Òtúrúpọ̀n Méjì and poetry of the ordinary
By Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon
MY presentation is based on the topic, Òtúrúpọ̀n Méjì and the Poetry of the Ordinary. Before I explain Òtúrúpọ̀n Méjì and its relevance to this presentation, I would like to begin by asking where poetic inquiry begins.
Poets have long used ordinary objects to express ideas about human experience. A mouth becomes a blade to convey cruelty; a fading flower represents the passing of youth; a broken mirror suggests a fractured identity. Through simile, metaphor, and symbolism, the familiar becomes a means of communicating meanings beyond its immediate form. This tradition has produced remarkable poetry. Yet it raises a question worth asking. Can an ordinary object serve not only as a vehicle for expressing an idea, but also as a starting point for discovering knowledge about human experience? This is the concern of my presentation: how a poet might begin with an object, examine its material existence, and follow the questions that emerge from sustained attention to it, allowing the inquiry to shape the poem’s understanding of the world and the relationships within it.
To explore the philosophical grounding for this approach within our own African epistemology, I turn to Òtúrúpọ̀n Méjì and a story associated with it.
Òtúrúpọ̀n Méjì: The dispersal of wisdom
Òtúrúpọ̀n Méjì is the 12th of the 16th principal Odù Ifá within the Yoruba system of divination, knowledge, and oral literature. In a story associated with the Odù, Tortoise gathers all the wisdom in the world into a calabash, intending to keep it for himself. He attempts to hide it at the top of an Iroko, but the calabash, held against his chest, obstructs his climb. Snail shows him a way to climb that he has failed to discover. When Tortoise realises this, a struggle ensues. Determined to reclaim the calabash, he fights Snail, and their struggle carries them across the land, through the water, and into the air, over different terrains and through different places.
In the course of the fight, the calabash breaks open, and the wisdom it contains scatters across the earth, into the soil, through the waters, and into the air. Wisdom is no longer contained in one vessel or possessed by one individual. It is dispersed throughout the world. Wherever one finds oneself, there is wisdom to encounter and something to learn.
I read this dispersal as a way of thinking about knowledge as distributed throughout the world rather than monopolised by a single possessor. I approach Òtúrúpọ̀n Méjì not merely as folklore or cultural illustration, but as a philosophical resource whose account of dispersed wisdom opens up possibilities for thinking about knowledge and poetic inquiry. From this perspective, ordinary objects and experiences become starting points for investigating what their material circumstances reveal and what we might come to understand through sustained attention to them.
Consider, for instance, a mug, a ceiling fan, a sheet of paper, an alarm clock, or a mound of eba. Though seemingly unremarkable, each has a material history and exists within circumstances that can help us understand the complexities of love, the experience of mortality, the conditions of labour, the workings of inequality, or our relationship with time.
The story does not explicitly prescribe a method of poetic composition. Rather, I draw on its dispersal of wisdom to propose that poetry need not look beyond ordinary life for knowledge from which a poem can emerge. A poem can begin by looking more closely at what is already before us.
This also has implications for who can write poetry. The experiences that furnish poetic inquiry are not exclusive to professionally trained writers. Everyone encounters objects, observes changes, maintains relationships, experiences loss, and participates in the routines of living. These experiences provide possible starting points for poetry, although transforming them into compelling poems requires attention, craft, and revision.
Take a look at the ordinary process of cutting one’s hair: hair grows, a barber cuts it, and it grows again. Repeated over a lifetime, this process offers an opportunity to contemplate change, repetition, aging, and the body’s relationship with time. No extraordinary event is necessary. The poetic possibility is already present in a familiar experience. The question is what we learn to see in it.
From objects as metaphors to objects as sources of knowledge
The distinction I present does not reject metaphor, simile, or symbolism. It concerns the role the object plays in the development of a poem. When a poet writes that a mouth is as sharp as a blade, the blade provides a comparison through which the reader understands the mouth. When a poet describes a broken mirror as a symbol of fractured identity, the mirror carries an idea that the poet wishes to communicate. In both instances, the object serves an expressive purpose. It helps the poet convey an understanding.
But what might happen if the poet stayed with the object long enough for an understanding to emerge?
Let’s take an ordinary object, a broken mug. Rather than immediately deciding that it represents a broken relationship, the poet examines its history, its deterioration, its continued use, and the owner’s reluctance to discard it. These details may eventually lead towards questions about attachment, memory, love, or the difficulty of leaving a painful past behind.
The object can still acquire symbolic meaning. The difference is that its material existence remains central to the poem’s development. Its meaning emerges through sustained attention to what it is, what has happened to it, and how someone continues to relate to it.
This is poetic inquiry through ordinary objects: the practice of investigating an object until its material circumstances disclose something about human experience.
