diVERSES reKINDLED: In Conversation With Ajibola Tolase

The Brady Bunch opens with a house in the suburbs. Star Wars first opened with a ship being chased across space. The Matrix opens with code and type on a screen.

When I spoke with Ajibola Tolase on his Cave Canem Prize winning collection, 2,000 Blacks, he was quick to emphasize the need for the first page of a book to take on that role of the first scene of a film.

There is a need to prime a reader. I often use the metaphor of the boat—the reader has no idea how sturdy the boat is as they enter, whether there is a leak, whether it has life jackets. There is a level of trust that goes into first meeting a person, first buying a pair of shoes, first biting the dish.

Fair or not, however that first goes dictates how the second will go. A first trip to Disney World in a downpour does not impress me the way a first trip to Disney World in the sun does.

Ajibola’s comparison puts pressure on us as poets to work with intention. How do we want our readers to see, not our poems as individuals, but our poetry as a whole?

The first poem they read of us dictates, to some degree, how they read the rest of our poems. It is why poetry submission guides often suggest starting with strong poems. It is why, often, the first and last poems of a collection tend to be the strongest. It is why weaker poems tend to hide in the middle.

I tell my communication students when they first meet someone, the most important words they say are at the start of the conversation and at the end. These are the moments the mind recalls, if not on a syntactic level, then emotionally.

The best poem in a book is not the best poem if the reader never makes it that far.

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Full conversation with poet Ajibola Tolase and poet Geoff Anderson: https://youtu.be/-WTBwkG5Dr0