“The People’s History of 1998”: Eight Questions for Gbenga Adesina
Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian poet who resides in Brooklyn, NY. Adesina’s childhood in Nigeria and his current residence in Brooklyn have inspired several poem collections, including his new and most popular, “Death Does Not End at Sea,” for which he was nominated and long listed for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. His poem “Across the Sea: A Sequence,” was the winner of the 2020 Narrative Prize, and his other poem, “Surrender,” won the Palette Poetry Spotlight Award. In 2019-2029, at Colgate University, he was the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow, while he taught a class on poetry called “Song of Human.” Today he is a graduate from the MFA Program at NYU, and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa, a prominent American Poet. In his poem, “The People’s History of 1998,” he switched from global events during the time such as “The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve/and wanted vengeance,” to more personal events, “We got a plastic green turtle and named it Sir/Desmond Tutu.” This writing style created a poem that reflected interconnected stories during one period of time concerning personal and global events that shaped not only his life, but the lives of others. One of the most fascinating things I have discovered while reading poetry is how good poetry has the ability to express the writer’s emotions while also connecting with the reader. The balance of personal elements with general elements of life creates a poem that not only is a piece of the author, but a story that the reader can then relate to. Gbenga Adesina’s “The People’s History of 1998,” does just that in the 2025 volume of Best American Poetry. His reasoning for writing his poem in this style is addressed in the following questions.
I noticed that you taught a poetry class called “Song of the Human” at Colgate University. Has teaching ever inspired a poem or impacted your view on poetry?
Toni Morrison, the great American writer said, “I really only do one thing. I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” Reading, writing, and teaching belong to the same continuum of activities I find deeply nourishing and spiritually fulfilling. I don’t think of much distinction between them except in the practical sense.
These activities are different rungs on the same ladder of my intellectual and spiritual quest for meaning and transformation.The books or poems I teach are often from my own personal archive of inquiry.
I teach a book, a poem, or a material because I’m passionate about it, because when I encountered it, it spoke deeply to me and it is out of this unforgettable encounter that I take the poem to my students with a desire to share a great treasure with them. My teaching provide a kind of inexplicable feedback and energy for my writing. The voices of my students, their wisdom, their brilliant and surprising perspective of the world make me to write more. The more I’m writing, the more I’m energized and want to be among my students to share my work and if not the work, then the spirit, ideas, questions, histories, and atmosphere of creativity driving my work.
Now, I think of a poetry class as a kind of orchestra. I’m the teacher and therefore the conductor, but I’m not the only one making the music of knowledge. There are multiple voices and instruments in this orchestra that is a poetry class. As everyone in the class bring their voices, insights, interpretations, life stories, and ideas to the poem or book we are reading, the poem takes on a new and larger life. New layers of meaning open up to us. The lesson is that a poem contains multiple and endless meanings, a poem truly comes alive at that point where humans bring their own lives and subjectivities to it. The poem speaks to us and we speak back to the poem in a fruitful, endless chorus.
In your poem “The People’s History of 1998” you alternate using historical references to that time period, and then personal. Why did you choose to do this?
I love this question. In my poetry, I interested in a kind of human history that is slightly different from how most historians teach us to think of history. We think of history in terms of the heroic figure, or great dates, and events: treaties, wars, plagues, great battles, presidents, etc. I’m interested in the quieter, yet no less significant histories of the human live. The histories of ordinary people existing in extraordinary times. (In retrospect, all time periods are extraordinary) allThe kind of histories you might never find in a newspaper archive or on radio, but is significant to the individuals or families that experienced them. I want to take these quieter histories and braid it with the more proclaimed histories to tell a fuller story of our loves and times. I tell my students, if your family story, your parents and grandparents histories and sacrifices, their beauty, their pain never makes it to the newspaper or the radio would it mean that their lives never mattered? I should think not.
In your last stanza of “The People’s History of 1998”, I could not figure out what your intended meaning of the stanza. Could you explain your thought process regarding that stanza?
It’s not good for the poet to over explain their poem or affix a single meaning to it. What I’d say is that the voice in the poem at that moment sees white egrets flying in the sky and thought could it be that one of those egrets is his little sister who is now a ghost? That the literal meaning, but the metaphors and deeper meanings now belong to the readers.
In the 17th stanza of “The People’s History of 1998”, I could not tell if the tone addressing “Calmaria,” and what it brought, was hopeful or melancholy. Can you explain your process and the intended tone/feeling that the stanza was written to evoke?
Nostalgia. The poet remembers that moment in his childhood when after it has rained, the world is suddenly calm and the air is clean, and the children will run out into the backyard to play. That’s the literal, but that the rain has stopped does not mean that the imprint the rain left on the world has receded. Calm does not mean the absence of wounds.
Are there any poets or other artists that have inspired/influenced your writing?
Several shelves of them. But let’s go with Larry Levis, Aracelis Girmay, Terrance Hayes, Yusef Komunyakka, Jorie Graham, Sharon Olds, Gregory Pardlo, W.B.Yeats, John Keats, Wole Soyinka, Niyi Osundare, Li-Young Lee, Mary Syzbit, Wengechi Mutu, Nora Chipaumire etc.
What are your thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of writing poetry in America today?
There are no disadvantages to writing poetry. The advantages abound. Poetry is the spiritual architecture of language and without language there is no meaning. Poetry teaches us that we are not alone, that our interior lives are not strange or warped. More practically poetry sharpens the minds of students and teaches a kind of literacy that is both textual and visual literacy as well civic literacy, an understanding of the world as a place of astonishing interconnectedness. Poetry is a digestible capsule of history.
You mention your family in a lot of your poetry. Has your family changed throughout the years and has that change impacted your poetry?
My family is very important to me. I think of the family as every child’s first glimpse and taste of the world and that taste never truly leaves the tongue. My father is dead now though his presence hovers around us. My mother is getting older as all parents do. My siblings are awesome and wiser. We are still a chorus. We will always be. My recent book of poems, Death Does Not End At The Sea suffused with all these changes.
In your interview about the poem “Citizen,” you write that a lady once asked you where “home” was, but you never wrote a response. Where is home?
Home? I suppose language itself.