The distinction matters because a poem can begin with a profound idea and still offer little discovery. When an object merely illustrates a conclusion the poet has already reached, the poem risks remaining within the limits of that initial understanding. But when sustained attention to the object complicates the poet’s assumptions, the poem creates room for inquiry, discovery, and surprise. The object becomes central to the poem’s development of knowledge rather than simply serving its expressive purpose.
Majekodunmi Ebhohon
An illustrative contrast: Two poems about daffodils
To illustrate the distinction, let us turn to William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” commonly known as “Daffodils,” alongside my poem on the same object.
‘Daffodils’
The daffodils were planted in rows.
Each bulb received its small plot of earth,
each stem its measured share of light.
Come spring, the yellow heads opened
at the same height, facing the same sun.
The gardener cut the dead flowers
but left the leaves to feed the bulbs.
For weeks, the garden looked neglected.
Visitors asked, _“why leave it untidied?”_.
He said the work was not finished.
By summer, the leaves had yellowed.
He pulled them loose and cleared the beds.
Beneath the soil, the old bulbs had spent
their strength making smaller bulbs.
He separated the crowded ones,
kept the sound, discarded the rotten.
In autumn, he dug new holes
and planted the smaller bulbs in rows.
He worked until the garden was full again,
then washed the soil from his hands.
The following spring, the daffodils returned.
Some were taller. Some flowered early.
A few did not flower at all.
The gardener marked their positions
and waited for the next season.
When the council came to inspect the garden,
they praised the flowers for surviving
three years after the village was cleared.
The gardener showed them the plan:
every row matched a street;
every bulb had been lifted
from a demolished house’s front garden.
The council asked what should be done
with the flowers.
He pointed to the yellow heads
bending in the wind.
“They’re ready,” he said.
“Dig them up. The houses are coming back.”
In Wordsworth’s poem, the flowers’ beauty gives the speaker pleasure, and their remembered image renews that pleasure later. The daffodils provide a way of exploring the relationship between nature, memory, and emotional experience.
My poem ‘Daffodils’ takes a different approach. It follows the daffodils through their cultivation, seasonal changes, reproduction, and transplantation. These details gradually disclose a history of displacement: the flowers were taken from the front gardens of demolished homes. Their survival and return consequently become inseparable from the fate of the community that once lived there. The daffodils are not simply illustrations of an idea about displacement. Their material history generates the circumstances through which that idea becomes legible. The poem discovers its political significance by following what happened to the flowers.
The contrast is not between a poem with insight and one without it. It is between two ways an object can contribute to poetic understanding: by awakening an emotional response and by becoming the subject of an inquiry through which new understanding emerges.
The following poems also demonstrate what it means to treat an ordinary object as a source of poetic knowledge:
‘The Return Policy’
I bought a red mug from the market.
The trader said
if it cracked before sunset,
I could bring it back.
So I carried it home,
set it beside the sink,
and spent the afternoon
dropping spoons into the red mug,
tapping the rim with a fork,
holding it beneath the tap,
waiting for a fault.
At dusk,
the red mug was still there.
The receipt was still there.
The road to the market
was still there.
I tore the receipt in half.
Years later,
the red mug sits in the cupboard.
The handle broken.
The glaze left.
A chip fell from the lip,
showing the grey dirt underneath.
Each morning,
I reach past six newer mugs
to find the old red.
In ‘The Return Policy’, the speaker’s relationship with the mug becomes most revealing years after the purchase. Its handle is broken, its glaze has worn away, and a chip exposes the material beneath. Yet the speaker reaches past six newer mugs to find it. This small act raises a question the poem leaves unanswered: what makes us continue to choose something whose condition has deteriorated when alternatives are available? The mug’s significance emerges through its physical deterioration and the speaker’s continued use of it. Rather than illustrating a predetermined idea about attachment, the object’s history gives the poem a way to investigate why we hold on.
My next poem, ‘Double Funeral’, examines what an object’s transformation can conceal:
‘Double Funeral’
I am sitting
at a desk
made of oak,
holding a white sheet
of what used to be
a different, taller
version of the forest.
We were not satisfied
with the first death—
the sudden bite
of the steel,
the heavy shudder
of the trunk
hitting the forest floor.
We required
a second, slower exit.
So we took
the timber to the vats,
washing away
the green spirit
with a caustic bath,
until the wood forgot
the bird’s nest
and the rough texture
of the rain.
Now it lies here,
flat and pale,
staring back
with a chemical face
now taught
to hold ink
instead of sap.
I pick up a pen
to save the world,
drawing a line
across this white corpse
to speak
for trees,
the only thing
in the room
that has died twice
to bear
all I ache
to pour.
