Futures

Abstract

How might a poem aspire to outlive its initial historical moment? How are digital formats altering the significance of publication and the experience of reading? Responding to critiques of lyric reading as an abstraction from history, this chapter suggests that poems published in digital literary magazines give us an opportunity to investigate how poems think through their own entanglement with history and open up alternate temporalities. It discusses such African-run litmags as Saraba, Agbowó, Sentinel Poetry (Online), Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Jalada, and Isele Magazine. For poets including Logan February, Ogaga Ifowodo, Jumoke Verissimo, Tsitsi Jaji, and Lillian Akampurira Aujo who have chosen to publish in these litmags, freedom is a matter of reimagining political structures in relation to sexuality, sociality, and the self. Thinking with the utopian possibilities of their poems, the chapter argues that their temporalities of recurrence and futurity expose the limitations of the present.