I tighten my syntax without suffocating meaning – much like tightening the reigns on a horse for speed, elegance and performance without choking the animal to death in the process. I reduce every unit of thought to a stanza of three lines, which ought to make complete sense as a stand-alone and even in the absence of any other stanza, and no matter how long or short the whole poem is. Such astringent stanza and lineation suggests that each word in a line has to mean more than its everyday denotative understanding. Connotation, symbolism, imagism and pun become important in alignment with sound-making – internal rhymes especially – by way of syllabic variation. That sound-making is enhanced in that I calibrate the empty writing page as as a kind of space for musical notations, with each syllable representing a musical note.
For the empty page to become transformed into sheet music, I mentally divide it into two from the middle – with the left and right halves being commensurate with a rising and a falling reading tone respectively. To complete the impression of the page as sheet music, I dispense totally with punctuation; another reason for this is the irritation of those punctuational markings on the page to the reading eye. Instead of punctuations, I govern the space on the page by leaving gaps between words where a comma or semi-colon should have been. In place of a full-stop is a reading tone of finality at the end of the three-line stanza. This means that a stanza in itself makes a full statement, is a complete sentence, at the end of which the full-stop is understood by the reading eye rather than seen. I also avoid all capitalisations – again because I find them visually interruptive. So my aesthetics is not only concerned with content and form but with graphemes as well, that is, with the physical script as object.
The idea is to Not interrupt the readers immersion in the imagism and cadence of my poetry due to the visual irritation of scripts on the page.This is such that although the eye is reading, the mind is reciting and imagining and is not encumbered by heavy scripting – just the way someone viewing a movie is not encumbered by the director’s cuts; the viewer is simply transported by the images on the screen and by the action of the film. The viewer and the viewed merge and become one.
To go back to the stanza as sentence and as a rounded statement as noted above, I write for example in the poem, “Globetrotter”: “toronto/ is amsterdam / adrift at Sea.” That is the first line of that very long poem. It is a complete statement; it is a sentence and can stand alone. It does not need punctuation at the end, the scripts are all in lower case. The next stanza follows the same pattern: “it breathes / the open atlantic / where line and angles blur / and bend into mist. There is no punctuation at the end.
It is important to note that just as each stanza and each line in a stanza are units of complete thought, so are each section of the the long poem form that I prefer a complete thought and can stand alone individually. However I need to get back to the core of my discussion: Graphology.
My poetry is spaced out like a graph that governs meaning on the page and at the same time renders the page into sheet music. That sonority is as much a music of the spheres as it is a music of African verbal communication. That is because the cadence inaugurated by my graphological arrangement of lines is inspired by a unconscious, or shall I say, primordial immersion in Yoruba sonic and rhetorical strategies.
