This article studies collections of inspirational poetry published on the Nigerian online platform and app, OkadaBooks. OkadaBooks lets users upload and access ebooks for free or at a low cost. Nigerian inspirational poetry can be seen as a hybrid poetic form that borrows from motivational speaking, self-help and religious pamphlet literature. The collections are marketed to readers as works of literature that through their literary qualities and poetic language can inspire the reader to create a better future for him- or herself. The main argument in the article is that the poetic and rhetorical devices that are used in this literature, which I propose to call the poetics of uplift, can be read as instrumental in the commodification of the text. The poets foreground the relevance and value of their texts through the different ways in which they promulgate a view of poetic language as having the power to change people’s futures for the better. The article looks specifically at how poets use literary devices such as the use of the pronoun ‘you’ and the imperative grammatical mode to speak directly to the reader and further considers how these poems explicitly celebrate language and the very concept of poetry.

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OkadaBooks 与隆起的诗学

本文研究了在尼日利亚在线平台和应用程序 OkadaBooks 上发表的励志诗歌集。OkadaBooks 允许用户免费或以低成本上传和访问电子书。尼日利亚励志诗歌可以被视为一种混合诗歌形式，它借鉴了励志演讲、自助和宗教小册子文学。这些藏品作为文学作品销售给读者，通过其文学品质和诗意的语言可以激发读者为自己创造更美好的未来。这篇文章的主要论点是，本文中使用的诗意和修辞手法，我建议将其称为提升诗学，可以被解读为有助于文本商品化。诗人通过不同的方式来宣传他们文本的相关性和价值，他们以不同的方式宣扬诗歌语言的观点，因为它具有使人们的未来变得更好的力量。这篇文章特别关注诗人如何使用文学手段，例如使用代词“你”和命令式语法模式直接与读者交谈，并进一步考虑这些诗歌如何明确地颂扬语言和诗歌的概念。