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An incident in
early college days may have given rise to �The Cow Chase� and its presentation in
the ELSA Press; a childhood recall of church sermon as the
preacher grips the audience with pious quotations from a pulpit may have
inspired �The Preacher�
later at college. Quite a
few gallant lines
that we scribbled for our ladies of
seeming virtues then. One never did take these things seriously
but some of our learned critics like departmental
chair, Ernest Emenyonu, thought they were promising efforts and encouraged
us. I think, by later editing The Quill and a few other
news pages in the
years of military dictatorship, one had begun the
commitment toward engaging truth and personal conviction
against the foils which martial brigandage and
pious deceptions amounted to in our time.
 My collections
are efforts to engage anyone who happens to listen to them in virtual dialogues
where opinions, convictions, and a lot many active speculations can be tested
and applied to specific or general situations. At a time in the Eclipse
the conditions of military and civilian buffoonery
with
the economic and political destruction of African countries necessitated direct and provocative
pronouncements. Other times in Full Moon brought the
chance to share with the reader subtler human sympathies
and some truly romantic experience. Millennial
was a product of several years of
experience in which past and present dialogues were resumed with hindsight. Awareness
was wrought by those disappointments and joyful surprises that
only time could furnish us.
All these go into the continuing dialogue in time
and, maybe, one individual is touched in a way that alters one's -and thereby the
whole of the human collective- consciousness for the greater good. People who
say writing changes nothing only underestimate the power of thought from which
spring those gripping realities that induce the obeisance of the masses.
There is the immediate family and community awareness
which is where most attention
resides, hardly rising beyond attitudes guided by closely
discernible
gains to self and like minds. But there is a global
awareness, of a new age, in the
understanding of galactic citizens who mean well for humanity. Now they begin to
rouse our attention to issues of
space, of earth and other planets, and their
capacity to repel the
havoc we are wittingly inflicting on them, on ourselves, and future generations. I seem to subscribe to the
view that beyond these lies the reminder that we belong to a vast
multidimensional universe in which one and many are authentic
representations of the whole. While our fragmentation has been the
work of
religious and ideological oppositions, poetry is capable
-in fact, poets have
been the most capable- of the unified, interactive
engagements in a way that can bring
greater understanding and
fulfilment to
human existence.
Chin's
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