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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Poems for sale: stylistic features of Yorùbá ìpolówó poetry
Author:Osundare, NiyiISNI
Year:1991
Periodical:African Notes: Bulletin of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan
Volume:15
Issue:1-2
Pages:63-72
Language:English
Geographic term:Nigeria
Subjects:Yoruba
oral poetry
Abstract:Yorùbá ìpolówó poetry, like modern-day advertising, brings 'the knowledge of desirable goods to the customer'. In the traditional setting it is a face-to-face, street-to-street activity, which is carried out in anticipation of an immediate response. Its medium is the human voice. Ìpolówó poetry is not merely functional. As a strategy of persuasion, it possesses an aesthetic appeal which first calls attention to itself before seducing potential customers for the product it hawks. Some of this beauty derives from its lexical composition, and its imagery - its metaphor, simile, personification, its structural and rhetorical devices, such as ellipsis and repetition, its phonological strategies, such as phonaesthetics, rhythm and tonal contrast. The author examines the stylistic features of the content, form and performance of Yorùbá ìpolówó poetry. He concludes with a few brief remarks on the audience of ìpolówó poetry and notes that hawking, especially in Nigeria's urban centres, has now been almost completely taken over by radio, television, and to a lesser extent, newspapers. App., bibliogr.
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