Poetry is lightning that must be seized early by all ‘learners’

When did the lightning first strike us?

We cannot be sure, but maybe it was seven weeks ago in this pages when Dr Tom Odhiambo — my fellow moderator at the AMKA creative writing /poetry sessions at the Goethe — posed this poignant question.

“How is it that children who grew up singing Baa Baa Black sheep in kindergarten classrooms, weaned on the rhymes, rhythms and singsong of poetry from an early age, end up disliking it in (secondary) schoolrooms?”

The poetically named Mwisayi Shimagar of Masiga went on to confirm eight weeks later — after the discourse had gathered its conference of clouds and the debate on ‘disliked’ poetry rumbled on all of June and July on these very pages — that “the smallest class at our literature department (in university) was Alt 302’ – the poetry study option.”

And yet, as the great poet Robert Frost once said, poetry is when “an emotion has found its thought, and that thought has found its words.” We all have empathy and emotion.

Most folks do. Perhaps the policeman (or plurality) that found it in their hearts to club six month old baby Samantha Pendo in Kisumu are not suffering from a lack of pendo (love) but simply a deficiency of poetry.

They have no poetry in their pathological personalities — and so are wordless, thoughtless brutes, programmed by their instructors to use their rungus (clubs) on those ‘looting nugus,’ so that they cannot see even the likes of babies who are the most vulnerable members of any society.

But why do so many high school students purportedly ‘dislike’ poetry as claimed in this space?

Why do we assume that reading poetry is difficult, obscure, complex and demands too much attention — yet we enjoy jokes on our WhatsApp apps, a feature in the newspaper or playing a game on the computer as a teenager?

The first cause is that a lot of people do not grasp that poetry is the Play-Station of Language.

Teachers begin with the didactic bit of poetry — and introduce the technical (yes, they are important, but, mos mos, let’s mosey our way there slowly) — alliteration, assonance, consonance — instead of first introducing students to the dance of words that poetry is.

It is all very well to bang on, as an English teacher, about what imagery, onomatopoeia and ideophones are in poetry — but you want your students to have an IDEA what poetry is first, or you will lose them all to iPhones (and the nonsense that goes on in there like ‘Sarahaha’).

And we are at risk of losing literature to these devices, within the Kenyan generation born this century.

That is how SERIOUS it is — and the mandarins at Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) ought to wake up to this fact — although they are trying — before it is too late.

In the case of poetry, it is imperative that one begins with poems that students can relate and enjoy; get them into the habit of reading poetry for pleasure, then the examinations and Shakespearian sonnets ( the ‘thou’ and ‘theretofores’) will take care of themselves later.

In my book Modern Poetry for Secondary Schools (Phoenix Publishers, 2016), teacher-author Kennedy Muriuki and myself begin with an original poem titled ‘Perspectives’ on page one.

‘She who lights neon in my heart/ called to say she couldn’t find the location of my place/ because my building moves by night. Perspective! – it is for the same reason/ she does not see my face/ in morning light.’

Students in high school are, as they always have been, concerned with ‘matters of the heart’ because, teenage.

In such a poem, the heart moves from its medical abode (with valves and assorted aortas) to a terrain that can be inhabited and make its owner experience joy (she lights me up in neon).

A young reader can relate, and therefore participate, in the significant experience that takes place in ‘Perspectives,’ — which is being stood up by a love interest (who is really disinterested, as well as unable/unwilling to appreciate the persona in the poem).

Pain is one of the principal paternities of poetry — and anyone can appreciate its expression.

At the 2014 Storymoja Hay Festival, we were paired up with Nigerian poet Chuma Nkwolo to ‘teach poetry’ to upper primary and secondary school students at the National Museum in mere two-hour sessions. Auma Obama was there. School head and writer Clifford Oluoch was there (with his clever little charges). And Beverly Nambozo of Babishai Niwe Poetry Prize from Uganda was there, too.

But how does one convey this ‘mystic’ creative art to youngsters in such a short period of time?

Someone once said ‘naming a baby is an act of poetry’, and for many, it’s their sole poetic act in a lifetime of inhaling this odoriferous oxygen that the Lord has freely given us, (even if we are busy ripping down the trees to build rental apartments and ‘condom-iniums’ for the middle classes, so that sections of Upper Hill now look like a toothless old woman, or a man after a bar brawl in which all his teeth were knocked out).

So we asked the kids and teens the meaning of their names, asked them to create poems from these, then took them on a ‘nature’ walk through the museum grounds and asked them to create ‘adventure’ poems. For teens, a literary look-in at the ‘works’ of the poetic Tupac Shakur may be the start of a journey that ends up with a profound ‘Prufrockian’ appreciation of T.S. Eliot.

‘Two in the morning, blazed and loc’ed out high’ is not as faraway, in poetic terms, from ‘Let us go then, you and I, where the evening is spread out against the sky’ as one may imagine.

In conclusion, people (and pupils) should learn that poetry is everything except ‘pooh’ (or po-faced) – poetry is a podium, poetry is a pogo for emotion, poetry is a poikilotherm, poetry is a point-blank bullet to the heart, an antidote to the poison in the soul, poetry is poker for the mind and poetry is political. Poetry, too, is a parting shot to the brutality all around us.

But I am a poet, not a rioter

My wounded indigo-finger was given

‘Jee-vee’ by IEBC, so I must keep the peace.

And not give vent to frustration

(posing as ‘Freedom of Expression’)

By picking up a random object like a stone.

That, may piss off the Police

Who, like sullen tribal gods, skulk at the slum street corner

Ready to rain wrath on any who may dare goad their goat.

Tony Mochama is the co-author of ‘Modern Poetry for Secondary Schools’ (Phoenix Publishers).