Amara Okonkwo-Bassey on the Obsidian Foundation’s upcoming showcase, rereading a mentor’s early work, and what it means to watch a community you belong to keep making room for the next ten voices
I got on the bus home from work on Tuesday, opened an old chapbook by Nick Makoha I hadn’t reread in years, and missed my actual stop by three full stations, which I’m choosing to interpret as an entirely appropriate response to good poetry rather than a genuine failure of basic attention. I only noticed once the driver announced somewhere I definitely didn’t recognize.
What Actually Prompted This Particular Rereading
The Poetry Society announced this year’s Obsidian Showcase, the reading that caps off the Obsidian Foundation’s week-long retreat for Black poets of African descent, ten new writers this December presenting alongside Makoha himself, who founded the whole initiative and remains, in my own personal reading life, one of the poets whose early work taught me what was actually possible within the form when I was still figuring out my own voice.
Why This Particular Foundation Matters So Much To Me Personally
I applied for the retreat myself, several years back now, wasn’t selected that particular year, and remember the rejection stinging in a way that surprised me given how new I still was to submitting anything anywhere. But I kept writing, kept submitting elsewhere, and I think that early rejection, handled with genuine care in how it was communicated, actually taught me something useful about persistence that I’ve carried into every subsequent submission since.
What This Year’s Showcase Cohort Actually Represents
Ten writers, this December, drawn from across the diaspora, following showcases the Poetry Society has held after each previous Obsidian retreat since 2020, readings that have apparently introduced several writers who’ve since gone on to publish genuinely celebrated first collections. I think there’s something quietly remarkable about an initiative built specifically around identifying new voices and then actually following through, publicly, repeatedly, on giving those voices a genuine platform rather than letting the retreat itself be the whole extent of the support offered.
What Rereading Makoha’s Early Work Actually Revealed To Me This Time
Details I’d genuinely missed on my first reading years ago, specific formal choices around line breaks that now read, with more of my own craft development behind me, as considerably more deliberate than I’d originally appreciated. I think that’s part of what good poetry actually does over time, reveals different things depending on where you yourself currently stand as both reader and writer.
How This Connects To My Own Current Writing Practice
I’ve been working on a sequence about my grandmother’s migration story, the specific, unglamorous logistics of it rather than the more mythologized version families sometimes settle into telling, and I think Makoha’s own handling of displacement and memory in that old chapbook gave me permission this week to stay with the unglamorous, specific details rather than reaching for the tidier, more universally resonant version of the story.
What I’m Actually Planning To Do About This December Showcase
Attend, obviously, and probably bring at least two other poet friends who haven’t yet discovered this particular reading series, because I think the community-building function of simply showing up and listening matters nearly as much as the actual writing itself. Poetry communities sustain themselves through exactly this kind of repeated, unglamorous showing up, one reading at a time, one missed bus stop at a time if the poem genuinely earns it.
What I’m Actually Going To Do With My Grandmother’s Sequence Before Then
Keep writing it, slowly, staying with the specific unglamorous details Makoha’s own work reminded me to trust this week. Maybe it’s ready by December. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, I’ll be at that showcase, listening properly, taking notes, probably missing my stop again on the way home if the evening goes anything like Tuesday’s accidental extra three stations did.
What I Actually Texted My Poet Friend After Getting Off Three Stops Late
Just a photo of the specific page that had done it, the one that made me forget where I was entirely, no caption, because some poems don’t need my own commentary layered on top of them. She wrote back within minutes, said she’d forgotten she owned that same chapbook, went and found her own copy that same evening. That’s genuinely the whole point of a community like this one, I think, poems passing hand to hand, decades after their first publication, still catching people off guard on ordinary Tuesday commutes.
Why I Think That Small Exchange Matters As Much As The December Showcase Itself
Because the big public readings are important, genuinely, but the actual sustaining infrastructure of a literary community is built from exactly these small, unglamorous moments too, a missed bus stop, a photographed page, a friend rediscovering her own forgotten copy the same evening. I’ll show up in December for the ten new voices. I’ll also keep showing up on ordinary Tuesdays for the old ones still teaching me things I apparently hadn’t finished learning the first time around, one accidental extra bus stop at a time.
One Last Thing Before I Actually Get Off At The Right Stop Tonight
I’m bringing the chapbook with me tomorrow, physically, to give to a younger poet I’ve been mentoring informally these past few months, the same generous gesture someone once extended to me when I was newer to all this. That’s genuinely how this community keeps replenishing itself, I think, not just through big showcases and December readings but through these small, direct handoffs, one worn chapbook passed forward, one missed bus stop’s worth of discovery shared deliberately with whoever comes next.