OctoGenarian Tour Sojourning Collective Poetikz
Two weeks ago, We launched the OctoGenarian Tour, stepping out on a sojourn that will test my endurance & reveal the possible. For the next 13 months, I’m nomadding multiple cities with meaning & a message for self-publishing Poetz & Activistz: We are more together than we can ever be apart, the Collective’s cultural logic is the way forward. That forward momentum is a work of Collective Poetikz that inspires, resonates, & recasts a people’s will to alter the world they inhabit & make—a slight digression.
Today a FB post questioned what it means to be alive! Questioned one’s moral & ethical positioning in the world, & the very meaning of life as it unfolds. Why are we alive? Do we unfold life or are we simply hosts for Life as it unfolds within us? A homeless man prompted this writer’s introspection. The post pictured the man lying fetal on cardboard under a bridge.
Wow, felt I, this is moral dilemma on the razor’s edge? I read on. The writer coaxed the reader to take another look at their own life & find answers to the questions he posed. Do we appreciate & luv ourselves enough to luv others? Are we open to hear them & respond to their self-doubt & perhaps our own loathing?
Moments before, vulnerable, reaching out beyond my limitations to be seen as needy, I’d written an appeal to be emailed to 100 people asking for help with this OctoGenarian Tour launched on the 28th of September. Points raised in the FB post highlighted & seamlessly tied into emotional points of my differently stated appeal. We live in perilous times & witness from differing perspectives but, there’s no time I can remember when crisis wasn’t banging on the front door—from my brother’s departure to the Korean war to the wars & hueman carnage unfolding worldwide today. Crisis & trauma are the sine qua non of the Western world order.
That said, the Ancestors willing, I’ll turn 80 in March, & I’ve undertaken a multicity poetry tour that runs thru November 2025. It aims to network self-publishing poetz into collective agency for the individual & her community. Poetz possess the power to initiate healing. Spiritwise, Poetz are cultures’ change agents with the heart, voice, & language to bring baffling worlds into actionable focus.
Poetry & history raised me from the dead level almost 60 years ago when I was sentenced to die for a murder I did not commit. That death sentence, the Vietnam war, political assassinations, Black communities engulfed in flame, rage, & hope were part of my infolding huemanity. But the ‘60s gave us more than individual clarity: A rise of collective consciousness stopped the war; Afrikan People changed identity, straightened our backs, cleared our minds, & brought citizenship to America & political liberation to Afrika. Women in the US found their voice & the collective will to shift the body politic.
But that era’s beauty was also its trauma. We became hypnotized by political sophistry, addicted to debt & wanton consumerism, enslaving technologies, & the elitist propaganda of finance capital & corporate state governance.
Today’s world is more dangerous still. Though more witnessed, it’s less contested than the ‘60s. The deluge of dystopian trauma our bodies & minds suck up daily thru small screens & 24/7 social media monitoring has numbed our souls. Here at home, poverty rages, immigrants & women are targets of lying politicians; & here & abroad, corporate-inflicted climate disasters & war everywhere are financed with American tax dollars. It’s happening on our watch & we’re numb, stupefied. Corporate media can’t be trusted to report reliable news. Social media diffuses our collective identity, & eviscerates actionable solidarity. We have only one another to lean on.
Poetz can’t stop the carnage but we can tell you the truth of how it’s reshaping our huemanity. We feel it! We speak its impact! Poetz are change agents & our words are medicine! We have the heart & language to evoke feelings & raise the collective consciousness. One voice, one body is not enough. That’s why we’re working to pull the Poetz together. This tour will gather the truth tellers & proclaim Life, Luv, & holding the planet & one another sacred as the medicine we need. Change happens from the bottom up each one teaching one, & all change begins with conversation.
This tour isn’t about me, politics, or even one particular outrage of man’s inhuemanity to man. It’s the All of Us being that Light in the window across the wide Ohio River when my Ancestors escaped enslavement. It’s Langston’s Racial Mountain in the ’20s. Malcolm’s manhood in the ’50s & ’60s. It’s the youth of the ‘60s saying, Hell no, We won’t go! Black Arts Movement Poets telling Afrikan people Get Up, Stand Up, It’s Nation Time! This tour is one hueman hand reaching out to the many. It’s OUR collective hueman voice saying, I SEE YOU!
My SS check can’t finance the tour. But the Life that remains in me as I navigate this 80th cycle around the sun still has the strength & the fire to be a finger in the dike of oppression, trauma, & death. No one person can stop the insanity we see, but together, we can take a stand for what it means to be hueman & free & a planet-luving people evoking planetary resonance that speaks the Luv of Creation.
Please, give what you can as often as you can. Our GoFundMe Campaign can be found here.
Peace, Luv, Respect!
Kétu Oladuwa
