‘Poetry is true to the human story’: An interview with Ajibola Tolase

“Poems need two things: logical sentences and emotional truth,” says Ajibola Tolase, winner of the 2024 Cave Canem Prize, which celebrates the richness of Black culture. The award includes publication of his debut collection, “2000 Blacks,” from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and a featured reading at The New School in New York. Previous winners of the Cave Canem Prize include Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith, who served as poet laureates of the United States in 2012-2014 and 2017-2019, respectively. 

For Mr. Tolase, who immigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria, the award was a surprising affirmation of his unexpected journeys both personally and professionally. 

In a recent Monitor interview via video call, Mr. Tolase explained that studying poetry wasn’t an option when he applied for admission to the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta, Nigeria. He was accepted into the statistics program, a discipline he believed would help him earn a good living and please his conservative father.

Poetry had been part of his life since he was introduced to the literary genre as a 10-year-old student in a state-run boarding school in Nigeria. 

He began writing poems at age 14 – “they weren’t very good,” he recalls – and he continued writing as a statistics major.

By his second year at university, he realized “statistics wasn’t the right field for me” and he felt “a little depressed,” he says, as he considered telling his parents that he wanted to drop out of school.

A friend who wrote rap music encouraged him to continue writing and introduced him to a local poetry club. There, he met poets who had won contests and been accepted into Master of Fine Arts programs in poetry in the U.S. 

“I’d never heard of an MFA program,” says Mr. Tolase, who suddenly had a new vision for his life. 

After he completed his statistics degree, he enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin. The first assignment was to write a poem in blank verse. “I had no idea what that was,” he recalls.

With support from both faculty and fellow students, he learned to use various forms and meter. “It’s like going to the gym. At first, it’s painful, but the more you work out, the stronger you become,” he says. He also realized that once you have a form – or container – for a poem, “then you can add your creativity; it allows you to really shine. And when you get the poem right, it’s really beautiful.”

Mr. Tolase wrote many sonnets and sestinas at the University of Wisconsin and afterward at Stanford University, where he held a prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship and worked with the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück. “She taught me the importance of emotional truth,” he notes. 

His debut, “2000 Blacks,” begins with several sonnets and later shifts to free verse. That movement helps underscore the theme of migration, which Mr. Tolase explores in his own life and on a global scale. “In life we migrate. You leave one relationship for another; you leave one job for another. No matter who you are, you make big life choices,” he says. 

“Poetry helps us identify and speak to the truth of people’s lives. Emotional truth. That’s how poetry helps us connect with someone’s story, even if our circumstances are very different, because poetry is true to the human story.”

Mr. Tolase says he feels a strong sense of kinship with Black Americans and with people who have been forced from their homeland due to war and other conflicts. “It has never been tougher for migrants than it has been in the past decade,” he notes. “There was a time when we had compassion for people. That seems to be gone. I’m always very sad to read or watch the news and see migration laws changing around the world. That doesn’t serve humanity, really.”  

Another migration he explores in the book is his journey from childhood to adulthood and his complicated relationship with his father, who was emotionally distant and often left the family for extended periods. 

“People are not inherently good or bad,” Mr. Tolase explains. “My father was raised during the Nigerian Civil War [1967-1970]. It was a different world at that time. What kind of masculinity did he inherit? How did that shape his relationships?” 

Writing about his father, in some of the poems, helped Mr. Tolase think about choices in his own life. “Even though I wrote difficult things about my relationship with my father, I do not hate my father,” he says. “I love him. We all need to decide ‘Who am I and where am I trying to go?’ I want to think about ... what kind of relationships I want to have.” 

Creativity and resilience are other themes that run throughout “2000 Blacks.”

“Those two elements are the story of my life,” Mr. Tolase explains. “To grow up in the circumstances I grew up in, I had to be creative and resilient. Resilience is standing in the face of adversity, and saying, ‘I will continue on.’ 

“That’s also the human story, when you think about all the good people in the world who look for ways to not let anything break their spirit. Forces in the world will try to break you. You don’t want to let that happen.”