Poetry: prose or pranks?

Of late, poetry standards have plummeted due to the influx of some artists who wear the garb of poetry. These artists bamboozle the unsuspecting audience with their prose, jokes or riddles which they claim represent poetry in a more evolved and transformed form. The wannabes claim that this new vernacular poetry suits the constant changing time. It is poetry that has aligned itself with modernity. Perhaps it is a creation of a new genre of poetry.

These artists of the modern movement of poetry embody a literary school that transcends romanticism and embraces something beyond realism theoretical framework which places limitations on poetry and other literary genres. They experiment their free verse with such strange, humorous, funny and ludicrous reciting styles. They produce lines that are not poetic lines but winding sentences haphazardly bundled not in a stanza but a paragraph like group of weird sentences.

Once, Kingsley Jika, a writer, publisher and literary critic, observed that a poem is made up of lines in stanzas and not mere sentences heaped together.

The old generation of poets comprising Benedicto Wokomaatani Malunga, Milton Thole and Gospel Kazako together with the second generation of Nyamalikiti Nthiwatiwa, Felix Njonjonjo Katsoka and Sylvester Kalizang’oma followed the traditional conventions of poetry. Their poems, to those who feel nostalgia for the past, exuded quality and were recited in poetic style and used literary devices like similes and metaphors in a right way.

According to Felix Katsoka, a poet and former president of Poetry Association of Malawi (PAM), standards of poetry have gone down in the country as the real meaning of poetry has changed. He says that most poems are now written in prose.

“It’s just story- telling and surprisingly the media is on the forefront promoting this type of ‘fake’ poetry. I do not hate this type of art but it should not be called poetry. Let poetry be poetry with its elements intact,” Katsoka says.

As Katsoka is lamenting the dwindling standards of vernacular poetry, the president of PAM, Chisomo Mdala, seems to disagree with him. “Maybe the first question every one of us–practitioners, the media, professionals and self appointed critics need to define is what poetry is. Whose definition do we use? For this article, do we use your [journalist’s] definition, mine or universal definition? And what is the universal definition of poetry?” Mdala wonders.

It is this lack of a unified definition of poetry in vernacular that’s given way to everyone who can parade anything in the name of poetry, Katsoka observes.

On his part, Blessings Cheleuka, a producer of Patsinde Programme on Joy Radio where vernacular poetry is given platform, observes that vernacular poetry is not moving from good to bad but rather the opposite.

“We should appreciate that times are changing. Those people who are saying poetry is moving from good to bad, what’s their yardstick? If you ask me in old times we never had successful shows. Why are people patronising shows now if they don’t like this kind of poetry?” Cheleuka wonders.

Robert Chiwamba is a poet of the modern generation and he defends his fellow poets who have employed a new style of writing and reciting poetry. He says: “art is made for people and anything of low standards won’t be appreciated and in the end it will fall off. As far as I am concerned, poetry today has reached its peak in as far as the public’s recognition is concerned. For instance, almost every radio station, television station and newspapers have a space for poetry”.

Commenting on the same, lecturer for Literature and Creative Writing at Mzuzu University, Wesley Macheso, observes that much as one may be tempted to argue that poetry does not have basic or standard rules, he thinks that we know that for it to be called poetry, there was a reason.

“In literary criticism, there is the concept of ‘literariness’ that should be minded. There is something that makes a work literary or poetic. May be for the need of money through wooing huge audiences, these new artists have dramatized poetry too much such that the next generation may think that vernacular poetry is nothing but jokes,” he says.

Macheso argues that if not careful, poetry may become the art of clowns.

He contends: “Our poets must aim at exploiting the power of vernacular language. Our languages are so deep and versatile making them suitable for poetic composition in such a way that may address universal themes with subtlety and beauty. That is what makes a work poetic and we need to see that; Beautiful language and mature performance.”

As vernacular poetry continues to draw huge audiences thanks to the new crop of modern artists, its standards according to literary critics are fast receding into the distant past whence they were strictly worshipped by its pioneers in the country.