mine and I are working on to promote Liberian poetry. My calls have been yielded very little poetry so far or response. And the worst part is that some of those who would be great poets do not want to take criticism or even learn from anyone, and you can blow up with anger all you want. In my frustration, I called a friend of mine who edited a Liberian literary magazine for years, and she said, You girl, good luck if you find any. Now, you can tell me that you are a poet all you want, but if you have not allowed your work to be examined, critiqued through the eyes of those who really know poetry, and have let only your friends tell you that you are a great Liberian poet, you are wasting your time. Now, this is what I am planning to do to change this. When I am fully recovered and when Liberia is back to normal again, instead of conducting one day workshops in Monrovia as I did in the past, I will look for money to conduct complete three to four week creative writing classes each year with those younger poets who were so eager to learn when I was with them. We need to teach poetry and fiction workshops to nurture the talents we have, to teach these talented youth to understand that creative art/ poetry /fiction is a serious business. A nation that cannot produce its own literature and art is a lost nation. And we can do this without any corrupt politics.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 15:17:22 +0000
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