some ghanaian poetry updates

One Ghana, One Voice is humming along nicely these days. Our latest endeavour is a Ghanaian version of Arc's "How Poems Work" series. Our first "How Poems Work" went up a couple weeks ago. It's an analysis of recently-deceased Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew's poem "The Sea Eats Our Lands" by still-living Ghanaian poet L.S. Mensah. It's great stuff, and can be read here.

Along with L.S., another up-and-coming Ghanaian poet making his mark on the scene is Darko Antwi, who has started up the new blog/magazine for African writing, Phillis Wheatley Chapter. My poem on Kwame Nkrumah, "Child of Saturday", has been posted on the site and can be read here. He's accompanied the poem with some photos of Nkrumah, including one with his wife and W.E.B. Du Bois, whose house and library in Accra I visited regularly - those can be viewed here.

Another upstart African publishing venture is Mensa Press, founded by Maryland-based Ghanaian poet Prince Mensah. The press is publishing five (!) poetry anthologies of primarily African content in the coming months. It's a great, and risky, project and I wish Prince all the success in the world in his efforts. One of the books will contain a few of my poems on Ghana, and I have written the introduction for another. I'll be sure to pass on more info about the books as it comes out over the next few months (for now, the sample cover in this post will have to do).

And while I'm on things Ghanaian + poetry, a blog post by one of our OGOV contributors, Holli Holdsworth, has been Twitted about by some local poets (small world, eh?). It's a post on food costs/consumption in Ghana and it's padded out by some... let's say "borrowed"... images and statistics from Hungry Planet: What the World Eats on the average weekly food consumption of families from various parts of the world (which were originally posted on the food blog of one of our dearest friends from Ghana [now living in Nashville] Erin McDonnell - smaller world!). You can read the blog post in question here, and a poem of Holli's from OGOV here.