JK Anowe
A Musical Malady
my head sings of a departure of all reasoning an echo
a word inside every word ready to break out i fill a book
with the word remember to emphasize how badly i long
to remain within the confines of memory once i was
the boy who perceived humans to be the only beings
capable of memory now i return to the awe of being
grown-up to watch a nanny goat after a morning
of grazing return to breastfeed her young my mother
who lets her back in the pen forgets her own
spouse daydreams of shutting the door on his big toe
as much as I wait my father’s dust-feet at the threshold
every dream is a plot to return from the body this place
of unresting we packed for but do not remember
arriving at imagine a wall & on it a painting imagine
in the painting a field any field & at its centre a grand
piano with a finger nailed to its single key blood
-dripping the only possibility of sound go back
to that wall imagined are you there now do you see it isn’t
that memory a sickening we return to for its music
a word inside every word ready to break out i fill a book
with the word remember to emphasize how badly i long
to remain within the confines of memory once i was
the boy who perceived humans to be the only beings
capable of memory now i return to the awe of being
grown-up to watch a nanny goat after a morning
of grazing return to breastfeed her young my mother
who lets her back in the pen forgets her own
spouse daydreams of shutting the door on his big toe
as much as I wait my father’s dust-feet at the threshold
every dream is a plot to return from the body this place
of unresting we packed for but do not remember
arriving at imagine a wall & on it a painting imagine
in the painting a field any field & at its centre a grand
piano with a finger nailed to its single key blood
-dripping the only possibility of sound go back
to that wall imagined are you there now do you see it isn’t
that memory a sickening we return to for its music
Commentary
JK on "A Musical Malady":
I am interested in poetry as a form of complex autobiography. A biography that curates my multiple selves through metaphors and myths. I invent the myths in my poems to survive, to breathe. In my poems, I’m always trying to interrogate how memory interferes with and alters history, private history and vice versa. I have said complex autobiography because it is my life. A history of colonialism and post-colonial violence. It is the history of my mind. A mall of multiple and chaotic voices. It is the history of my desire; of the restlessness I feel inside language.
As for my process, there's really nothing fixed, i.e. other than living, as far as I can tell. There’s a lot of thinking (sometimes out loud), note-taking (which basically is just writing down interesting ideas/phrases that pop into my head every now & then), & idling (or being the devil’s favorite workshop, as I like to call it) weeks or months before the faithful business of sitting to finally “write” the poem, but never anything meticulously routine.
I believe to be a poet is to be in a constant state of searching. I am always searching for otherness in language and self, i.e. the sound within sound, a word within a word, a feeling within a feeling, which I am yet to embody. I am, for example, quite fascinated that you can find the word mother in smother, (to borrow a little from Ocean Vuong), especially as it relates to the complex relationship I have with my own mother.
I want to explore intersections—between illusion and wakefulness, between birth and reincarnation, and as a chronic depressive, between side effect and withdrawal symptom, outlining the difficulties, such as mental, emotional and economical blocks, in my creative process as a poet.
I am interested in poetry as a form of complex autobiography. A biography that curates my multiple selves through metaphors and myths. I invent the myths in my poems to survive, to breathe. In my poems, I’m always trying to interrogate how memory interferes with and alters history, private history and vice versa. I have said complex autobiography because it is my life. A history of colonialism and post-colonial violence. It is the history of my mind. A mall of multiple and chaotic voices. It is the history of my desire; of the restlessness I feel inside language.
As for my process, there's really nothing fixed, i.e. other than living, as far as I can tell. There’s a lot of thinking (sometimes out loud), note-taking (which basically is just writing down interesting ideas/phrases that pop into my head every now & then), & idling (or being the devil’s favorite workshop, as I like to call it) weeks or months before the faithful business of sitting to finally “write” the poem, but never anything meticulously routine.
I believe to be a poet is to be in a constant state of searching. I am always searching for otherness in language and self, i.e. the sound within sound, a word within a word, a feeling within a feeling, which I am yet to embody. I am, for example, quite fascinated that you can find the word mother in smother, (to borrow a little from Ocean Vuong), especially as it relates to the complex relationship I have with my own mother.
I want to explore intersections—between illusion and wakefulness, between birth and reincarnation, and as a chronic depressive, between side effect and withdrawal symptom, outlining the difficulties, such as mental, emotional and economical blocks, in my creative process as a poet.
Biography
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JK Anowe, Igbo-born poet and teacher, is author of the poetry chapbooks The Ikemefuna Tributaries: a parable for paranoia (Praxis Magazine Online, 2016) and Sky Raining Fists (Madhouse Press, 2019). He’s a recipient of the inaugural Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2017, and a finalist for the 2019 Gerard Kraak Award. Recent works appear in Glass Poetry, The Gerard Kraak Anthology 2019, The Shore, The Muse (University of Nigeria’s literary journal), Agbowo, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Fresh Air Poetry, and elsewhere. He’s Poetry Chapbooks Editor for Praxis Magazine Online. He lives, teaches, and writes from somewhere in Nigeria.
Twitter: @JkAnowe |
