So, I’ve crossed the mystical barrier of 10 poems posted. Now I can begin to respect my own project as a project. What I will try to do now is combine the work I’m doing for the writers’ fund with this and find images of the poets to go with their poems. The Pan African Writers’ Association/Ghana Association of Writers building has pictures of a lot of writers in it (see some images here) so next time I visit I will spend some time locating these brilliant phantoms whose work I have begun to catalogue. Thanks to everyone who has sent supportive messages.

Nii Ayikwei

I’m very pleased with myself because I’m managing to pick up some poems by now-obscure Ghanaian writers to share. I love ‘The Serving Girl’ by Acquah Laluah, which is in An African Treasury (selected by Langston Hughes), which I managed to buy on eBay after looking for a copy for years. Looking good. I don’t know what target to set for myself in terms of number of poems to collect, but I guess if I remain on the internet I can make it a lifelong project. I will soon put up my favourite poem by my Uncle Frank (Francis Ernest Kobina Parkes), ‘African Heaven’, which also appears in the Treasury. This is, after all, Ghana’s 50th anniversary year so I might as well get busy with it. My other blog is marching on according to my moods and I’ve just started a Litcast called FACT (image to the left), which is good fun too. The whole podcast experiment thing has been good for me – although I seem to have take the longest break in the world after my 14th episode. I promise to make it up by recording a ‘Chronic’ one soon. See you out there somewhere…

I’ve decided to start a podcast to experiment with the technology, and also to do one of the things I love doing – reading my poetry out. I’m sure it will be odd without a visible audience, but I’ll get used to it. One thing’s for sure – the first one will be terrible; I have a stone age microphone, bad acoustics in my flat and, of course, there’s the invisible audience thing… Anyway, I’ll be reading from my chapbooks eyes of a boy, lips of a man, M is for Madrigal and shorter (the one I put together to raise money for the writers’ fund for Ghana. Enjoy the podcast!

Schedule: Once per week
Title: Nii Ayikwei Parkes POETIC
Format: mp3 – each book will be a volume: eyes of a boy… = vol 1 and each poem will be a part, therefore the first poem from eyes of a boy…, will be vol 1, part 1. All the poems will have a bit of preamble where I talk about my day and perhaps give some context for the poem.

Future plans: If this works out and I learn the art of podcasting properly, I’ll start to podcast the African Writers’ Evening series that I run at the Poetry Cafe every other month.

I saw and liked the layout of wordpress for a regular review-type blog so I came like an ant after rain… and this is how it will work: you wont see much on this front page, but if you want to see some of the poems from Ghana that I’m collecting, go to the links on the side or top, if you want to see a music review do the same etc. If you want to send me something you’ve found that you think I’ll be interested in e.g. a poem from Ghana that I don’t have, please visit my site niiparkes.com and get in touch. Essentially, this is not a blog blog; more like a place to put together a lot of the random stuff I’m interested/involved in or have written as a reference for anyone who is interested. I have another blog called the thought movement where I get silly on the regular so you can follow by blogish stuff there… That’s all folks!