AUDIENCE-CONSCIOUSNESS IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN POETRY

Abstract

Since African poetry emanates from the socio-political schisms bedevilling the African cosmos, contemporary African poetry has seen a shift from exclusive euro-modernist tradition of obscurantism, ‘syntactic jugglery’ which obfuscates the assimilating capacity of the common man. The aesthetics of the shift is obviously evident in the simplistic language of its medium of instruction; the infiltration of oral traditions; the special place created for the peasants in the reading and relish of poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals, through critical comments on the poetry of the euro-modernist poets and that of Niyi Osundare’s generation, who are audience-conscious, evident in the simplified language of their poetry for the apt understanding of the layman, that the masses enjoy the poetry written in workaday English, while a selected few relish the one produced with convoluted syntax and complex imagery. After creating these dialectics, the researcher concludes that, though minimalism appeals to a vast majority of audience, poetry should not be made to yield recklessly to craftlessness, or be reduced to poetry of ‘unaesthetic’ prose statement.