Syl Cheney-Coker - Poetry

Poetry

Cheney-Coker's poetry is tinged with the anxiety of his perennially uncertain status, dealing both with exile (he has spent the majority of his adult life outside of his country) and with the precariousness of living as an intellectual in Sierra Leone. At the same time, he is concerned always with how he will be read; his poems are radical and ardent, but also erudite and allusive, which can distract a reader from Cheney-Coker's ideological project. He has been called one of the more western-influenced African poets. In his "On Being a Poet in Sierra Leone" (from his The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, 1980) he writes:

at the university the professors talk about the poetry
of Syl Cheney-Coker condemning students
to read me in the English honours class
my country I do not want that!
do not want to be cloistered in books alone

Read more about this topic:  Syl Cheney-Coker

Famous quotes containing the word poetry:

    A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    the raw material of poetry in
    all its rawness and
    that which is on the other hand
    genuine, you are interested in poetry.
    Marianne Moore (1887–1972)

    No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.
    Ezra Pound (1885–1972)