Anderson Tepper introduced Ben Okri; Ben Okri introduced the empty chair. The empty chair takes on more power, the more PEN events one attends. Okri's introduction was so beautifully felt and spoken that it resonated as the best I've heard so far.
Okri was a surprise to this reader of the dazzling novel THE FAMISHED ROAD. He is more professorial than I had expected, and several of his poems were lists of rules. However, I tried to follow his credo of approaching things with an open mind. Why should I have expected him to be any way at all?
Most interesting to me were his words about the sources of his own writing. His mother a storyteller, and his Nigerian life imbued his...
