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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It, I'm Alison Stewart. Ben Okri is a Booker Prize-winning novelist, a poet, an essayist, a playwright, and a writer of short stories. Until recently, much of his work from the past 30 years had never been published in the United States. That is changing with the help of a US-based independent publisher, Other Press, who since last year has been rolling out revised editions of his work going back to the 1980s. Those works include his 1995 novel, Astonishing the gods, and revised versions of his 1996 novel, Dangerous Love, and his 2007 novel, The Last Gift of the Master Artists.

Most recently, in February came the US Publication of the poetry collection, A Fire in My Head, Poems for the Dawn. There are poems with titles like Decolonization, Liberty, and On Race. They touch on topics like Black Lives Matter and the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London. There are poems dedicated to specific figures and organizations, including Barack Obama and Amnesty International. Let's listen to my conversation with Ben Okri.

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Alison Stewart: Would you start us off with the poem, Decolonization?

Ben Okri: Yes, with pleasure. It's called Decolonization and it has a subtitle from Fanon.

It never takes place unnoticed.

Like a blade before your eyes.

It transforms those crushed with their nothingness.

Into central performers under the floodlights of history's blood-like gaze.

A new rhythm, by dawn men brought, a language new minted from the Old Earth.

A humanity remade by vaporizing chains, and the brutal alembic of oppression.

It's the way new beings are forged from fire and rage.

Distilled into clear dawn.

But nothing supernatural presides over this renewal.

No deities or heroes or famed individuals.

The new becomes been, the same way it became free.

Alison Stewart: That was Ben Okri reading from A Fire in My Head, Decolonization from Fanon. Is that Frantz Fanon?

Ben Okri: Frantz Fanon, absolutely.

Alison Stewart: Would you tell us--?

Ben Okri: A great sound--

Alison Stewart: Yes, for listeners who don't know.

Ben Okri: Oh, well, he's a great theoretician of revolution and the effect of colonization on the psyche of the colonized. He's been one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, looking at colonization and African nations and nations that have undergone oppression throughout the world. He was a psychiatrist and he brought his psychiatric training into a study of the effect of colonization on people's minds and psyches. He had a really illuminating effect on the politics of many nations across the world.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to distill about colonization and from his work in this poem?

Ben Okri: Well, several things, but I think the most important thing is that it's an act of self-transformation, it's an act of self-liberation. To decolonize is not just casting off the colonial chain. It has to also be worked through the psyche, the psyche of an individual, and the psyche of a whole people. That's why if you look at the poem, I use a lot of chemical images because a fundamental transformation has to take place and it's a very difficult transformation. Sometimes it happens to the history of a people, which can be bloody, and angry, and full of rage, and can have very calm moments. I just thought the poem just best expressed that difficult transition.

Alison Stewart: In this book of poetry, after the table of contents, after the listing of the poems, there's tiny small instructions that say, "Read slowly," at the bottom of one page, that's all it says on the page. Why is that important for readers to keep in mind, "Read slowly"?

Ben Okri: I think we've been in a too-fast reading phase for a long time. I feel that we read too quickly, we listen too quickly, we understand too quickly, we analyze too quickly, we criticize too quickly. The thing is that when we slow down our reading, we deepen our comprehension. When we slow down our listening, we deepen our hearing. I've come to write now in this stage of my writing life, this last 15 years, I have come to write in a very compressed, elliptical way. You get the music of what I'm writing, of my language best when you slow down because all of the music, and all of the magic, and all the power, is actually inside, and if you read it fast, you miss the nuances.

Alison Stewart: That's also an interesting idea for someone to take time for themselves to slow down.

Ben Okri: Oh, yes, absolutely. We need to slow down in our living, we need to just walk a little slowly sometimes, enjoy the silences of life, just watch a cloud scudding across the sky, listen to the music of people's voices.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ben Okri. We're discussing his poetry collection, A Fire in My Head, Poems for the Dawn. We'll talk more about the poems in a minute. I just want to get to more from the beginning of the book before we dive in. There's a lot to experience. There is the Yeats' quote, "I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head," from The Song of Wandering Aengus. What was it about this poem that you took the title from your book from it or that you wanted to include these two lines?

