Poetry as a Therapeutic Flexing of the Soul: A Conversation with Nome Emeka Patrick

Uchenna Emelife,

Nome Emeka Patrick is a blxck bxy. He graduated from the University of Benin, Nigeria, where he studied English language and literature. A recipient of the Festus Iyayi Award for Excellence (POETRY). His works have been published or forthcoming in POETRY, Poet Lore, Strange Horizons, Malahat Review, Beloit poetry journal, The FIDDLEHEAD, Notre Dame Review, Black Warrior Review, Puerto Del Sol, FLAPPER HOUSE, Gargouille, Crannóg magazine, Mud Season Review, The Oakland Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart prize nominee. His manuscript 'We Need New Moses. Or New Luther King' was a finalist for the 2018 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He guest-edited, alongside Itiola Jones, Nigerian Young Poets Anthology. He is a reader for Palette Poetry. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria. He is extremely shy, say Hi on twitter @paht_rihk.

In this conversation, Uchenna Emelife on behalf of Book O'Clock journeys into Nome's head, learns of his writing process and what poetry means to him.

Thanks for granting this interview. Let's begin by finding out your writing history. When did you start writing and has it always been poetry?

Thank you for having me in mind —for this interview.
I started writing at a young age.

After my mother died, we left Lagos —my siblings and I —and moved to a village in Ondo state to stay with our maternal grandmother.

My father stayed back in Lagos because he had to work.

I started writing stories. And whenever my father visited us in the village, I’d show him. I’d tell him we can publish it and get rich. Funny how easy I thought it was. Lol.

My father never really paid attention. I stopped writing.
But I was fascinated by my grandmother's moonlight stories. A ritual my mother never missed when she was alive. She would tell my brother and me stories every night.
I started writing again after I was done with my secondary school education. Honestly, I could barely construct good English (even after secondary school) because the school in the village hardly even used English. We spoke our dialect.
I failed WAEC and NECO. It was when I was preparing to take a new one that I stumbled upon the poems in "Comprehensive Lit-in-Eng" textbook. I loved the poems. All of them.

And that was it. I got back to writing again.
So, the thing is: it hasn't always been poetry.

Wow! Your story is touching. Your brilliant poetry now cannot even be suggestive of this beginning. Glad you picked up the pen again.
Do you have writing rituals? Like what you do to trigger the emotions and get them on paper or is writing an effortless task for you?

“The poem is like an idea, a seed, and with time it grows inside you.”

Rituals are great when it comes to matters of writing. Some say it edges us towards discipline and dedication.

However, for me. I do not have rituals. It just happens. The poem sometimes, is like an idea, a seed, and with time it grows inside you. And when it is time to write it, you just write it —knowing that it is something you just have to do. That is how it happens for me. However, there are some times when I challenge myself to write every day for a month —which I guess isn't a ritual because it is clearly not habitual, but rather a conscious intention.

I love the seed analogy.
Can you describe your relationship with poetry?

“Our existence is a conglomerate of stories.”

My relationship with poetry is mostly an evaluation of the self —a microscopic look into the self. A stretch into what seems to have been repressed.
Kaveh Akbar writes in his poem "Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)"
_"I carried the coldness like a diamond for years holding it close near as blood until one day I woke and it was fully inside me"_

And each time I come across these lines, it reminds me of the fact that I've actually held in me the loss of my mother for many years.

Maybe, I didn't really have what it truly mean to grasp the entirety of loss at that early age.

I thought, before I started writing again, that I had gotten over it. But many things bring her to mind. The grief heightened when my maternal grandmother died. She was exactly like my mother. She was everything my mother was to me. And when she died, I knew I had finally lost that mirror that holds my mother's reflection. I was in 100L at the time, and I was depressed for a long time.

I thought it was all over. But these lines validate the possibility of pain lurking inside the core of our beings as humans. Perhaps, I had been repressing it. Perhaps, I had been looking beyond it. But when it was time to write, I find myself mourning those two women over and over again.

Apart from the subject of loss these lines remind me of, it also helps me grasp this truth: our existence is a conglomerate of stories.

I love how he uses "diamond" and "blood" to illustrate how precious and necessary memories are to humanity. When we stop to carry memories inside us, we cease to exist.

However, it is left to us to bring them to the surface or not. What matters is, these lines have come into an old conversation with fresh language and insight.

