Full Title: “He didn’t know what a sonnet was. Now he’s won a major poetry prize. (via Washington Post)”
Sitting in class on his first day at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ajibola Tolase thought: I don’t stand a chance in this room.
He wanted badly to be a poet, but it was instantly obvious, he said, that “I had no education in poetry.” The other students in his master of fine arts program had gone to Stanford, Harvard, the University of Chicago, studying English or something like it. Tolase had a statistics degree from the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta, Nigeria. The culture shock, he said over a recent Zoom call, was nearly as stark as the cold. (“It’s not even freezing yet!” Midwesterners informed him cheerfully that fall.)
“When they talk, they know things. When we’re reading books, they have terms to describe things,” Tolase, 29, recalled of his classmates. “‘Anaphora.’ I had not heard the word ‘anaphora’ before. Our first assignment was to write in blank verse. At that time, I had not written in any meter. I’m like, ‘First I have to figure out what iambic pentameter is.’”
Five years later, Tolase has been awarded the Cave Canem Prize, putting him in a storied literary lineage. The Cave Canem fellowship, founded in 1996 to nurture Black poetry, boasts a network that includes the winners of six Pulitzers and five National Book Awards. This prize alone has launched the careers of two U.S. poets laureate: Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey. By winning it, Tolase has also secured publication for his debut collection: The University of Pittsburgh Press will release “2,000 Blacks” in the fall.
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Links:
Washington Post | Ajibola Tolase
