Here it goes… trepidly I venture into the world of writing, I mean “real writing”.
I have written a couple of poems but seriously, I don’t consider poem writing that difficult a task. In fact I think it’s quite easy, far easier than a lot of people think it is. Sometimes it strikes me that history has given the likes of Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Fry, Atwood, Elliot, Doyle, Angelou, Key, Wilde, Rosseti, Emerson etc. so much more credit than they deserve; pretty much like the incredible amount of spotlight showered on some EPL footballers, whom in all honesty, are not even fit to be in the Pepsi Academy let alone the Naija Premier League.
I mean, really, what is there to it!? All these poems we’ve read and heard so much about… “Child’s Hymn”, “Hunting Morning”, “Amor Intellectualis”, “She walks in beauty like the night”, “Star spangled banner”…
Don’t be fooled by all the jargons; narrative, metrics, rhyme, assonance, alliteration… means nothing, nada, zilch! To write a poem, all you really have to do, in a nutshell, is put a couple of vague, utterly meaningless sentences ("emphasis on “vague” and “meaningless”) on separate lines making absolutely certain that they don’t overflow into the next line i.e. sentence one stays line one and two on two etc. voila! And oh, don’t forget a very brief, snazzy title.
But writing a book, an article, journal, even common entries in a personal diary or web-log (what is now fashionably called “blog”) – now that’s the *ish*… if you do need proof however, this right here took me approximately eighteen hours, forty-three minutes and xxx seconds to finish and this 551 word write-up just about makes as much sense as a drunk’s slurred barrage of garbled rants. And if that’s not proof enough, just ask the average Naija graduate how long it took to complete their project, that’s if they ever managed to.
But be rest assured, I can do an equally (if not more) nonsensical poem in way less time without even breaking sweat – yeah, that’s right and I’m pretty sure you can too (sounds like U2, don’t it?). Now just imagine if I had to write volumes of about say six, seven hundred pages of extremely serious stuff like some work of popular, historical or literary proportions, school thesis or some research paper that’s supposed to make major sense to a massive, massive audience…!?
Well, enough of this boring monologue. To the authors of the listed web-logs (forgive me I’m every bit a buttoned-down, old-school and utterly unfashionable young man):-
http://funkolaani.blogspot.com/
http://aishathebinigal.blogspot.com/
http://www.exschoolnerd.net/
http://debuzzevents.blogspot.com/
http://meetmissbalance.blogspot.com/
http://mojoyinola.blogspot.com/
http://onyi-bestseller.blogspot.com/
http://all4words.blogspot.com/
http://blog.rocnaija.com/
http://extraordinarilygood.blogspot.com/
Whoever and where you are, I hail thee immensely… maximum respect and more ink to your writing apparatus and hopefully, more money in your pockets too.
I cannot help but wonder how y’all have kept it up for as long as you have, but from you I draw my inspiration and I say a big, big “thank you”!
PS
If I do not make mention of your web-log, please be slighted not… I bet you are very good too; just haven’t been opportune to stumble on your writes in this labyrinth that is now the WWW.
LOL… And take all that crap I said about the poets and poetry seriously at your own peril!!!
RESPECT!
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