Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of April 6th
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It is the 96th day of the year, leaving 269 days remaining in 2022.
Clark told harsh stories of war and inhumanity in his poems and other writings, but also sensual tales of nature's beauty and traditional African life.
He was a journalist and a scholar, conducting research into the traditional legends of his Ijo, or Ijaw, tribe. One of his plays, Ozida, is a traditional Ijo performance, He also translated the work into English for a film production.
He was a graduate of the University of Ibadan and lectured at the University of Lagos for several years. He also held visiting professorships at Yale and Wesleyan universities in Connecticut. Clark also studied at Princeton University in New Jersey, and a book about his stay there, America, Their America, criticized middle-American values, capitalism, and Black American lifestyles.
But it is his poetry Clark is best known for. Casualites: Poems 1966-68, is a collection of his poems that speak about the horrific nature of the Biafran-Nigerian war, which came about when the Ijo tribe declared independence from Nigerian. The country violently suppressed the burgeoning state.
We fall.All casualties of the war.Because we cannot hear each other speak.Because eyes have ceased the face from the crowd.Because whether we know orDo not the extent of wrongs on all sides,We are characters now other than beforeThe war began, the stay-at-home unsettled.
Another collection, A Reed in the Tide, contains poems about his African background and his world travels. His final volume, published in 1988, is Mandela and Other Poems, which focuses on aging and death.
Clark, who published under the names J.P. Clark and John Pepper Clark, died in November 2020.
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