Niyi Osundare
Quick answer: Niyi Osundare craft guide: Yoruba wordplay, performance rhythm and earth-centred poetry from The Eye of the Earth, with practice advice for poets.
Niyi Osundare (born 1947) writes poetry that expects an audience, not just a reader. Raised in Ikere-Ekiti in Nigeria's Yoruba heartland, the son of a farmer-singer, he came to prominence in the 1980s with a generation determined to pull Nigerian poetry away from difficulty and back toward the marketplace, the drum and the audible line. His collections have won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Noma Award, Africa's premier book prize of the time.
For a working poet, Osundare is the great modern example of accessible density: verse that ordinary listeners can follow at a hearing, yet packed with pun, proverb and percussion. If you fear that clarity means thinness, he is the antidote.
The farmer's son who professed poetry
Osundare studied at Ibadan, Leeds and Toronto, then taught for years at the University of Ibadan before joining the University of New Orleans, where he survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005, losing his house and archive in the flood. The double citizenship of village and seminar room defines him: he writes as a scholar who never stopped hearing his father's farm songs.
His breakthrough decade produced Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Village Voices (1984) and The Eye of the Earth (1986), a book of praise and warning addressed to the land itself. Long before eco-poetry became a syllabus word, Osundare was writing it from a farmer's knowledge of soil, rain and harvest.
The signature moves
Osundare's style is a performance style, and its components can be isolated and practised.
What you can learn
Write a praise poem for something unglamorous: a tuber, a bus, a broom. Give it ten titles, each more extravagant and more accurate than the last. The oriki habit teaches metaphor-making faster than almost any exercise, and it kills false modesty in your imagery.
Then test your work on the ear. Osundare has insisted throughout his career that poetry in his tradition is incomplete until performed. Read your draft aloud to one listener and watch their face; revise wherever attention sagged. Writory's monthly contest, which scores language and creativity among its five criteria, is a decent laboratory for exactly this kind of audible, inventive line.
Where to start reading
The Eye of the Earth is the classic entry point, followed by Waiting Laughters (1990), which won the Noma Award. Songs of the Marketplace shows the early populist manifesto in action, Midlife (1993) turns inward at fifty, and City Without People (2011) responds to Katrina and its aftermath.
What poets can take from this
- Write ten praise-names for an ordinary object, then keep the five that surprise you.
- Retune one worn English idiom so it carries your own place and weather.
- Add a refrain a listening crowd could shout back, then vary it once at the close.
- Let a landscape act as a character with desires, not as scenery.
- Perform every draft aloud before you call it finished; cut what your breath stumbles on.
Try it yourself
Choose a food crop, rainfall pattern or river from a place you know and write its praise poem in the oriki spirit: address it directly, stack up invented titles for it, and let one refrain return three times, changing slightly as the poem's mood turns from celebration to warning.
Questions
What is Niyi Osundare known for?
He is known for performance-ready, Yoruba-inflected poetry that champions the common reader and the earth, especially The Eye of the Earth (1986) and Waiting Laughters, winner of the Noma Award. He is also a long-serving professor and essayist on poetry's public role.
What is an oriki?
Oriki is Yoruba praise poetry: chains of praise-names and epithets recited to honour a person, lineage, place or thing. Osundare adapts its piling, laudatory structure to modern subjects, which gives his poems their ceremonial energy.
How did Hurricane Katrina affect Osundare?
He was living in New Orleans in 2005 and lost his home, books and manuscripts in the flood, narrowly escaping with his wife. The experience shaped his collection City Without People (2011).
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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