Letter To The Unknown Poet

Dear Esther,

I saw the message you sent me about your friend who is interested to be guided as a new unpublished poet. I’m also honored that you take me as someone who would be able to guide someone else. I’m honored because I myself am also a new poet, and I’m willing to help in ways I can.

 First of all, she has to see poetry as something that she does for herself first, before other people. I started writing poems just before the end of secondary school, and my poems came from sorrows and grief. I remember how we took Literature-In-English classes together and how we did so well in the arts department, and how we were among the best students. We were in the same debate club, we read together, laughed together, but it didn’t occur to me that anybody would read my works in the future and classify them as poetry. Or even classify them as anything. Yes, let me confess that I wasn’t confident. I did not have faith in my writing then. For many years I thought my writing was something that only I could enjoy, love and understand, and I was satisfied with that thought because sitting down every evening to write and pour my heart onto paper was the most glorious thing ever, something akin to prayer.

I didn’t know that I was writing poetry because even though I did literature, I wasn’t very sure if what I was writing qualified as poetry. So I would write for myself for many years as a form of therapy. Poetry helped me to heal of my emotional pain. I wrote poems to see myself, to find myself. I read other poets as sources of comfort. I was deeply introverted, and because I was very hurt in my spirit, poetry helped me to stay alive. I wrote to myself without being sure if I was doing it in the right way, without knowing what I was doing, until many years later when I got an opportunity to be published.

I’m emphasizing on writing poetry for yourself first because poetry wouldn’t make you automatically richer than you are, but it can open doors for you. It can connect you to people or your readers whom you wouldn’t have met outside your writing space. Many publications do not pay you when they publish your poems. You will be paid or earn something only when you win poetry contests, or when a publication that pays their contributors pick you up. So I want her to approach poetry as something that she does for herself first, not as something that can fetch something else.

I want her to approach poetry with humility. I want her to be kind to herself. I want her to be truthful to herself. I want her to be truly herself. Let her see poetry as something she must do, something she has to do, if she is really a poet. If she is a poet, I want her to be proud of being a poet. Let her listen more to her literary spirit. I want her to be happy. Any day she decides to send her work out to any publication, I want her to know that rejections are normal. Many publications will reject her, but she shouldn’t be discouraged. The more she is rejected the more she should write.

The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says she writes because she has to write. In interviews, she says that even if she didn’t have the wonderful opportunities she has today to be read widely and deeply appreciated, that she would still be somewhere writing, unknown, but still, she would be writing, and this is true for every genuine and unpretentious writer. Being a published writer is a secondary aspect of being a writer. I think the first aspect is more important than the second. First of all, you have to write, and the writing has to be for yourself first, before moving into the world. You will have to love and believe in the work first, before looking for a publisher, or a publication.

If your friend the poet is Nigerian, or African, I will advise her to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s books. If she’s not interested in big books, then she might be interested in her smaller pieces. She might follow her on her social media handles. She might also be interested in watching her interviews on YouTube. Or her popular Ted Talks, The Danger Of The Single Story, and We Should All Be Feminists.

I wish her everything good.

From Isaac Dominion Aju

Isaac Dominion Aju has appeared in different literary publications in the United States, including Poetry X Hunger, Flapper Press, and New York City’s Writers’ Journal. He will be a featured writer in Cajun Mutt Press in the US by November. He lives in Nigeria where he works as a fashion designer and writes in his free time.