There is something about the Nigerian poetry that palls. I may be crucified by this, but the truth must be told. There is certain satiety of lyricism and declamation in the contemporary Nigerian poetry that is becoming increasingly indigestible. There is an uncreative temper and explicitness in the poems that are being rammed into our throats, leaving very little to chew on. We have had enough of this gross presentation of endless, repetitive diet of politics in our poetry. The poems are rather prolix, prosaic and uninventive. Normal failings in Narrative poems, if narrative poems they are, but Nigerian poetry suffers from a serious lack of narrative voices. What we have heard and continued to hear are the same subject voices in imagined superiority, crooning the same monotonous things in the same monotonous formats, assuming to teach us about what even a lay man on the streets already knows - politics. For God's sake where are the narrative poems? Where are those short poems of inventive directness and immediacy? Where are those poetic vignettes of the Nigerian life? Life is vast and endless. Our poetry should reflect that vastness and endlessness.

Thom Gum says in one of his poems! Whatever is here / it is material for my art! The world has moved on. Sex, loneliness, jealousy, duty, friendship, loyalty, madness, drunkenness, etc., have since become material for poetry. Why are the Nigerian poets so fixated as Ebereonwu puts it "in versifying the popular opinions on our misrulers by newspapers columnists?" We have had poets addressing the so called socio - political ills since the country's independence, yet nothing has changed. Yes, I concur there is no way politics can be completely expunged from our poetry, but if we must write about politics let us be more subtle and creative about it. Eliot did it. If took decades before his earlier critics who had criticized him for not addressing the political ills of his day realized that wasteland is much more than just "a poem about the catastrophe of inner life and of civilization". Even so, the British and American poetry has since moved on from the modernist practices of Eliot and Pound. The current poetic offerings by Western contemporary poets have a very little consanguinity with the modernist legacies of their forebears. That is why poets like Sonia Sanchez, Allen Crossbie, Li-Young lee, Rita Dove, Cathy song, Andrew motion, James Fenton and others are making names for themselves.

Every student of literature knows that the development of poetry, nay literature, has always followed and maintained fidelity to one unchanging tradition - the tradition of action and reaction, of counter reactions and returns. Thus we have romanticism as a reaction against neo-classicism, modernism as a reaction against Victorianism, etc., and poetry is much the better or it. Why then has the present generation of Nigerian poets created for itself dark stagnant waters in which it has continued to wallow in the oral traditions of the second generation of Nigerian poets? Why should our contemporary poets continue to write in the aesthetics in whose evolution they had no hand and in which their predecessors have continued to record unsurpassable achievements?

Before I am misconstrued, I must quickly say that I am not advocating total severance from the rich literary heritage of the masters. What I am saying is simply this; the greatness of the present generation of poets neither lies in the aping of the masters' aesthetics nor in the betrayal of them but in the redefinition of the masters' rich bequeaths. How can this be done? I do not want to fall into the error of prescribing the modes our poets should adopt, but there has to be a progression from the present state of our poetry. Every poet worth his salt knows that his poetry will be much more richer if he submits himself to vast extensive readings; if he makes himself receptive to all poetic trends all over the world, while maintaining a consciousness of his base; if he loosens up his current stilted poetic lines and finally if he embraces all subjects as material for poetry. Reading a few verses of Niyi Osudare, Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka will not give them the greatness to which our poets aspire.

It is however gratifying to note that propitious signs about the development of our poetry are already emerging from certain poets. In the freshness of imagery, in the musicality of lines, in the inventiveness of imagination and language, Uche Nduka, Obi Nwankama, Ebereonwu and Chiedu Ezeanah are already setting the pace. These poets are certainly some of the poets that shall define the aesthetics by which their generation of poets will be enjoyed and remembered by subsequent generations of poets.