FOR IKEOGU, FOR POETRY:
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Ikeogu Oke, poet,
literary troubadour and winner of the 2017 NLNG Literature Prize Prize (Poetry)
was notably vibrant in life and vocation as a writer. A jolly good fellow, humanist and
unapologetic defender of African culture, Mr. Oke brought a unique finesse to
the art of writing, especially in poetry, lacing his lines with music and
suiting the rhythm and tempo of words to its operatic foundations. In doing
this, he created a new sort of poetry
placed on the wings of performance yet retaining the candour and piquancy of
this elevated of all arts. His was a concatenation of poesy in union with
performance as he also created words with the enigma of art that enthrals and
thrills. The author of The Heresiad,
that won him the NLNG Prize and many other works spread across anthologies and
other publication outlets, Ikeogu Oke, was a visible signpost of an emergent
trope of writing though traditional yet uniquely different and effusive in its
acceleration and positioning a new credo of creativity.
The gusto with which
he unassumingly projected ‘a yet-unexplored idea of poetry as an art form that
transcends verse and goes on to embrace song, music and drama, resulting in what
may be called operatic poetry’ (The Heresiad, 2017:7) did not
leave the discerning surprised about his determination to change the game of
verse and the verse of game. In a deliberate cantata of spoken words, mixed
with the rubrics of traditional verse, our literary universe received with
excitement the birth of a canon that was beginning to tune us to a Handelian
spectacle and compositional trope when suddenly the music ceased and verse ran
out of its metre. A sad end to a performance that was just about taking off,
yet poetry does not die. Poetry as all arts lives with the creator also living
eternally in intellectual memory.
Sad as it is to be
notified of the recent demise of poet Ikeogu Oke, the Association of Nigerian
Authors (ANA), in a bid to immortalise this active poet of our time and a
living totem to the power of hard work in the face of all challenges, hereby
invites submission of tribute poems in honour of Ikeogu Oke. The Editors of
this forthcoming volume are looking for 51
poems (in tandem with his age at the time of death) for inclusion in a book
that will be released in the first quarter of 2019. It will be essentially a collection of poems
strictly on him and his art or related to poetry and mortality or immortality. The poems should be structurally
concise, thematically-relevant and strategically poetic. Only 51 poems will be
selected in a qualitative first come first serve tradition and so interested
contributors should immediately send in one
or not more than two poems of
which one may be selected on or before the deadline of 31 December, 2018. All submissions with not more than one hundred word biodata should be
forwarded to nwspublishers2016@gmail.com.
Denja
Abdullahi Ofonime Inyang, PhD
President General
Secretary
