[In the following interview, Walcott discusses his formative experiences and cultural influences on Saint Lucia, his views on the development and multicultural atmosphere of the Caribbean, his work as a playwright, his interest in film, and his approach to the composition and teaching of poetry.]

The author of many plays and books of poetry, Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He lives in Saint Lucia and in Boston. This interview took place January, 1995 at Walcott's studio in Saint Lucia and was broadcast on Voice of America.

[Styron:] So let's start at the beginning: tell me a bit about your early childhood on St. Lucia—your first memories, or your parents in this multi-racial, multi-cultural group of islands—where you went to school, and how you started writing poetry.

[Walcott:] I was born here, not far from where I am now, near the sea, up at Becune Point. I was born in the very small town of Castries, which is the capital of St. Lucia. My mother was a school teacher and a widow. I have a twin brother and a sister.

I think my mother's encouragement obviously, and because of the fact that my father was a painter and an amateur writer and evidently a director of theatricals as well—was very encouraging in terms of our writing. So I owe her that. I mean she was not one who discouraged it, in a place like this where it, you know, conceptually it seemed to be crazy to want to be a writer, and particularly a poet, and for her that was perfectly okay, and she is the one who physically, practically, helped me, by giving me some money to have my first book printed in Trinidad. I owe my mother for that kind of encouragement.

And of course teachers who were splendid young men who felt that it was perfectly okay to want to be a poet. That's not a common thing, in any country.

It's a very uncommon thing, from the poets that I have had conversations with—on this program and everywhere else. So you did not feel alienated, or different, as they did; you were in effect in the mainstream, in your family, if not in school?

I'm saying it was never much trouble at any point for me to consider that I was making some choice that would not be to my or to other people's benefit. That I am very grateful for.

Were you always aware of and concerned with the multi-culturalism, with the many races and backgrounds in the Antilles as you seem to be now? It seems to me to be almost your grand theme—in your Nobel lecture on the Antilles, for instance, you speak of St. Jean Perse in Guadaloupe, of his “the swaying palm trees recite by heart”—Perse was the former Nobelist from this area—and you say the fragrant and privileged poetry that Perse composed to celebrate his white childhood, and the Indian music behind the graceful young brown archers whom you speak of in Trinidad, in Felicity, as they were recreating the Ramayana there—Trinidad has the same cabbage palms, set against the same sky, and you say, “They pierce me equally.” So is the source of your poetry, and of your love for the Antilles, partly its multi-cultural background?

No, I think I arrived at that, and I think we, in the Antilles, arrived at that too, politically, because basically the Caribbean, from Cuba down—Cuba of course a little earlier—is basically a feudal setup—it was pyramidal, hierarchical, and frankly feudal, because it meant in terms of the land that there were fewer white owners with large estates, on which, in the smaller Caribbean, in the lesser Antilles, the working population were principally African—and it's only when I went to Trinidad I think that I became fully aware—certainly absolutely more aware—of the complexity and variety of races. In Trinidad, and for us, in a passage that I myself have gone through—which would be the equivalent in terms of, if I were dividing my life into political sections, I would say—the childhood would be colonialism, the adolescence might have been adult suffrage, the maturity would be independence, and then perhaps the independence would be chaos, I don't know—the way you feel when you get to my age.

But anyway, that's a political parallel. So that if a multi-cultural society wasn't there early, I think the explosion of races that I encountered, the mute explosion of different faces that were there in Trinidad, is tremendously exciting, and remains that way to me. It is happening more and more in the Caribbean. For instance there are more Syrians here now, there are certainly a few more Indians, and so on, so that, you know, the mosaic, and the mural, of different faces—that you see around you in the Caribbean—wasn't that rich and complicated—it was very simple at the beginning.

I think the sense of multiplicity came to me when I got to Trinidad, and that became a tremendous heritage, because it meant that I was perfectly entitled to study Chinese literature, because there were Chinese in Trinidad. And they are West Indian, and you know, Arabic, and—English obviously, and Spanish, and African—all of those things existed, and they are as much my heritage as, say, the African heritage is.

I know you say that—at least you say one way or another, that “the ideal city is a writer's heaven”—I think you spoke about Trinidad in relation to cities—and cities are also a source of culture. So what for you would be the ideal city? Is it the city you found in Trinidad? Or have you found cities in other parts of the world that give you that same feeling?

I remain a small island boy, no matter where I go. And I don't know Europe, so every city I go to in Europe comes as a total shock of experience in a sense, so that's not an experience that I know, and one that I'm still, in a sense, afraid of. Like I'm scared of Italy because it might be too overwhelming; I might want to stay there. I was scared of Spain, and now I'm not cowed by Spain, and love it very much.