Ben Okri: Oh, well, first of all, which of us poets doesn't love Yeats? This is early Yeats, this is mythic Yeats, this is Yeats exploring the relationship between the land and mythology. To be honest with you, I was really rather surprised that nobody had-- because Yeats is very much mind for titles. He's one of the most used poets for titles in the world. I was very surprised that A Fire in My Head, this wonderful phrase from Wandering Aengus hadn't been used. It's a magical little poem.

A Fire in My Head really spoke to me really deeply because I've [unintelligible 00:07:41] quite a few fires in my head for a while, political fires, mythic fires, fires about love, spiritual fires. The whole idea of a fire in your head is this makes you-- turns your head into a cauldron. It goes back to alchemy all over again. It's as if you've got this heat in your head that you really need to share. It was just a perfect title and I was just very lucky that no one else had nabbed it before me.

Alison Stewart: The collection is divided into five sections, unknown hour, convergence, midday, dusk, invocation hour. What made sense in that arc? Why did that arc make sense?

Ben Okri: Well, first of all, it's designed to track the medieval Book of Hours. Anyone who knows the paintings that they combine with books in the medieval times, you can see these in many of the great galleries, they divided the spiritual life into hours. Not only that traces the hours of the day, but it's also the hours of a life, the hours of the development of the spirit, and I also take it to be the hours of spiritual growth. In this book, it's divided that way because they're political poems, mostly. They start with the unknown hour from which many of our difficulties come, and into which they go.

It develops into convergence because that's the place where the problems, the difficulties become visible. They converge and we see them. Midday is the day, or is the hour of heat, and the forge and tempers and anger. Dusk it's darkening. Invocation hour is when we find a new kind of energy to deal with these problems. The whole book, in a way, is a meditation on the hours of the political program, of the individual and the poet, and looking at what's going on in our world. I needed a structure for this volume, and this medieval Book of Hours was just perfect for me.

Alison Stewart: Ben, would you read another poem for us?

Ben Okri: Do you have a choice?

Alison Stewart: How Many Ways. How about How Many Ways?

Ben Okri: Okay. How Many Ways is a wonderful one to choose because it's a new poem I wrote, especially for the American edition.

"How many ways can a world be destroyed?" She asked skeptically. He drew a breath in the darkness of the day, after the Mayan end of the world, and in a blue voice said, "The world can end in many ways. It can end with a ship coming to a shore." "Oh, I can see that," she said. "Only," he replied, "because you believe history is truer than a symbol." "And what else?" she asked. "The world can end with the breaking of an egg. I fear," she said, "you're getting esoteric." "Not at all," said he quietly, "a symbol is more accurate than history."

For the first time, she was silent. Maybe the mystery of symbol was the cause. Maybe she sensed more. "The world can end," he said, "with a kiss." Then she gasped. "It can end with a touch, with a sound of a voice, a light in the distance, an odd-shaped moon. Can end with an idea, the birth of a child or a road taking too long." She was no longer listening. Maybe her listening had taken her to a distant river, the childhood shoreline where an arriving ship brought her dark afternoons and snow.

Alison Stewart: That was Ben Okri reading from his book of poems. This is called How Many Ways, a new poem for the American edition. When did you write this poem? What inspired it for this particular collection?

Ben Okri: This was written about seven, eight years ago. I tend to write poems and leave them, forget them, come back to them when they call to me. It was really based on a conversation I was having with someone I just met. We were talking about the ancient world, we were talking about Africa, the Caribbean, we were talking about how worlds end, and a ship from a distance. I was thinking about the ships that came to many countries in Latin America, or Sigma ships that came to America itself, the ships that came to-- and I was just thinking about the ways in which worlds end.