In ‘Double Funeral’, paper becomes the means through which the poem examines a contradiction in environmental advocacy. The tree is felled, processed into timber, and chemically transformed into a sheet of paper. The speaker then picks up a pen to defend the natural world, writing on the remains of that same world. The contradiction is material: the speaker’s attempt to speak for trees depends on a product of their destruction.
The paper’s transformation also raises a question about intention and consequence. Can we defend the natural world without examining the material systems and practices through which we live? The poem arrives at this question by following the paper’s passage from tree to writing surface. Its environmental argument emerges from the history of the object on which it is written.
My final example is ‘Eba’, which explores how an ordinary process can disclose aspects of the human condition:
‘Eba’
I am looking at a fresh mound of eba
in a plastic bowl,
steaming and smooth,
having just endured the violent slapping
of a wooden spoon
and the scalding water of its birth.
Right now, it is in its twenties—supple, radiant,
and full of yellow optimism.
But if you leave it on the counter long enough,
the midday sun moves across the linoleum,
and a subtle tightening begins.
The skin grows leathery,
the way a face does
after forty years of afternoons.
It begins to shrink slightly
from the edges of its world,
withdrawing into a quieter,
more solid version of itself.
By evening, the steam is gone.
The stiffness sets into the joints of the contour,
and a fine network of cracks map the surface,
like the lines around my own eyes
when I look too closely into the bathroom mirror.
And then, the forced retirement.
A pale fuzz appears on the crest
followed by the slow,
sour bruising of the core.
The yellow giving way to gray,
softening, sinking into its footprint,
until it is no longer a meal,
but a brief history of what it means to grow cold.
In Eba, the food’s progression from freshness to deterioration provides a way to examine ageing and mortality. The changing texture, the cracks forming across its surface, and the eventual appearance of mould give physical form to a process the speaker recognises in the human body. The comparison becomes especially personal when the speaker sees in the eba’s cracks the lines around their own eyes.
The poem’s reflection on ageing develops through the food’s changing condition. By following this familiar process, the poem makes mortality available for contemplation without beginning with an abstract argument about death. Here, an ordinary food becomes a means of examining the passage of time through changes that can be observed.
A practical method: LOOK’
To make this approach easier to apply, I have organised it into four steps under the acronym, LOOK.
L — Locate the object
Begin with something ordinary and specific: a cup, a key, a receipt, a pair of shoes, a light switch. Place it in a real situation. Avoid deciding too early what it should mean.
O — Observe its material life
What is it made of? How is it used? What happens to it over time? What does it enable, prevent, conceal, or endure? Look beyond its appearance to its function, condition, and history.
O — Open the questions
Ask what the object’s actual properties or circumstances might reveal. A locked box may raise questions about protection and confinement. A switch may raise questions about who controls the power it appears to offer. Let the questions arise from the object rather than impose a message on it.
K — Keep looking
Resist the first interpretation. Follow the details further. Allow the object to complicate your initial idea, and let the poem discover something you had not fully understood before you began writing.
The aim is not to eliminate metaphor, symbolism, or imagination. It is to give them something concrete to work from. An object may acquire symbolic force, but that force should grow from the poem’s encounter with it.
A short workshop exercise
I encourage us to choose an ordinary object within reach. Spend three minutes observing it before writing anything. First, record five details about its material condition, use, or history. Avoid comparisons and abstract ideas for now. Write what you can actually observe.
Next, ask three questions: What does this object make possible? What does it conceal or prevent? What has happened to it, or what might happen to it, through continued use?
Then write a short poem in which the object remains central. You may discover a human relationship, a political arrangement, a memory, or a question of mortality. But do not explain the connection before the poem has earned it. Let the reader encounter the details and participate in the discovery.
Finally, examine the draft. If the object could be replaced by any other object without changing the poem, you may not yet have looked closely enough. Return to its particular features and see what they can do.
Wisdom in the ordinary
The story associated with Òtúrúpọ̀n Méjì invites us to reconsider where wisdom may be found. My engagement with it has led me to consider ordinary objects not merely as vehicles for expressing ideas, but as starting points for investigating human experience.
Every object offers a possible starting point for poetic inquiry. Its material history, present condition, uses, transformations, and relationships with other things provide grounds for questions about the world. A poem need not begin with an extraordinary experience or a completed philosophical argument; it can begin with something on the table, in the room, or in the hand. The poet’s task is to investigate what the object reveals and shape that discovery through language, structure, rhythm, and choices about what to leave unsaid.
Dear brother Godson Osarenren and the entire Naija Poetry Fest Community, I thank you so much for the opportunity that you have extended to me to share my reflections with you.
* Ebhohon, author of The Great Delusion, delivered this presentation on 13 October 2026 at Naija Poetry Fest Community Workshop
