Edward Desire Kibirige, author of Bard Diaries. PHOTO/courtersy
Confessional poetry or “confessionalism” is verse whose autobiographical detail is deeply personal to the poet.
Universally acclaimed poet Sylvia Plath wrote a poem titled Daddy and it is one of the prime examples of confessional poetry.
In that groundbreaking poem, Plath casts her experience as a daughter against the frame of other more universal father/daughter dynamics.
The beauty with Plath’s poetry and, indeed, any confessional poetry worth its weight in the supreme heaviness of the topics it discusses, is its relatability.
Edward Desire Kibirige’s poetry collection, the Bard Diaries, is confessional poetry of this fashion. He hopes, as he writes, that his personal experiences may touch the spirit of all those who encounter his poetry.
Apart from being expressive, however, his poems are also rhapsodic. The poem We share Not belongs to the latter:
We share not the tongue and religion
But it doesn’t cease our union.
Think about the lightning and thunder:
They are different but follow each other.
I describe you as stunning and charming
But your beauty is also dazzling
My love for you is inexplicable
I can’t let go since it’s impossible.’’
Before we dissect his words in this two-stanza poem, it is intriguing to note that there are names for stanzas of certain lengths: two-line stanzas are couplets; three-lines, tercets; four-lines, quatrains.
However, there is not a name for two-stanza poems unless we are labelling the poem according to line length, rhyming scheme or meter.
That said, there is a name for We Share Not and that name is uneven.
Yes, there is no symmetry between the first and second (which is also the last) stanza.
The first stanza is more elevated, subtly detached. The poet’s tone is one of engaged unconcern. It is more logical than emotional.
Then, in the second stanza, this tone gives way to fawning admiration. It is quite a twist.
The persona, in the second stanza, is literally falling over himself just to let the object of his affections know of his affection. But because of the poem’s unevenness, the persona’s pleas fall flat.
They just don’t seem sincere. So this poem comes across as being more affectation than affection.
In the poem I’m Inevitable the first couple of lines make bad poetry evitable and good poetry, well, inevitable. Then, things go slightly awry:
“I’m inevitable
Nothing can stop me
I make some cry
I take and I don’t give back
I’m the path to most’s dreams
I create ancestors too
No scientist has medicine to get rid of me
No witch can be-witch me
Poets write about me
I’m famous, all know me
Soldiers can’t shoot me
I make the blind and the unblind equal
Since all can’t see me…”
Beyond the persona being something of a blowhard, the poet squandered the opportunity to use his inevitability as an indicator of something deeper than the hollow assertions above.
Being inevitable means he cannot be avoided. So if the poet used this word as a byword for love, hate or another facet of the human condition that cannot be avoided, he could have used this poem to highlight a different sort of power.
A power, one might add, that is transcendental.
That is because what cannot be avoided must embraced for any lessons it carries. This embrace would serve as a metaphor for what we must hold onto in a world in which we increasingly own nothing.
That said, the poet redeems himself in the poem When Day meets Night:
When Day meets Night,
Day handovers to Night
Peacefully without any fight
And for so long earth exists.
But why do us
Need to fight and hate
To handover
Yet doom waits for us?
Author: Edward Desire Kibirige
Title: The Bard Diaries
Published: 2024
Price: Shs30,000
Pages: 103
Availability: Aristoc Bookshop.
