BEHIND THE MIC: IN THE MIND OF A POET



Forget the clichéd pleasantries, and the tedious list of excuses for not blogging often…I will just get into it. So, if you had a feel of the Lusaka social scene, it’s hard not to have noticed the explosion of ‘spoken word’ that has threatened to envelope the whole town. From the branding of Bittersweet, to the fiery tenacity of Please Don’t Snap (PDS), to the underground rawness of Cross-Factor, and the mushrooming of many spoken word acts, it is nearly impossible not to fall in love with poetry all over again. Gone are the days when poetry is looked at as some archaic, impersonal, snobbish caricature; designed by boring Literature teachers to cage pupils in a cell of academic torture. It has changed. The rules have been dropped. Organic, raw, creatively seductive, it yearns to be moulded, adapted, and redefined to the glory of art and relevant refinement.
Many, vigilant supporters of the vintage works of poetry from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe; might find this new breed of poetry a travesty, and some (very few, I might add) might view it as the next big thing. Anyway, this blog post is not meant to discuss the inner mechanics of advantages of this spoken word over the regulated poetry of sonnets, haikus, dirge, etc. And personally am ill-equipped, intellectually, to handle such a task. I am merely writing to tell you my faithful  (and not so faithful) blog readers that I will be, over the next several weeks, interviewing the minds and personalities behind this robust movement of spoken word in Lusaka and giving you a bird’s eye view into their creative process. Some of you (I hope, most of you) have heard these poets before, and thus this interview series might help further open the sanctuary of their minds to you and bring a personal (dare, I say family vibe) to your interaction.

I won’t give you the full line-up, instead, will tell you one poet in advance each week until we are last to our very last one. So this week’s poet will be the versatile wordsmith, MAGNIFIRE!! 

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