Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a Nigerian medical student, poet, essayist, and Assistant Editor at Fiery Scribe Review. He is the winner of the 2022 Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest and a 1st runner up of the 2023 Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry. His works appear or are forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales, Variant Literature, and in the annual Outstanding Young Writers Anthology (Paper Crane, 2023). He was also a 2023 Adroit Journal Summer Mentee and a 2023 SprinNG Writers’ Fellow.

Onyedikachi Chinedu: Hello, Adesiyan. It’s a pleasure to have you as this month’s poet for the series. In your poem “Potpourri”, the speaker grapples with the loss that comes “like a scroll in a bottle,” and a seminal imagining of grief as “a stray luggage.” Can you talk about what inspired this poem and the connection between grief and a stray luggage?

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi: Hi, Onyedikachi. Thank you so much for giving my voice a space; it is an honor. For your question, I tried to show how influential grief is. I think of grief as this formless thing even though it comes to us “morphed as scabs” as I have written in the poem.

When I wrote this poem, I had lost my uncle to a fatal brain trauma and was in mourning. A close friend of mine had also lost his sister (the pseudonym “Bhabi” belongs to her), and while this loss was distant, it felt personal because I believe nothing ever deserves its tragedy or as in Danusha Lameris’s words “nothing wants to suffer.” Thus, the first step towards healing was to either attempt to embrace this loss or to distance myself as far as I could. For me, acceptance of ownership meant control. The poem began at the threshold of embracing this loss.

Onyedikachi Chinedu: What I find fascinating in “Potpourri” is the epiphanic quality at the end. How did you come about the ending of this poem?

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi: The poem’s ending came a month after the first draft; it was a similar technique used in “Backwards” by Warsan Shire. In the poem, she writes about her father’s death in the first stanza, but the second stanza begins with a play on time by reversing time itself: from being fatherless to having a father again. This mystery of reincarnation took my mind for a few weeks, and it seemed like the warmest gift of solace. I thought, who wouldn’t give anything to have their lost ones returned to them?

Onyedikachi: “Leaves rattling like kettledrums / thumbing piano of the evening breeze / sonata of the sea mass.” These are lines from “Music in the Garden.” The grammatical functions of some of these words are converted. What role does this conversion occupy in your poems, and how do you grapple with experimentation in your writing?

Adesiyan: As rightly said, “Music in the Garden” was an experimental work where I tried to play with the effect of music and the distortion of language. It consequently resulted in the grammatical conversions of some of the words.

In my recent work, conversion seems to be a recurring technique because I am attempting to reduce the occurrence of banality in my work. To me, the true artistry of a poet is not necessarily what he strives to imitate but what he strives to innovate. It is the thrill that keeps me as a creative writer. I believe this was what stimulated the experimentation in “Music in the Garden.”

Onyedikachi: Oftentimes writers are asked, “Why do you write?” Joan Didion said in an essay: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Could you share what pushed you to start writing poems?

Adesiyan: One of the progenitors of my passion for the craft was John Pepper Clark. I remembered reading Clark’s “Casualties” in a secondary school English textbook and instantly resolved that I was going to write like this. The poem sang to me. I will never forget this line: “The casualties are not only those who are dead.” The visceral grip it had on me lacked words. Eventually, I dabbled into it in 2015. It took a while to get published, but I kept honing my craft and read tons of poetry books: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Danusha Lameris’s Bonfire Opera, Kaveh Akbar’s Calling A Wolf A Wolf and Pilgrim Bells, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exits Wounds, Pamilerin Jacobs’s Gospels of Depression and Samuel Adeyemi’s Heaven is A Metaphor, etc. Later, I would stumble upon some Button Poetry poets such as Sarah Kay and Rudy Francisco. Also, Safia Elhillo’s spoken words influenced my passion for poetry, too.

Onyedikachi: In “Music in the Garden,” you made mention of Keats and Bryon. Do these English poets influence the way you write or were they used as allusions?

Adesiyan: They don’t really. They were merely allusions, but I got to research about them while working on the poem, and it was a beautiful experience to know their works.

Martyr   
for Pekuliar

He will shatter into fractions
on the road: split skull, dismembered torso.

The asphalt roughens
against this corporeal violence.

His rosary still hooped round his fingers.
I imagine him staring back at the rage

of his assailant’s machete
and seeing nothing but a lance of light.

Nothing deserves to suffer this way
or to carry its god on its tongue.

There are magnolia flowers blossoming
out of the ground where his blood seeps.

I imagine his smile as the petals,
like his black skin, sermonizing light with colors.

A cherub leans into this lateral plane
to seal the wound where his blood pours out.

How much floss of songs will death thresh
out from your mouth?

Forgive me, I could not save you.

Alkebulan 
after David Odiase

I know the taste of desert sands and sea salt.
The scent of tobacco on grandfather’s lips,
dry yam peels underneath mother’s fingernails.
I know this earth to be a channel
for lost souls to canoe into dead waters.
Here, the sky does not halo our heads
but sets on us like a sickle.
Trees blossom in the absence
of leaves, birds fly with broken wings,
and a droughty wind swarm our seas.
The indigo of our attires no longer glistens
like glass refracting light.
We pour liters of eucalyptus oil
into a calabash of palm-wine
to sweeten the sourness in our mouths.
Still, nothing yields. The girl threading
beads around her waist inherited
only the black alphabets of survival.
How much chaos will the earth sing of?
We question the muzzle of the gun,
carrying our god in our diastema.
The fissure in our teeth
bids us to remember what is lost: the ivory
and the emerald from the troves of Obuasi.
Pray we unspool like tufts from the clog
that holds us. Pray we slog past this endless road.