The New Voices Poetry Contest: 2025 Theme Reveal 🔥🔥🔥🐦🔥
This theme invites poets to write from the space between memory and imagination, to converse with ancestors, elders, spirits and traditions, while dreaming of the Ghana they hope to inherit. It's about seeking wisdom from the past to shape the future.
Poets are encouraged to reflect on lost histories, cultural legacies, and personal identity — and to boldly imagine the social, political, or spiritual transformations they wish to see.
This is a call to listen deeply and speak daringly, to write poems that bridge generations and birth new narratives.
Poetic Approach1:
You may write in the form of a dialogue, where the poet converses with an ancestor, elder, tradition, or history.
You may use lyrical language, rich imagery and evocative metaphors to convey the emotional and spiritual resonance of these conversations.
You may draw from existing Ghanaian oral customs, storytelling forms, traditional songs etc. Is it an ‘apayɛ’, or incantation, or libation?
It can be in English or any Ghanaian language (but must come with a translated version).
You may experiment with structure, form, and tone to capture the essence of the dialogue.
You may break any existing rules of craft you want.
Get creative.
Some Ideas to Explore:
Inheritance:
What do we carry in our blood, our names, our dreams?
What do we inherit from our ancestors, and how do we carry their legacy forward?
Identity:
How do our ancestral roots shape our sense of self and belonging?
Who are we when we trace the line back? How do ancestral roots shape who we are — in language, in silence, in skin, in spirit?
What does it mean to belong to a people, a place, or a story that began before us?
How does that enforce the pride we have/should have in our heritage?
Wisdom:
What lessons still echo from our ancestry?
Draw upon proverbs, teachings, tales and mythologies.
What guidance does the past offer us and are we willing to listen?
What lessons can we learn from the past, and how can we apply them to our present to shape the future?
Memory:
What do we remember and what remembers us?
Reflect on personal or collective memories, forgotten histories, or suppressed truths.
How do we preserve the stories of our ancestors?
How do we preserve and honour the memories of our ancestors, and what do these memories reveal about us?
These are only suggestions. Get as creative as you want. Take as much liberty as you want. Just make sure the theme is used creatively.