The least compressible intellectual domain is physics. The least compressible artistic domain is poetry.

Perhaps I have never known any name to be as feminine as Camara Laye. Yet he was indeed a fine man who believed in the sweetness and loveliness of Africa as much as he believed in its expanding sour edges.

The temptation to be obvious.

I don't think any translator could have done the good job of naming which the enigmatic Gass did for the more enigmatic Rilke. The Death of the Poet is both an essay and a poem existing in the same spectral energetic range as Alexander Pope's metrically wrought Essay on Criticism

It's all about tension. Any poem without tension is a salad without the milky sauce; it might look good or be good for the body but by virtue of its physical incompleteness it is perceptibly incomplete.

Reading Gass: "The page was peace. The page was purity. And, as I would begin to realize, some pages were perfection."

There's no apex, man. Only ascent.

I’m slowly beginning to understand what John Donne was pointing at when he wrote: “sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a respiration from God, and a suggestion from the Devil.”

Rampant celebration of mediocrity happening simultaneously at the level of capitalization so intrusively bizarre the only saving grace is to wear headphones and walk into some forest where your only companions are wind-torn trees and a bit of philosophical hogwash to stay afloat.

One of those days when I think: well, oddly enough, I need a kissmate after all.

This cold weather in Enugu right now is so alarmingly unholy. I’m not sure my aversion to intimacy in pursuit of a principled life is working its engines anymore. Godhelpman.

The problem with reading Gass is that he “gasses” you up with more than enough information to make your decision on whether you are a mad man roaming the streets in search for garbage to feed your starving stomach or some old arthritic university professor learning to walk again.

I miss having free time in my hands, although my free time at the moment runs between mentally preparing for the task at hand and eventually not doing the task at hand. It’s a game of hands eating up each other; a sort of temperamental optimism couched in James-Woodian cynicism.

I’m gutted by the amount of stupidity masquerading as noncritical opinions, and the idiotic celebration of individualism by wankers and scoopers without any iota of accountability. It’s as though we are living in the last days of civilization. The present colonialist is the self.

If you have even the simplest means to live your life without having to grapple with the inundating messiness of what we come to know as social media, you are among the 1% the universe loves. It’s perhaps the hardest time to be an empath and a writer: it’s a drowning exercise.

It used to be beautiful and recurring: sitting down on a well-laid couch by the window and thumping away on the keyboard swaddled with imagination. Now everything seems to be grinding on octopus legs: uncertainty upon uncertainty: much that every reading time is a rebellious act.

At the just concluded Ụmụọfịa Arts and Books festival, we had Ichiban, Evidence Egwuono Adjarho, Njoku Nonso and Ụmụnnanwezuoakụ, four of the best critical minds working today in the literary scene to discuss criticism and the contemporary Nigerian literary scene.

Flying in silence, mindful thinking, ruthless execution: the immaculate loom must be weaved into its intended form.

when you read a great chunk of oldies of critical assessments on afro- and afro-american literature, especially that of the 50s and 60s, you realise that most of our recent critical outings are mostly regurgitations of old thinkings without our epochal (or futuristic) groundings.

Having to tell myself every morning an unhealthy amount of times: “it’s indeed a small, unintended life we are given. The beauty is in the fact that it can be edited anytime we want, as long as the spirit and the being of the spirit is willing enough to bear and endure the pain.”