In the beginning...

Welcome to Poems from Kenya, the official blog of the Kenya Association of Poets. In a few weeks, we promise, you will find here poems submitted to the Kenya Association of Poets since 1980, by lovers of poetry from diverse religious, political and professional leanings. All these people take special pride in being called 'poets,' but they are actually many other things, like students, teachers, journalists, creative writers, scholars, painters, musicians, and even noisemakers.

Above all, they are expressionists, thinkers, critics, entertainers and social commentators who have, and continue to contribute to this ever growing colletion of poetry. The older poems have been preserved by the secretariat for many years, in the hope of one day finding a publisher. But since publishing comes in many forms these days, the poems have been performed, recited, aired and now, finally, blogged.

But first, a brief history of the Association.I do not know if the charming lady Pam Amadi still breathes the air of this earth, but I ask her poetic spirit to respond to this blog. I think Francis Gichuru is now a senior professor of education at Kenyatta University, but his poems, short, subtle yet deep, still tickle my heart and bring back those fond memories of my poetic childhood. I have put together some of their poems here not because they were the founders of the association (which is a historical fact, anyway) but because they wrote some fine poetry in their own right.I am thinking of Shokat Habib, Raju Umamaheswar, Sam Mbure, Marjorie Oludhe MGoye, Stoa Pokile, and many others whose poems, though not easily available in book form many years later, kept the literary embers aglow in the Kenya Times newspaper in the 1970s and 1980s.
In this electronic age, can this blog be a reunion for us, an electronic stage, where we can make a comeback, like we did at Kenyatta University's Cinema Hall in the late 1980s and at the Goethe Institute in the early 1990s?
Send your poems and comments to kenyanpoetry@yahoo.com
Posted by Kenya Association of Poets at 2:04 AM