With a number of selected poems I am interested in demonstrating the addressivity, the locus of intersubjective utterance, possible in what is considered primarily a monologic art.

Oral poets in Africa have always seen themselves as artists in dialogue, and the modern poets writing in English take after the oral artists in their dialogic aesthetics. But BakhtinвЂ™s conception of dialogism, as I hope to argue, is something that is a given in African traditional poetics. The capacity of this poetry to be an utterance, to speak and to listen, to embody voices in dialogue, necessitates the appropriation of Mikhail BakhtinвЂ™s theory of dialogism to pursue its historicism, given its spatiotemporal location in the past of Nigeria. The choice of вЂњaddressivityвЂќ here is to draw attention to what one might see as the intention of the poet to orient her poem towards an addressee the desire to speak to other subjects. The recent Nigerian poetry, then, as I intend to argue, oversteps the limits of poetry-as/for-art (in the sense Euro-American modernism conceives it, and as received in Nigerian literary tradition), and institutes itself as an agency of subversive addressivity. To foreground the context is not merely to privilege the primal interconnectedness between this poetry and the recent historical events in Nigeria from which it takes its life, but, more importantly, to account for the method, the how, of realising poetry as a pragmatic medium for inventing a nationalist discourse. Of utmost significance to the identification and mapping of this poetry as a dialogic, intersubjective, and intertextual discourse is the context in which it is produced. 1 Nigerian poetry in English which emerged during the socio-political turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s, this article argues, is dialogic.

Poe turmoil rewards