But in terms of the proportions of a city, what I meant was—Auden had a wonderful line that he wrote in his middle period about lakes, and he said, a lake allows the average father, walking slowly, to circumvent it in an afternoon. I think the same thing said by Auden about lakes may be true about a city, that I think that a city's got to be basically, for a certain distance, ambulatory; I think we should be able to walk, almost around the circumference. Now—perhaps you can do that in some cities, but you really can't, ultimately. I think the width, and sense of dissipation, of identity, that can happen in a city, is not something that I personally am excited about. I think the proportions of cities, and certain historical peaks of great literature, or painting, for example, all have a neighborliness, a familiarity, even a provinciality, to them. And perhaps when that provinciality goes out of a metropolis, then what it creates is very small pockets, that don't cohere. You know, inner cities, or sections for the rich, or another kind of section—whereas I think certainly in a West Indian city there's a kind of coherence and rhythm that is affable, and, you know, penetrable, and so on—at least for me. So I find that in Port of Spain—not that I walk that much, in fact I never walk, but—so there's a lie there, but I mean—I'm talking about the sense of circumference that is there in a city. That's what I feel. And if that city can contain all these races and there's an affability that is possible in the idea of the neighbor, the next-door neighbor, who may be Chinese, or African, or Syrian, as is the case in Port of Spain, then that's to me an ideal thing.

Can you see a dark time when tourism, or political conflict, or overcrowding would cause Port of Spain, or any of the island cities, to become like New York, like Washington, where races clash, where the ethnic neighborhoods are set against each other—or like Belfast, where religious groups fight each other?

No. I think—for instance in Trinidad there are Muslims and Hindus—if someone tried to exploit the religious differences that exist between them—you know, if you're smart enough you can always exploit anger or resentment or jealousy or whatever, but I think that it would be hard to do that in Trinidad. Even if it were attempted that should certainly be stopped—eradicated—quelled—whatever. I don't think that the idea of exploiting, the idea of racial hatred, is out of the question—I think it could happen for instance in Trinidad, where there is, you know, a lot of tension in a sense between the Indian and the African politicians, still, and it could happen in Guayana, and so on. This is not such a threat, though. I think that after awhile the rejection and absurdity of it would strike the Trinidadian—particularly the Trinidadian—as being a waste of time and stupid and not practical.

And that's what I like about the temperament of Trinidad and the Caribbean. But I think the threat, the danger is the expansion that can happen with tourism—that you could have like many Miamis, all along the Antilles. Especially in the flat islands, in which, you know, the growing and the spread of malls and marinas and shops and hotels and so forth, can suddenly transform a place into a large shopping mall with a beach. I think the responsibility of that control rests with the politicians. You can't blame them. If our politicians, and they do do that, encourage things like, you know, drug lords, or encourage land sales, or hotel developments in which they make some deals—we have to examine the corruption of our politics before we accuse people from abroad of, say, corrupting our life style. Self-examination is more important than blaming Americans for corrupting the Caribbean.

When you talk about the blessed obscurity of your island, you also talk about the fact that there can be a virtue in deprivation, because it can save you from what you call “a cascade of high mediocrity.” Do you think there's more danger in high mediocrity invading your island than anything else?

Well, I think it's a world-wide threat, I think the tide, you know, sort of that mass tide of not-quite-good, or okay, you know, not a masterpiece, but tolerable. You know, the fat paperback with the silver and gold raised things that you find in airports—it's hard to define what it is, because it sort of looks elegant and is terrible—that's the seepage that I think is dangerous. What I meant by that is not to say that, you know, there are qualities and virtues in poverty; I'm just saying that what I remember of my boyhood is that a library had to choose the best because of the budget that it had; there were no second-rate novels in the library in Castries—they couldn't afford them—so what you had to have is Dickens and you had to have Scott—even occasional novels were quality novels. It might be O'Hara, it might be Hemingway, or English writers, like Waugh and so on. So that's what I meant—in terms of the rigidity or astringency of a particular budget, if you equate that with poverty, the kind of education that one had was a part of that kind of deprivation. A lot of the writers of the Caribbean, who were quite brilliantly educated in many respects, had to look for themselves and create their own idea of what writing could be. I think now—I think that there's so much tolerable trash out, you know, that for us it is dangerous because we don't have the alternatives. If you live in New York you can say, I don't want to watch any more television, I'm sick of MTV, and then you get something else—then you can go to a movie that you really want to go to, or a play or something—when you don't have that recourse, and you're flooded with stuff that is okay, you know—it doesn't hurt anybody—but if that's the only thing you have, then that's a terrible thing that I think is happening in the Caribbean. And what one has to fight against and preserve.

As a child then, in a library with good taste—what inspired you? What literature did you read that made you want to become a writer? Or was it just spontaneous knowledge rather than other reading?

No—there's no point pretending—I think if one asks oneself why do you become a writer, I think you have to answer quite simply, quite humbly, and quite gratefully, that you were gifted. And that's what my answer is, and it's quite acceptable for me to say that about myself. I don't think of it as something that separates me from anyone else, I just think of it as a reality. I knew that I had this gift, that I wanted to develop it and so on. So I knew that early.

