What is POETRY?
Poetry is literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen for it. It’s a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhymic qualities of language.
Poetry is thought-provoking and therefore a literary composition, written by a poet and it usually conveys a thought, and describes a scene or tells a story in a concentrated lyrical arrangement of words.
ORIGIN OF WORLD POETRY DAY
World Poetry Day )WPD) was first celebrated in 1996. The Academy of American Poets organized the holiday to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States.
However, some countries of the world also celebrate World Poetry Day on October 15 to mark the birthday of VIRGIL, a Roman Poet who is famous for his Epic Aeneid.
WHEN WAS THE POETRY DAY RECOGNISED BY UNESCO?
World Poetry Day is held on the 21st of March. It celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression of identity.
World Poetry Day(WPD) was declared by UNESCO in 1999 with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard.
WPD is remembered every year on March 21st to honour Poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry, and Forster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance music, and painting and raise the visibility of poetry in the media.
ITS SIGNIFICANCE
Poetry is a form of language that is understood by all, even if one doesn’t speak the language.
Many famous poets are known to teach people the way to see the world around them. It is an art form that inspires an individual to change his perception about life. What one might not understand from a simple sentence, poetry allows you to do that.
Schools and colleges all over the world, organizations, publishers, and poets celebrate March 21 every year.
Another significance of the WPD celebration is that many poets use the opportunity of the period to come together and organize small gatherings to read poems, teach the art of writing poems, and spread awareness of poetry to the public in general.
Schools, colleges, and other educational institutes hold poetry competitions for their students.
If you want to celebrate World Poetry Day, all you need to do is to either read poems of well-known Poets or simply attempt to write one. You can compose poems and read to your children, wife(and vice-versa), friends, and loved ones.
To mark this year’s World Poetry Day Celebration, we bring to your delightful pleasure the world of imagination and creativity in poetry. We have for you here some poems from great poets of repute and other ones from the stable of The InterviewsNigeria publication outfit. Enjoy the poems:
- NIGHT
Your hand is heavy, Night, upon my brow,
I bear no heart mercuric like clouds, to dare
Exacerbation from your subtle plough
Woman as a clam, on the sea’s crescent
I saw your jealous eye quench the sea’s
Fluorescence, dance on the pulse incessant
Of the waves. And I stood, drained
Submitting like the sands, blood, and brine
Coursing to the roots. Night, you rained
Serrated shadows through dank leaves
Till bathed in a warm suffusion of your dappled cells
Sensations pained me, faceless, silent as night thieves.
Hide me now, when night children haunt the earth
I must hear none! These misted calls will yet
Undo me; naked, unbidden, at Night’s muted birth.
Wole Soyinka-Nigeria’s Nobel Laurette
- THE WORLD AS I SEE IT
Life could be very enjoyable
So also it could be boring
To me, life is a thing of a contradiction
It is full of many paradoxes
It is a universe full of ambiguities
Life, though at times pleasant
But most of the time does not worth its salt
For me, the medal of Saint Julius I wear
To love God is my solace in this hemisphere
Love of any other things are secondary and optional
I also believe that I was born to be Great
Born to enjoy the good things of life
Though not to the extreme
My clarification of enjoyment is peace
Peace within me and friends
To enjoy with opposite sex too
I must confess I love the opposite sex you know……
Share my joys and sorrows with them unconditionally.
But tell me fellow men Is it possible to secure a woman’s love unconditionally?
In this century of money-bags
Where women and men sing and worship in the name of the Naira and no kobo?
The answer is NO
Despite all odds, I believe in calm endurance of all hardships
Just like the Stoic Philosophers
And I know that with time
I shall conquer to become a conqueror
Not the one that rules the world
But the one that rules his empire
Idowu Tunde-FGC,Enugu(NYSC)1990/91
3.NIGERIA
Where some get paid in advance
Others in arrears
A few filled to satiety
Numberless die of starvation
Fire becomes the fashion
Of criminal action
Persons go to slumber without discrimination
Injustice and corruption, a mode of life
With such a Nation Nigerians strive
Can the Deity bring her out of this?
Rita Ese Eelah (Miss)
(The Shuttle UNILAG)
- JUST AS IT IS
The people are waiting
The tear-ducts shedding blood
The naked eyes-x-ray the veins, just
as High tides of blood plod through the arteries
They have nothing more to eat
And they are biting us, biting hard
Like the worms biting our stomachs
The next second may spell our end
Throw that soup away
You have cooked it since the afternoon
My doctor says I should slim down
And I need some exercise
This rug is now old, still
We need a TV set in the toilet
Dear, we need another food store
You boys, never play with my gardener’s son
Corruption! Oppression! Injusstice!
We can all scream, now and then
It will not end, however,
Until from vice we all turn
And act the son who is love we all accept
Mike Bamidele
Culled from the Shuttle-Volume 2 -UNILAG
- DRUNKENNESS
A drunkman is a self-murderer
Who drinks to another man’s good health
And robs himself of his own.
Drunkenness expels reason, distempers
the body and diminishes strength,
Drunkenness is a witch of senses
and demons to the soul.
Drink drunk is a thief to the purse
And guide to beggarly, leonine and villainous
Drunkenness makes a man wallow worse
Than the beast and act like a Fool.
Idowu Tunde