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Showing posts from March, 2019

Niyi Osundare: Poet of the Moon

The occasion for this brief statement was my introduction of Professor Niyi Osundare as Keynoter at "Enchantings: Modernity, Culture, and the State in Postcolonial Africa," a conference organized by Professor Tejumola Olaniyan for University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research in the Humanities, April 26-28, 2012. Note to self: you have still not written that full length paper on the poetry of Níyì Ọ̀ṣúndáre. When I was given this task some months back, I told myself this should be an easy one. After all, how hard would it be to speak about the author of Village Voices , the book of poems which, in 1985, inspired my 9th grade students at Modakeke Islamic Grammar School to believe that they too could write poetry, and indeed wrote poems they sent to the Daily Times in Lagos. Sorry, Professor Osundare, my students, motivated by your book, beat you by nearly a decade to the wisdom of distributing poetry in the tabloid platform. But that is an