Interview by Timothy Ogene

Uche Nduka is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist and collagist. He is the author of nine volumes of poems of which the latest is titled Nine East (SPM Publications, London: May 2013). Some of his writings have been translated into German, Dutch, Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, Spanish and Romanian. He presently lives in New York City and teaches at Queens College. In this short interview, Uche interrogates his own work, offering the reader an idea of what he – as a poet and “psycho-cartographer” – aims to achieve when he writes. At the end of this interview are two poems from Nine East, his most recent collection.

Since Flower Child (1988), you’ve published seven collections and appeared in several anthologies. No doubt, you’ve been busy, averaging a collection every 3 years, in addition to teaching and editorial jobs in Germany and the United States. Here’s my question: what inspires this persistence? Is there any feeling or “knowledge” that your existence and essence depend on a resolute commitment to your art? Well, there are now 2-in-1 questions for you!

Actually I have published nine volumes of poems to date. Perhaps my persistence in writing may be attributed to the fact that I remain receptive to the poetry of the past and the poetry of my own time. I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in poetry and seeing how poems come into being. I see my duty in life and art as that of questioning, Illuminating, inspiring, seeking, celebrating, provoking.

As a psycho-cartographer, I map the complexity and variety of humanity. In some ways, my existence and persistence depend on innovating. I do not like imitating myself when I write. I am not interested in perfecting one type of poem in book after book. I try to avoid repeating the techniques that helped me write a previous poem or poems. Being habituated to a formula in writing is off-putting to me. I hope that each book I write takes me to a different place artistically. It seems that predictability plays great havoc with heartfelt work.

I also get inspired through knowing and feeling that sometimes poems should alarm or shake people up; they are not just for comfort, titillation, entertainment, and knowledge. True poetry does not fully protect its writer or its reader. I must admit I like mocking our common pieties. A lot of the time my interest is in writing a poem rather than publishing it. My need to write poems borders on the compulsive. Writing poems is essential to my existence but it does not work for me to try and fit into some old mold of what poetry is.

My approach to poetry is exploratory. The realm of my poetry is not confined within political or geographical or autobiographical borders. A writer is necessarily schizoid and paradoxical. Unavoidably so.

The writing of poetry requires fortitude. A poem knows me more than I know myself. In a sense, every line in a poem is the crux of the poem. I do not only write poetry; I embody it. Yet writing a poem is being connected to something bigger than oneself. Offering and receiving poetry are basically acts of love. That mission keeps me going. I find where I am living at the moment very encouraging. Brooklyn is a space of explorative art.

Where did it all come from, this unboxability and compulsion to resist “common pieties?”

To answer your question I have to think in pink and soundlessly seek the permission of the soil to rearrange a room. Inexplicably ideas and actions and visions come to fruition in me. I thrive where there are questions. I hate being told what to think, where to go, what to long for. My experience of time changes from day to day. For me the impossible is almost always close at hand. I don’t trust the ways that societies force individuals into becoming caricatures. The payoff is minute. I am all for a new paradigm to vitalize our lives. I have always believed in forward-thinking and creativity as a way of life. Since childhood I have made a ruckus about injustice, intolerance, tribalists, white supremacists, black tyrants, bullies of all kinds.

Perhaps having been a child reared during the Biafran war and noticing how ephemeral life is ignited a passion in me to avoid being taken in by religious, social and political orthodoxies. Who knows? Or may be I am a sworn nemesis of haughty pieties by nature. I have never found the manipulation that undergirds societal pieties entertaining. I find most opinions and expectations about exile, spirituality, nationalism, poetry, cosmopolitanism, globalization, persona, music, home, nostalgia or lifestyle ridiculous.

When I read your work, and as you’ve just highlighted, I feel you are more interested in aesthetic fecundity and poetic beauty, for it own sake, than the conveyance of contextual meanings. Is this intentional? Do you want the reader to simply appreciate your work – the complexities that you map – as a piece of art divorced from any standing idea or cultural allusion?

I am interested in meaning and non-meaning. Your question implies that art has to be reduced to one thing. I don’t think so. The books and uncollected poems I have written so far are full of graspable ideas and cultural allusions. Time, people, observations, experiences, visions, dreams, cities, villages, oceans, rivers, and countries, live within the poems.

I thoroughly believe that poems are also objects passionately participating in their time. Poetry can be a way of thinking about life; it can also be a series of encounters with the wondrous and the painful.

My poems do not stop at observing phenomena; they are sprightly events. Most of my poems are in sync with appearance and disappearance. They are thrusts into possibilities. Yes: in poems surprises are inevitable. They admit the quotidian but the quotidian need not be banal. Real, imaginary or fictional, the conveyance of contextual meanings can aesthetically take circuitous routes. Both conscious and unconscious elements go into the writing of poems. Both the intentional and the unintentional further the evolution of a poem. I don’t see poems as stable givens.

Finally, if you were to name an artist whose body of work reflect your style as a poet, who would that be and why?

With regard to visual arts I am wary of the autoerotic. I prefer the merriment of the ambiguous. My poetry is both open and suggestive. It is not definitive but sometimes cuts right to the chase: an agglomeration of projection, emulation, desire, consciousness, and instinct. It battles isolation and alienation. Because of this I choose Picasso as the visual artist whose work resonates with my style as a poet. Throughout his working days his paintings went through vast and varied transformations. He was constantly distancing himself from the idea of a single style or theme or medium. Simultaneity comes to mind while looking at each of his canvases. The revelations in them do not have to be transactional.

Like Picasso I am not big into fences and minimalist porcelain. I like things that are over-the-top: gleaming music, verdant regalia, and mercury mirror. Speedball, stoneball, rainbow’s roadshow. Like his paintings, my poems are invested with craft, intellectual agency and emotional experience. His canvases somersault; they jar one’s imagination. What’s the use of having a gift and having no place to give it? May troublesome poems and paintings flourish!

 
Excerpts from Nine East

        wraparound, amaranth,be her bluets.
        gigglewire, feverdew, bikinis amiss.
        fornicatory transylvanian, boogiephobia.
        either this shadow of your cat or the
        hyper-clarity of despair. what a crappy
        way to receive the Goddess that rained
        herself into us. which seems to shift something.
        will this oriental rug remember this belly-dancing.
        you’re a damn good stone cracker. very
        professional are the hand-crafted anxieties.
        for she hasn’t stopped putting the moves on him.
        likely she will go part of the way with him.
        tell the bare wall why you are waiting for a bus
        as the poem’s face is lifting off, almost slipping out
        of the page, making room for the unintended,
        psyche as flesh, poem as cavity, ochre, transparent,
        page and word facing each other.

        Poem 92

        day that northern ground.
        sandstick, searchlight.
        faster than the rocket
        of revolution.
        you are the woman
        who changed the way
        i sweat.
        while sending these
        glasses to the leaves.
        dazzle of creamy hours.
        wherein the fallibilities
        in passwords.
        maybe breathing room.
        but maybe not.
        what you’ve draped
        over rhododendrons.
        this room from which
        the world can be shaken.
        footfalls keep pouring in.
        so many waves to save.
        man into white globe.
        civility is not weakness.
        when farther down
        the ripple in the cherry.
        those red nines.
        with the shine
        of your inner thighs.
        postcoitus or postcolonialism?
        choose.

From Nine East. London: SPM Publications, 2013. Print (c) Uche Nduka

Painting in header: Rage, by Danielle Denham.