The Dialogue of the Big and the Small: The Poetry of Ben Okri

In an interview with Charles Rowell, Ben Okri expressed his views on art and its relation to society in the following terms: “I see art as a bridge between the secular and the spiritual aspects of humanity. In art I’m including everything from song, dance, architecture, painting, music, literature, conversation of a certain kind, even certain silences. Society is held together by laws, but it is animated by art” (214). Okri’s expression of his views on art gives one a glimpse of the challenges facing the reader who wishes to read a specific text in the light of such a broad statement. In the same interview Okri spoke of art and life as being “perpetually in dialogue” (215); the notion of dialogue informs the title poem of his 2012 collection Wild, in which the poet evokes “the infinite dialogue/ Of the big and the small” as a way of understanding inspiration (54). In the same poem he speaks with a disarming simplicity of the way “Those ancients saw/ The world as it is,/ A system of co-operation,/ Where things are both themselves/ And symbols and correspondences” (Okri, Wild 51). Such statements appear to go against the grain of the modern reader’s temptation to see the literary text as the site of a complicated transaction involving a multiplicity of codes used to “read” the world. Robert Fraser has pointed out, in talking about Okri’s Mental Fight (1999), a poem which owes its title and inspirational thrust to William Blake, that “the poem seems strange, because, as readers of twentieth-century verse, we have grown so used to minimalism, obscurity, or narcissistic self-pity that we take these qualities as the hallmarks of poetry” (Ben Okri 93). Existing critical studies devoted to Okri’s poetry (of which there are very few) focus on the way in which his poetry, in particular Mental Fight, can be interpreted through mythical, philosophical, or spiritual frames.¹ Such studies are useful for the way in which they permit the reader to understand forms of expression which may seem either totally personal or hopelessly abstract. However, they do not help one to approach Okri’s poetry as poetry, characterized by an interdependency of form and meaning which constitutes the very definition of the genre. That Okri himself is aware of the impossibility of separating the formal aspects of poetry, such as sound, from its meaning can be deduced from remarks he makes in the essay “Newton’s Child”:

It is amazing how much writing is a combination of mathematics and musical composition, of reason and aesthetics. It is also amazing how much of writing is rewriting; how much is instinctive; how much is simple logic, and the operation of so many secret and invisible laws. Take, for example, the law of visuality—the words you actually see on the page. There is, to give another example, the law of subliminal effect—words that you don’t notice but which make you see things more acutely.

(Way of Being Free 24)

In commenting on Okri’s reference to “the law of subliminal effect,” Fraser points out that in Virgil’s Eclogues, an important text for Okri, “the match between sense and euphony is so smooth that his music seems to be what the poetry is expressing” (Ben Okri 99). This remark is curiously similar to Paul Valery’s view of poetry as “hesitation between the sound and the sense” (qtd. in Jakobson, Selected Writings 38).² Clearly there is no simple way of entering the world of Ben Okri’s poetry. While this statement can be applied to all poets, Okri’s multicultural background and his blending of diverse literary, philosophical, and spiritual influences requires an approach that takes these factors into account without allowing them to overshadow the personal encounter between poem and reader which is, for Okri, the heart of the reading experience. In his collection of essays A Time for New Dreams, Okri defines poetry as “an inner dialogue. It suggests a private journey to one’s own truth” (4). The...