Ben Okri on why teenagers are poets
As a child, Ben Okri wrote more than a hundred poems
As the closing date of the Sunday Telegraph Poetry for Performance competition approaches, Booker-winning author Ben Okri explains why young people should put pen to paper.
There’s something about being a teenager that lends itself to writing poetry. It’s a solitary time when individuals attempt to understand themselves and make sense of the world. Yet, all that upheaval and uncertainty that goes with that time of life, the questioning of rules and parents, the anxieties, crises and self-doubt, can make for wonderful poetry.
It’s because the richness and exuberance of teenage feelings cannot be contained that poetry makes the perfect receptacle for the overspill. Teenagers have such a vibrant response to everything. When you have such feelings, there’s not much you can do but rebel. When I was young, I wrote poetry for the same reasons that young people take to drugs: to get into it, to get out of it, to rage, to be free. Poetry did all of that for me. It was my rock and roll.
As a teenager, I wrote about everything, about love and rainfall, mosquitos and space travel. It was a kind of overflow of the soul singing, and a way of dealing with the need to think. The act of writing is to engage with one’s feelings, and it has a wonderful way of helping us explore ourselves. It’s a crystallisation of what a person is feeling, what people are thinking, what a nation is feeling, at any one time. But it fills us without clarity and without outline, and for those reasons I think it is an important outlet for the young. It helps you know where your anger is, where your joy is.
It is difficult to communicate normally when we are full of feeling, so we turn to the magic properties of poetry. It has the same intoxicating effect; it is the wine of life.
When the young reach for their notebook and pen, it is because of intoxication. Poetry connects us to the wonderful and the normal. It is the electrification of the ordinary. It is the celebration of all aspects of life, of new experiences, new understandings. It is surprising how much poetry there is in people without their knowing it. If you listen carefully, more often than you think, you will hear the most extraordinary images and symbolism come out of daily speech. It must be that poetry is the condition of the soul.
True poets try to keep an aspect of their teenage self alive as far as possible, to be sensitive to life and its changes. But writing poems in your teens doesn’t mean you will become a poet, and a teenage outpouring doesn’t necessarily amount to poetry. But it helps translate things. In some ways, it’s a distillation. The hard part is acquiring a feeling for the music of poetry, for the meaning and magic of words.
As a child, I wrote more than a hundred poems, but before I left Nigeria with one suitcase, I destroyed almost all of them. It was fiendish, like cutting off an arm. But in many ways it was also the best thing I ever did; it was important to shed them as it taught me about selectivity. The poems that survived are my best. I kept only five – and those were the five that saved my life.
Now it’s your turn. The Sunday Telegraph is inviting readers, young and old, to submit poems on the theme of “relationships” for its annual Poetry for Performance competition. A nation that encourages poetry in its young is a nation that encourages the genius of its people.
- Ben Okri is a Booker Prize-winning author and a judge of The Sunday Telegraph’s Poetry For Performance competition.
