Song of Ascent: On Yewande Adenike Akinse’s The Harmony of Ing and Isms.

Yewande Adenike Akinse has written a pamphlet of striking inward radiance, one that treats selfhood not as a fixed monument but as a living pilgrimage through weather, inheritance, thought, and spirit. In The Harmony of Ing and Isms, the poet turns language into a chamber of meditation, where becoming is more important than arrival and where the quest for the highest self unfolds through tension, surrender, and lucid resolve.

What is most impressive here is the pamphlet’s governing intelligence. Akinse builds her meditation around the elastic interplay between “ing” and “isms,” transforming grammar and abstraction into a profound philosophical architecture. “Ing” becomes motion, process, breath, and continual emergence, while “isms” suggest the systems, beliefs, identities, and inherited structures through which a life must pass and against which it must sometimes press in order to remain fully alive. The poem’s genius lies in its refusal to simplify this relationship. It does not demonize ideology outright, nor does it worship flux for its own sake. Instead, it seeks a hard won harmony, a music of being in which structure and spontaneity, spirit and soul, faith and doubt may coexist without annihilating one another.

Akinse’s speaker is a pilgrim from the opening lines, “meandering through vicissitudes to safe harbour,” and that image gives the work its moral atmosphere. This is not the rhetoric of easy triumph. It is the speech of a consciousness that has been tested by chaos, crisis, longing, and uncertainty, yet remains committed to movement. The recurring declarations, “I am not alone” and “all I seek is to be,” carry unusual force because they emerge from struggle rather than innocence. The poems understand that self actualization is not a clean ascent. It is a passage through contradiction. One must travel through the crossfire of ambition and nostalgia, yearning and surrender, hope and hesitation, before any durable vision of the self can be earned.

The poems are also deeply attentive to ancestry and embodiment. When Akinse writes of descending “from great ancestry” and names herself “as woman and as black,” she anchors the inward quest in history and flesh. Self realization here is not a solitary abstraction detached from the world. It is a reckoning with lineage, race, gender, memory, and the collective burdens and blessings that accompany them. Yet the poem never allows these realities to become cages. They are part of the song of ascent. They are prisms through which the speaker learns to negotiate existence and essence, not barriers to transcendence. In this, Akinse achieves something rare. She writes a poetry of identity that remains spacious, metaphysical, and hospitable to mystery.

There is, too, a notable musicality in the poem’s repetitions and returns. Phrases recur like bells across water, gathering resonance with each reappearance. “The harmony of both, is to have lived” becomes less a refrain than an earned article of faith. Through this incantatory method, Akinse gives the poem a ritual quality, as though each stanza were another step upward on an interior staircase. The movement is circular and ascending at once. The speaker revisits doubt, but from a changed altitude. She names fear, but shapes light from it. By the final movement, the pamphlet arrives at a vision of the self not as perfected certainty but as awakened continuity, “present and continuous,” “progressive and perpetual,” “unafraid, & unbound.”

What lingers after the reading is the pamphlet’s largeness of spirit. Akinse has written a work that honors the unfinished nature of becoming. She suggests that the highest self is not discovered in purity, but in the difficult art of accommodation, in learning what to discard, what to embrace, and how to walk with both motion and stillness in the same body. That is the true beauty of this body of work. It recognizes that to live fully is to remain in process, to carry one’s faith and doubt as lanterns, and to continue the ascent with humility, courage, and wonder. In that sense, The Harmony of Ing and Isms is not merely a poetry pamphlet about self actualization. It is itself an act of self actualization, written with grace, thought, and a luminous seriousness that compels admiration.