Godspower Oboido

Godspower Oboido (born 10 November 1988) is a Nigerian poet and Christian preacher. His poetic voice has been compared to that of Christopher Okigbo and Leopold Senghor, two all-time leading figures of African poetry and influences that mark Oboido's style of poetry. Quotes I’ve always wanted to do poetry. The first poems I wrote were in 2005–which interestingly got published in a Journal in the States but I am not saying which journal it is as I do not think those were successful poems –the type you no longer want people to see. I used to make a living from working as a painter. Visual art was everything to me and everyone wanted me to study Fine Arts in College but I knew somewhere that I wanted to paint with words. I wanted to marry poetry and painting –so that is why as a poet today, I am more concerned with imagery than anything else really. I want to see and live in the poems that I read, or write. Let it have feelings, frown if it likes. As a poet I quite like to hide behind my poems. But I guess these days I am not so much about writing for meaning but writing about significant experiences in my life –giving my audience the opportunity to share in them. That was what Christopher Okigbo did too. Again writing about your own experience is also writing about other people’s experiences too, or being their voice in a way. Yes that is true. It is very inspiring, if not daunting, to come from a country of literary heavyweights. We have a great storytelling heritage. Everyone is a storyteller –your grandma, teachers and peers –I remember growing up in Benin City, the children in the neighborhood would collect ourselves together to tell folk tales of the tortoise, ancestors and everything else. It was a tradition passed down through many generations. Then the early postcolonial writers from Nigeria did a lot to establish our literature on a global level. I am talking of the era of Christopher Okigbo, John Pepper Clarke, Chinua Achebe, and Nobel Prize for literature winner, Wole Soyinka. They were all friends –how cool is that? We draw a lot of inspiration from that generation. My favorite Nigerian poet is easily Christopher Okigbo who is today widely acknowledged as by far the most outstanding postcolonial, Anglophone, African, modernist poet of the 20th century. There is a chapter devoted to his works in the British Open University textbook, Aestheticism and Modernism: Debating Twentieth Century Literature (Gupta Danson Brown and Suman Gupta, 2005), David Richards (2005) that placed Okigbo side by side with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Bertolt Brecht, and Virginia Woolf, among the pillars of twentieth-century modernism. I also like Niyi Osundare who was one time my favorite and modern poets like Afam Akeh, Amatoritsero Ede and a few others.