Tanure Ojaide’s recent designation of the poets of this generation as copycats has generated a great deal of irascible and impertinent sputtering in certain quarters of the contemporary literary establishment. It is as it should be. Different generations of poets have always detested and pilloried certain elements in each other’s works from time immemorial. But I hope Ojaide did not include in his sweeping castigation the female poets, I mean the very best of them: Promise Okekwe, Toyin Adewale-Gabriel, Angela Agali-Nwosu, Lola Shoneyin-Soyinka, Biodun Idowu and some others. If he did, then it is unfortunate. It says much about our mindset when it comes to discussing issues, especially literary matters.

I believe the female poets have written better poetry than most of their male counterparts. Their poetry is less self-conscious - at least as far as language goes, direct and straightforward, pared of all meretricious rhetoric, overblown lyricism and contrived diction. But the female poets are not the subject of this essay. I shall treat that in a forthcoming essay. Let me address myself directly to the general issues that the poets of this generation should be concerned with. If it is true that every generation of poets tries to build on or completely avoids what it perceives as certain inadequacies in the works of his predecessors, then it is in this light that Ojaide’s denunciation must be construed as a wake up call, nay an unwitting attempt at calling the attention of the poets of this generation to the weaknesses in the poetry of his own generation, and they are many as can be found in the poetry of every age.

However, there are some of them which the realities of the present times have since rendered threadbare and cast in stark relief, namely: the poet’s assumption of the town-crier role-in this age or anointed spokesman of his people, his preoccupation with politics, his strident and self-righteous sermonisations at the populace and its leaders, his continued ornamentation of his poetry with the gewgaws of a bygone age and other poetic baubles, his extravagant use of metaphors and alliterations and finally, his prolonged and orchidaceous symphonisation of  workaday themes. All of these can still be found in our contemporary poetry in grosser detail and plenitude.

In spite of all the brickbats and angry denials, the Niyi Osundare generation has had a far greater influence on this generation of poets than the Soyinka generation. As they say, you can tell the dominance of a school by the preponderance of bad versions of it. This is in no way surprising. Every generation of poets has always had a greater access and displayed a closer affinity with the works of its predecessors than those of the other generations, and hence, takes its departure from it. This precisely is what our contemporary poets have failed to do.

The literature of every generation is not created by the mere coming on to the stage of a group of younger writers at certain intervals of the passing years, but by that age at which the writers’ sense of perception and apprehension of the world with which they are coming in contact is keenest and profoundest. We know that the world into which a child grows is always substantially different from that of his fathers, not only in terms of its physical changes, mores, attitudes and temperaments but also in terms of other subtle but substantial qualities to which his father has been desensitized as a result of the latter’s extreme intimacy with the world. It is the recognition and apprehension of these qualities that make literary generations.

The contact that the Soyinka generation had with the world differed from the one the Osundare generation had with it. Hence it elicited from them two different reactions. And these of course happened while the masters’ sensibilities were still young and tender. Each of the two generations of poets was governed by the conditions of its own times and each drew from them its own strengths as well as its own weaknesses. If this is true, then the point becomes clear enough: that it is imperative for every generation of poets to create its own world in which it must find its abode, and which its readers upon entering it, must immediately recognize. It is from its own created world that every generation of poets derives its sustenance by which it lives.

It has been almost thirty years now since the advent of the Osundare generation. It is almost twenty years since the present generation of poets can be said to have started. The only distinguishing quality between the two generations remains primarily the age difference. Our contemporary poets have written excellent verses strictly in the modes, formats and aesthetics of their predecessors. It is high time we woke up. I reiterate the point I made sometime ago: that however loving the relationship between a father and his son is, however strong the connection, there will come a time when the son ceases to see himself as a mere extension of his father, and even begins to assert his independence, although he still possesses in his system some of the genes of his father.

That time has long arrived. Only we are yet to wake up to it and welcome it. The question that should begin to exercise our minds now with increasing persistence is; what will the next generation of poets say of us? We cannot afford to remain a mere codicil to the Osundare generation.

The apparent immobility of thought and perception in our contemporary poetry is, I think due to the fact that our economic and socio-political conditions have remained largely unchanged from those of our forebears in the early seventies and eighties. If anything, they have become worse. But need our poetry be tied rigidly and monocratically to only a certain part of our contemporary experience? Need we continue to repeat what our elders have said so well? No poetry progresses on the monorail of politics and socio-cultural vapourings.