Interview by David Ly
Tolu Oloruntoba’s debut poetry collection, The Junta of Happenstance, is a journey through syncopated language to peel back his own interpretation of the (im)migrant experience, struggles against social injustices, and his time as a physician. What follows is an interview between Tolu and David Ly as they discuss how The Junta of Happenstance came into being, the experience of choosing a cover image, and how Tolu knows when a poem is done.
David Ly: Before The Junta of Happenstance, you wrote a chapbook called Manubrium (its title poem included in The Junta of Happenstance). How did you find moving from putting together a chapbook, to a full collection?
Tolu Oloruntoba: I began The Junta of Happenstance as a series of three thematically linked chapbooks. I found that focusing on one section at a time, each of which could stand alone, helped me complete about twenty to twenty five poems at a time. It seemed less daunting than setting out to write an entire book, especially since I wrote most of the poems over a three-year period. I had been using “man-” words as a motif to explore the inherent violences of humanity. In one of the chaps, Mangonel, I had used the register of medieval siege warfare. Another of the chapbooks, Mantis, was a finalist in a couple of chapbook competitions, which gave me some confidence that it wasn’t all nonsense. Jim Johnstone accepted Manubrium for publication by Anstruther Press, and the shape many of those poems took made it into The Junta of Happenstance, which Jim edited. I found that having a strong sense of my theme, and working toward that, was more effective than collecting disparate poems.
DL: There is such syncopated language in your poems which is evidence of how long you spend on them, writing with such an eye for detail. How does a poem begin for you, and how do you know when one is done?
TO: Thanks, David. Poems often begin for me with an image, or a phrase that arrives from my subconscious, often from things I have been thinking or reading about. These are usually the cells that the crystals of my poems form around, gathering mass over time in my notes. I rarely write an entire poem all at once. When I write poems quickly, I aggregate my lines over several hours. More often, the process takes weeks. A poem is never done. You either get it published or you keep editing it whenever you stumble on to it, until you die. I often replace words or edit small aspects of poems that have been published, when I have to read them publicly. There’s always something that could be said better, often because of the clarity that time away from the work builds. Having said this, I often sense I am done with the poem when I get a sigh-like feeling, a feeling like I have said all I could say at the time, as well as I could say it, while being faithful to what I had in mind.
DL: How do you find your background in practicing medicine helps you write poetry?
TO: Having spent six years in medical school and another six practicing medicine, I find that a lot of my metaphorical language inevitably delves into medical terminology. I try not to be overtly “medical,” but my training gave me an incredible investment in figuring out how people function that I find to be a great way to live. That’s a wonderful toolset for any poet. Medicine depends on many things: deftly describing what is there, knowing (broadly) how a system fits together, knowing how to guess at what may be wrong, knowing how to investigate a problem, tracking trends in the data, knowing how the environment and non-evident factors affect the individual, and knowing how to propose a path forward. See? Poetry.
DL: How did the cover come about for this collection? Were there other options you explored?
TO: I accepted the first front cover design Kate Hargreaves created. She absolutely nailed it. The publisher said, “Are you sure?” and sent me two more designs, but I knew we had struck gold with the first. Accepted without any changes. I am so grateful to Kate for her brilliant design of the entire book. I knew I wanted a cover image that interpreted themes from the book through West African sculpture. I had often felt odd while viewing African collections at the Museum of Modern Art or the Baltimore Museum of Art. The pieces, many of which I suspect had been expatriated fraudulently or through looting, felt forlorn and out-of-place. My rumination on this also drew from recent efforts (some of which have become successful) to return pieces of art looted from what is now Nigeria. The 1897 British expedition in Benin is one example, which I write about in the book. The ancient city of Benin was destroyed by British forces that then looted thousands of artifacts from the Oba’s palace. Many of these pieces were eventually auctioned off or donated to museums around the world. I found an image of one such piece, the Benin plaque “Warrior and Attendants,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was appropriately martial and confrontational, and diasporic like me, and tied in well with the themes of conflict (and colonial legacies) that animate the book. I also wanted to use white space in the way that several designs I liked—like your chapbook, Stubble Burn, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Cezontle, Alison C. Rollins’ Library of Small Catastrophes, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Lucky Fish—did.
DL: I think my favourite poem in your book is “Heretic.” It does a very good job of creating this uneasy atmosphere where you feel like you’re being watched. Do you have a favourite poem in the collection? If so, which and why?
TO: Thanks! I liked writing “Heretic.” You and I need to prepare for when the secret police arrive to disappear us. The poem I think of most fondly, however, is “Grove,” because it helped me find the first coordinates in my journey to what became the book. It is short, but perfectly conveys my state of mind at a very important time in my life. I lived in a low-rise condo complex at the time, and there was a telegraph pole behind the building, just outside my window, and a cemetery beyond. I may have been imagining it, but it seemed to me that the box attached to the pole emitted an almost-constant dial tone, which, with the sound of traffic below, became the background hum of my life (“the curtains of the world / do not hush the dial tone traffic”). Also, probably because the apartment was dry, I often saw my duvet give off electrostatic sparks when the room was dark, and I was turning around (“In black light / the forest is an eye white fishbone grave— / we are bleached and all-pupil in its dark”). The atmosphere these things created (which takes me back to that exact place and time) helped me describe an interesting phenomenon, in which one does not realize they are despairing until someone asks about it or points it out.
DL: What was an unexpected obstacle you encountered while creating this book?
TO: The difficulty of writing acknowledgments! It felt like an extreme sport, knowing that I would forget to include some people, that my relationship with some people who deserved thanks had changed, and that I didn’t want to keep going for ten pages.
DL: Why is it that “The key to a large door / can be infinitely small” if “the machinery of rib walls / creates air for the world”?
TO: Because nothing makes sense, until it does, and the improbable, when it is before us, often seems inevitable.
Tolu Oloruntoba was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and practiced medicine before his current work managing virtual health projects for BC health organizations. His poetry has appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, PRISM International, Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Obsidian, The Maynard, Humber Literary Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His debut chapbook, Manubrium, was published by Anstruther Press, and was shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award, while his debut full-length poetry collection, The Junta of Happenstance, was published by Palimpsest Press in Spring 2021. He lives in Surrey, BC, in the territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, and Kwantlen Nations. Find him on Twitter @toluini and on Instagram @tolu1n1.
David Ly is the author of Mythical Man, which was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Poetry Award. His sophomore poetry collection, Dream of Me as Water, is forthcoming in 2022. David is the Poetry Editor at This Magazine, part of the Anstruther Press Editorial Collective, and a Poetry Manuscript Consultant with The Writers’ Studio at SFU.