Wow! This explains a lot about your theme choice in poetry. I read your poems and I feel this prevalent dark voice. I'm actually curious now. How do you reconcile your mental health with the dark themed poetries you write? Does it affect that balance in anyway?

“I think writing poetry for me has been a sort of therapeutic flexing —of the mind, of the soul.”

Striking a reconciliatory balance between my writing and my mental health isn't all that easy. The two, to an extent, seem interwoven. So that what comes to mind when I'm going through a phase is God and Poetry.

Writing dark-themed poetry is like sitting naked in a room before a mirror & telling the mirror stuff you’re afraid to tell others. Because everyone is quick to remind you they have their own problems too, so why disturb them with issues that affect your mental health.

It is like telling your secrets to a wall because it was never a secret in the first place (people just don't want you to say it) and because you're tired of carrying it around.

So when I write dark-themed poetry, I'm saying what no-one was willing to hear into the body of the page. I'm writing it because the page never betrays you. The page waits for you. The page is patient. The page is trustworthy. The page will never judge you.

The page never judges. Gold.
What can you say is the highlight of your career so far?

“The highlight of my career is the art of writing itself.”

There are many things that orbit around the mole of this "highlight" but the highlight of my career (if that is what you choose to call it) is the art of writing itself —every word assembled into meaning, every line lineated into form, every new poem acting as yet another witness not just to memory/imagination, but also a witness to my existence. These things are what I live for. I mean, as far as I am writing, these are eternal to me.

I think, every acceptance made me feel like I was riding the waves towards a distant but beautiful world. However, I must confess, POETRY magazine's acceptance made me feel I was doing something right. And I think, I got more attention after they published my poem.
What made everything seem overwhelming was the fact that that same poem had been rejected multiple times.

I totally enjoyed your poem published by POETRY. I remember I shared it to my friends after we had a conversation about crazy poem titles we love and I was like, "I know this guy’s" then I showed them your poem and they loved it too. Okay, truthfully, I may or may not have told them that we are best of friends online and now they see me in a different light. Ha-ha.

LOL.

You said your poem on POETRY was rejected a number of times. How did that make you feel? What is your reaction to a rejection mail and does it change eventually? I mean the reaction.

“When I get a rejection, I feel a sort of sharp pain”

First, I'd say rejection is one of those core parts of this art — I mean writing. And though, we acknowledge this truth —bitter and unfair as it may sound —we have not been able to truly handle it. Or maybe, I'm speaking for myself.

When I get a rejection, I feel a sort of sharp pain, like a shot arrow, driven into my chest by an indescribable force. That is exactly how I feel. But as time goes on, this feeling unfurls again into self-belief, dispels into courage to keep on writing.

You're speaking for me too. When I send out a work, I tell myself that no matter what comes out of it, I will accept it and remind myself that it's never really over. Same me will drown in sorrow when it turns in a rejection eventually. Haha. We are only human so we feel hurt when what we consider worthy of acceptance isn't by another's standard. And I think it's okay.

Yes. I think it is okay. Every one can't totally love our works. I mean that's why a poem is rejected by one journal and accepted by another (who is even willing to pay for it.)

This!
Typical case of one's man meat being another's poison.

Yea.

Do you have a favorite poet? If yes, why are they your favorite?

“I’m interested in what forms language can shape memory into, what world it can take us to & not get us lost, but helps us become both a witness and a character of this artistic tour.”

I find it difficult to call pick when it come to favourite poets.

But it is either Kaveh Akbar or Ocean Vuong or Sylvia Plath or Gbenga Adesina or DM Aderibigbe or Lucille Clifton or Jericho Brown Mahmoud Darwish or Natalie Diaz or Li-Young Lee or Meghan Privitello or Emily Skaja or Safia Ehillo. . .the list can go on and on.

But for the sake of this interview, I'd pick Kaveh Akbar. He is my favourite because I love the honesty and vulnerability he brings into his poems —the way language can tell so much yet hold so much so itself, I mean his poetry, like Li-Young Lee's or Mahmoud Darwish's, is almost like a riddle and a revelation. I'm interested in what forms language can shape memory into, what world it can take us to & not get us lost, but helps us become both a witness and a character of this artistic tour.

Kaveh Akbar does it to me. Other poets I have listed up there do, too.

