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What sparks a poem? How long does it take for an idea to become a poem? In a dynamic series of very personal essays, Inua Ellams shares his own experience of creating poetry, taking the listener on five vivid and varied journeys. Each essay culminates in a poem taken from his most recent collection, The Actual.

Inua sets out the starting point and context for a poem, unpicking his relationship to its central motifs and themes, drawing on a wide range of social and cultural references. The series offers an in-depth and personal exploration of the process of creating individual poems from an award-winning young poet. Poetic Provocations invites the listener into a poet’s mind and process with refreshing honesty, warm wit, political analysis and insight.

The essayist

Born in Nigeria in 1984, Inua Ellams is an internationally touring poet, playwright, performer, graphic artist and designer. He is an ambassador for the Ministry of Stories and his published books of poetry include Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, The Wire-Headed Heathen, #Afterhours and The Half-God of Rainfall – an epic story in verse. His first play, The 14th Tale, was awarded a Fringe First at Edinburgh International Theatre Festival and his fourth, Barber Shop Chronicles, sold out two runs at England’s National Theatre. He is currently touring An Evening with an Immigrant and working on various commissions across stage and screen. He founded the Midnight Run in London, a nocturnal urban excursion, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Essay 2: Kipling / Kipling’s legacy

Inua considers Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the invention of race and racism, how its myth was evidenced in philosophy and biology in an endeavour to prop up the colonial enterprise and the slave trading industry, and how these beliefs still play out in the world, during the pandemic, across countries and cultures and in the death of George Floyd. As institutions struggle to, or refuse calls to, decolonise or make more inclusive programmes, it is left to artists and writers to undermine and critique, and Inua’s final tongue-in-cheek poem, fantasising about Kipling’s death, serves that very function.

Essayist, Inua Ellams
Producer, Polly Thomas
Exec producer, Eloise Whitmore

A Naked Production for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 3

[Photo credit: Danny Kasirye]