What are worlds? A world can be the dream of a people in a little enclave. A world can be our big world and climate catastrophe there. For me, it was a very open meditation. All of these things just there in a simple conversation. I think it was just right for the American collection at this particular time because we're now asking that question, how many ways can the world end? We're having to deal with that every day. Anyone who's got the slightest fear about the climate catastrophe hanging over us, just ask him that question, how many ways can the world end?

Alison Stewart: The collection includes a poem of yours. It's very well known, Grenfell Tower, June 2017th, about the fire that started in a mostly low-income London high-rise. Killed more than 70 people. Your reading of the poem has been viewed more than six million times on Facebook. When did you know this poem was resonating with people?

Ben Okri: I don't know. It took a while before I became aware of that. You see, the thing is that the Grenfell Tower disaster happened not very far from where I am, around three, four o'clock at night. You can already smell the ashes as well as the bodies. I know the smell of burnt bodies because I grew up during the Civil War. I wrote it through all of that and read it out on TV. Then not long afterwards, it was just reproduced everywhere. It was reproduced on walls, it was reproduced in newspapers, people were responding in America and New Zealand, Australia, Africa.

It was very, very moving that this fire in London touched so many lives. I've been wondering over the years why that is. I think it's because of the ancestral fear of being burnt alive that most people have, as well as a profound sympathy for those people in that tower who didn't have anything to help them escape. There was nothing. There was no stairwells that they could escape down, there was no fire extinguishers. It was a great indictment of a system that doesn't value the lives of the poor as it should value all lives.

Alison Stewart: Ben, how is your process different when you're writing about something that's very real and very specific, versus the work that The Muse sends to you?

Ben Okri: That's a great question. That's a really wonderful question. I think with something like The Grenfell, I go into a state that is close to grieving. It's very, very strange. It's like descending into my own underworld. I sink myself into a state. It's not an emotional state, it's not really anger or anything like that. I just sink myself into a condition of absolute feeling as it enters into language. Those poems are never driven by my head, never driven by my intelligence, never driven by my knowledge of the great poetry of the world, they're just driven by this pure feeling.

They're very difficult to write, and sometimes-- with this one, it took me five hours. I just was writing with internal tears just for five hours, and then came out of that state and then spent some time writing. The most important process is submitting oneself to the state that-- there's no other word for it, but akin to a huge grieving that's taking place inside one. I feel like many people have a lot of unfinished grieving inside them, which is strangely enough and a terrible thing to say. It's a great world, a great source for poetry, even love poetry.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ben Okri. The name of the poetry collection is A Fire in My Head. Ben, would you take us out on another poem, your poem of your choosing?

Ben Okri: Oh, okay, the poem of my choosing. There's so many. I want to read you a love poem. I want to read you poems about poetry. I'm going to read one that was suggested earlier. I'm going to read Africa is a Reality Not Seen.

Alison Stewart: Terrific.

Ben Okri: Because it gives me an opportunity to share certain feelings I have. Africa is a Reality Not Seen.

Africa is a reality not seen, a dream not understood. Its wars are the scab of a wound, its famine the cracking of seeds, its dictatorships, a child torturing beetles in a field. Its soul is older than Atlantis, and like all things old, it's being reborn and doesn't know it. Countless cycles of civilization and destruction are lost in its memory, but not in its myths. Africa is a living enigma, an old woman taken for a child, a wise man taken for a fool, a beggar who is also a great king.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri about his latest poetry collection, A Fire in My Head. As we celebrate National Poetry Month, visit wnyc.org/allofit to listen to more of our conversations with poets such as New York Times bestselling author Clint Smith, and Korean-American poet, Eugenia Leigh who joined us last week. That's all of it for this hour. Coming up next, we'll turn to a collaboration between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and artists Titus Kaphar. It's a book exposing the failures of the criminal justice system. That's next.

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