That’s a lot of ors. Ha-ha. Your list is definitely worth looking up.

Who do you write for? Yourself or your reader?

“Every poem outlives the poet”

This is tricky. Lol

If I wrote for myself, why do I seek the editor's nod to feel I am good at what I do?

Why do I put my works out there for others to read?

But hey, I understand your question. I write first for myself.
But every poem outlives the poet, even at that moment of writing it, which is why most times what we planned writing isn’t what we end up with.

Back to your question, I write for myself first, then the reader. I mean every reader approaches a poem not within that intrinsic circuit in which they were created by the poet, but in novelty. So our experiences of the poem are not bound by complete exactness, but by language.

Every poem outlives the poet... True this.

Have attending writing workshops and belonging to cliques influenced your writing in anyway?

Never attended any writing workshop. So, that is ruled out.

And cliques. Lol. I found cliques after I started getting published not before I started.

Reading, constant study influenced my writing.
But presently, I must add, my clique is the Almighty Geng!😂 And they influence me.

Ha-ha. Okay. What does it take to be in this almighty geng? I want to be influenced too.

It takes nothing really. I said Almighty geng because these guys are madass critics. And they write madass poems. I mean, what more can you ask for?

These are people who give you long-ass criticism on a 20-line poem. Lol.

They're Almighty Geng, please.

Ha-ha. Funny how your replies keep leading me to the next question. What’s the best compliment you have received from a reader? And what’s the harshest critique you’ve gotten?

Ha!

Best compliment. I can't remember, but someone said after reading my poem on a magazine "You don't even have an MFA yet, and you're dragging space with those who have!"

The harshest critique. Lord, it was from a guy back in University days when I was in 100L & was still writing bad poems (I still write many bad poems). He was the coordinator of Creative Writers' Workshop. He sat me down & asked me to explain every line. As I explained, he made one negative comment or the other. And after that, I stopped writing throughout 100L. I mean this guy doesn't like contemporary poetry. He wanted me to write in the traditional way, & I legit felt he was right.
And guess what, when I resumed writing I was aiming at rhyming my poems & doing other traditional stuff. Luckily, one of those poems made the BPPC shortlist. And I was happy. But looking at that poem now, I can't imagine I wrote it. Glad for growth.

Forced rhymes. Somehow, everyone went through the forced rhyming phase. I remember I got this rhyming dictionary app that helped me slap end- rhymes to my lines. I didn't care they read horribly. So long as they rhymed, I was good.
But I have this special respect for poets that are highly traditional with 'em rhymes and all and still be able to paint the desiring image in readers' minds.

Same here. I respect them, always. It is not easy. Zeina Hashem Beck has a very long poem that has great rhyme in the February Issue of POETRY magazine. I was awed when I read it.

So Nome, what are you currently working on? Any upcoming projects you wouldn't mind sharing?

“My project for now is simply living and breathing and praying not to die young and praying to be remembered even if I die young.”

I really don't have any serious project. But I am writing a series of monologue poems that acts as an examination of how the supernatural reflects our existence, not in the level of religion, but in the level of what most people might consider superstition. In this poetry project, I am looking at how the affinity between a dead mother and her living son could be strengthened even when they both belong to separate worlds. It is my story. It is about me & my dead mother. So that is it.

Most of the poems have been accepted for publication by Malahat, Black Warrior Review and some others.

Apart from this, my project for now is simply living and breathing and praying not to die young and praying to be remembered even if I die young. Lol.

But then, I'm trusting God with life because my life is also my project.

Interesting. Looking forward. Thanks so much for your time and this informing session. Best wishes in your career, chief.

Thank you, man. Thank you.

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Uchenna Emelife is a journalist, creative writer, content creator, and a literary enthusiast. He has written for Nigeria’s Nation Newspaper, the ICIR, Opinion Nigeria, Minority Africa and Punocracy. A third year student of Literature In English, Uchenna was awarded “Rookie Journalist Of The Year” by the National Union of Campus Journalists (NUCJ) in 2019 and “Essayist of the year” by the local chapter of the NUCJ and “Campus Reporter of the year” by Pen Press UDUS.

In 2020, he co-pioneered a book club in his school, Book O'Clock UDUS where he reports and writes about books and currently serves as the deputy editor-in-chief of Pen Press UDUS and the Programs Director of Minority Africa.