In Retrospect: An Interview with Adedayo Agarau, Author of The Years of Blood
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Adedayo Agarau, whose collection The Years of Blood won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped Agarau’s body of work, from his early writing to his most recent compositions. Agarau writes “with exquisite sensitivity, rigorous measure, and steadfastness,” in the words of aracelis girmay. Here, he walks us through his life in poetry thus far, from an early poem exploring a feeling of pan-africanism, to recent poetry written while on a flight.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Adedayo Agarau: It’s really not hard to remember, Sarah. I remember the poem, or at least its title. Samson Kukogho helped title the draft “African Child.” He had given me a prompt to try to express myself as a child describing where I come from, and it’s interesting that my instinct was to describe this feeling of pan-africanism, which I had never felt or tried to express. My life, as a child, was filled with mathematical formulas, physics, and its pendulums, and I spent most of my senior secondary school between extra lessons and chemistry classes. Whenever I think about the poem, I am just thankful that I could at least express myself in a mode I didn’t know existed.
FP: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle your first collection For Boys Who Went spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
AA: This question brings back so many memories, and I am grateful you asked because I had to spend time reading For Boys Who Went. The poem, “For boys who went and never returned,” opened with “here is a bed for your absence / for lizards to crawl / for silky silence / for the names of the girls / who have stretched for you,” and this evidently documents that I have been trying to write The Years of Blood since poetry found me. You know, when language arrives, it arrives as babble. For Boys Who Went was my first attempt at speaking so clearly, although I was writing under the political conditions I was hoping to oust through my poems. There has always been an absence. There will always be absence, but now, it comes as language.
FP: What lesson(s) did writing and publishing your previous chapbooks such as The Origin of
Name and The Arrival of Rain teach you that you applied to your debut collection?
AA: Experimentation. In The Arrival of Rain, I experimented with form. In The Origin of Names, I experimented with the Yoruba language.
FP: In terms of the evolution of your collection, The Years of Blood, could you briefly map out the stages your manuscript went through, from a starting point to the final draft?
AA: I wrote the first poem on my flight from Lagos to Chicago. It was my first flight out of Africa. I spent all my time writing this book, which was first named “The Year of Blood” and submitted as my thesis at the Iowa Writers Workshop, chaired by Elizabeth Willis and with very brilliant support from Duriel Harris and Mark Levine. I developed it further with the editorial support of Remica Bingham-Risher, and the book won the Poetic Justice Institute’s Editorial Prize.
FP: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
AA: Absence. As I mentioned earlier. There has always been. There will always be.
FP: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing often starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
AA: Right now, I have returned to my earlier obsession with 21 Pilots, an alternative rap + rock band. Dermot Kennedy just released his album, and I just discovered a Nigerian artist called Boy Mullar.
