Emotional Resonance and Self-Discovery: A Conversation with Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
by Christine Nessler
May 23, 2024
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet & essayist from Nigeria. Winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest (2022) & First runner up in the Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry (2023), he and his works are featured in 20.35 Africa, Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales & elsewhere.
Tell us about yourself.
Most of my friends call me a weirdo. That is because I can be very clowny and witty sometimes. You could say an oddball. Some of the things I enjoy doing are listening to good music, reading Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” numerous times, playing chess, and watching romance movies. I am also a big fan of Greek mythology. I love silence, being alone, and not necessarily loneliness. I am a Christian and a cocktail of many other things.
What inspired the poem, Biotic?
Often, I struggle trying to stay mentally sane in the chaos of things around me. Most times, I am numbed by PTSD, anxiety, and a sort of grief for myself that I don’t feel much alive anymore. In a therapeutic endeavor to combat this, I began a diagnosis, investigating the origin of my despair. I realize to be human is to be constantly traumatized by your own frailty. The line: “Nothing should have to suffer this way” was pinched off from Danusha Lameris’ poem “Nothing Deserves to Suffer.” I do not want to suffer. Of all things the poem embodies, it is a prayer. I do not deserve to suffer. I want to live—embraced with love, in simplicity and in daily awe.
What do you hope your reader takes away from Biotic?
I hope my readers resonate with feelings of rage and tenderness to the sensibilities of existence. I hope they will probably grieve the self with me, try to stop terror from singing its tenor as I do, and be resilient against the onslaughts of fear and anxiety. I hope they fall in love with their being. I hope they love being alive. I pray every iota of their being is alive with wonder.
How has being a medical student influenced your writing as a poet and essayist?
As an essayist and a poet, I would say I borrow some of the diagnostic and research techniques from my medical studies in producing my works. As with the medical systems, my writings often begin as questions, a quest of inquiry for truth or a deeper knowing. However, it can be tough juggling both my academics and writing together. Often, I am forced to take breaks from writing. But during my leisure hours, I inoculate myself with much reading while unable to write.
What is your strategy for invoking readers’ feelings and emotions through poetry compared to essays? How is it similar? How is it different?
Essay-wise, I require a bit of diplomacy in tone, structure, and objectivity but poetry comes off more easily, often without guardrails. Although both are similar in the transfusion of a message, the mode of language is different. When I write a poem, I am thinking of how to emotively surge the reader into experience with something, into feeling, without necessarily trying to solve or convince them of anything, but let them be the author of their responses. With essays, I am often trying to convince or repudiate my readers on the validity of a particular philosophy or subject through logic and persuasion.
What is your favorite style of poetry? Why?
I am excited by experimental poetry, where a poem takes the form of a ledger, a dictionary entry, an hourglass, a mathematical question as in one of my favorites: “SET OPERATION OF A COUNTRY IN THE BELLY OF WA(TE)R” by Zaynab Bobi or do something unorthodox. This innovative aesthetic dictates to me the unlimited landscape of the mind, or as popularly spoken—“the spice in the variety of life.” I believe poetry should allow us to wonder—be diversifying and inventive in the extent of its linguistic methods.
What poet has most influenced your work? Why?
I enjoy reading widely and have been fortunate to have encountered the soulful masterpieces of Ocean Vuong, Samuel Adeyemi, Rudy Francisco, Kaveh Akbar, Safia Elhillo, Mahmoud Darwish, and a host of others. My admiration for Ocean Vuong has been most influential in my work. I love how the lines in his poetry embodies his soul and how he embodies them in a like manner too. I particularly enjoy listening to his interviews and readings because of his spirited ministration of the soul of poetry and the ingenious mechanics of his mind.
How does poetry help you to make sense of some of life’s mysteries?
Poetry to me is a medium by which I experience the world in its ability to elevate my consciousness beyond the faux limitation of my mind. Through spirited odysseys on the page, I am stretched beyond the breadth of time and space and brought into encounter with life-changing reflections and revelations which often birth clarity—answers, sometimes, a thirst for more answers, and most often, a deeper knowing. Lately, I have been burdened with the quest for self—the true, unembellished form of myself and poetry has been the tool of investigation.
What do you think of when you hear, “The Good Life?”
I think of butterflies and chrysanthemums; a flower symbolic to me to mean beauty, goodness, and peace. Personally, I am fascinated by the bliss of mundane moments; waking up to chandeliered sunlight, fresh air, sipping a cup of tea, conversations with friends, the spontaneity of life, the epic and the wondrous. I have a theory that happiness is a genre but with multiple modes and so when I think of living a good life, I think of living a life of your own terms—to be free or as Mary Oliver sermonizes “to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” And to be astonished by the simple things.
Adesiyan’s poem, Biotic, is featured in Issue #15 of The Good Life Review.
Thank you, Adesiyan, for allowing us to share your poem with our readers and for spendning extra time with us on this Q&A. We wish you the best!