In terms of how one felt about reading other writers, I think that happens to every writer; I think you lose your originality like your virginity, you know—at the beginning you're original. The most original period of any writer's life is when that writer begins to write. Thomas Traherne says “I learned the dirty devices of the world.” I think the dirty devices of syntax, about how to be a writer, can corrupt a writer in a sense. I think for instance a writer like Blake, trying to get back to an inner sense of syntax—you can only have one writer like that. Then—to take an example of supreme magnificent decadence, you'd have to say Milton, or aspects of Shakespeare. But it's magnificent, right? What I mean is, that clarity and inner sense that is there in the beginning writer—that goes. And then the writer learns how to write, from other writers.

What I think that I feel was very exciting for writers of my generation, given the apparent constrictions of where we were, is—this is what was happening. You would go to school, on a hot day—you would have to wear a blazer, you'd have to wear a pork helmet, you'd have to wear long pants, gray flannel—I mean this was like murder, and to go home in those clothes. However, that was a discipline imposed on the equivalent of an English schoolboy. Of course it was mimicry but that was the discipline. The mimicry was good, I think, because although it created an elite, it made you aware that you were going to a particular place to do something. And there you would go and you would be studying Latin, and you would be studying French poetry, in a tropical climate, very hot and so on—now I think the danger is for people to teach that as being incongruous. That is dangerous. The other thing is not dangerous. The other thing is not what you would call white-washing, or colonializing. I think that is stupid. The width of encountering, say, Latin writers, or Shakespeare, or French writers—it wasn't Baudelaire, too early to do that—but to have that kind of experience, that is wider. I remember being in the library, in the Carnegie Library, and reading Wilson's Axel's Castle. Now I was a much older person, maybe at sixteen or seventeen—I remember the tremendous kick—I mean it's physical—it was like a heart thudding, reading—you know, reading the criticism of Wilson on Joyce, and the same that happened a little later in Eliot's criticism of the Jacobean playwrights.

Now here you are in the tropics, sitting down, you know, wherever you are, and outside there's a fierce, oven-like heat, and black people out there, walking, continuing their lives; how do you connect that with what's happening outside? For a while you can live with that and simply file it as a kind of separation and division. And then you realize as you get older, there's no division. There's no separation. Because the person who's outside there, the woman who's walking with her basket, wants her son to be where you are. And why would you deny her son, you know, because she's black or poor, the place where you are, because you have been given a scholarship or something? So there's no incongruity, to me, of having gone through that. And I think it's a kind of experience that created the sharpness, the acuity, and the depth, of writers like C. L. James, who's written brilliantly about it in Beyond the Boundary, and writers like Naipaul, and other writers like Hearn, and Wilson Harris, have had that experience. That sense of almost being disconnected with the world outside, but knowing that one has to push further on and make that connection.

Before you decided to push further on and meet the world outside, whether it was in the Antilles or the States, or—I don't know how much time you spent in Greece—

I've never been to Greece—no—I think if I'd been to Greece I wouldn't have written the book.

It's such a remarkable evocation of the islands in Omeros—so you were acquainted with Homer through reading rather than through—

Well I should confess—I've never read Homer—I've read fragments of Homer—this is terrible but—the Homer I read was mainly like reading Hemingway—I mean the physical Homer, the geographic Homer. The Homer of myth and the gods and so on I found very hard to absorb. As reality.

Was myth, or religion of any kind, a reality for you when you were a boy?

Oh, certainly in terms of super—if you want to call it superstition—but it's really religion, in terms of African religion, African pantheism, and story-telling and music and so on. Definite influence, and I put it in my plays.

Was theater as attractive to you as poetry early on? Did you know that you would write plays and found a theater?

My brother and I did that—we did it a little later, but—he put me on to writing plays—but my mother used to perform, you see, she used to recite a lot of Shakespeare, and evidently my father had staged it—there's a man I knew who played Shylock and my mother played Portia, and it must have been young people just doing fragments of Shakespeare. So that theatrical thing that was there in my mother, through my father's encouragement. I have a strong belief in heredity, you know, through environment. Absolutely.

Did you act as a child? Did you act as a young man?

No, no, no. I gave up acting when I was on stage once and I had to say a line like, “Roger's coming now,” and Roger didn't come so I got very angry—I was furious, and then I quit.

Was that right here in St. Lucia?

That's right. That's the end of the career, right. So then I started to punish people by writing plays.

Did you also direct—when you were in Trinidad?

Yes, I direct, sure, yes.

Does that still appeal to you, or not?

Definitely.

You've directed your own—

Yes.

Have you allowed other people to direct them too?

Yeah, I have—it's very difficult if you form your own company, which I have. The companies are now thirty-five years old, you know, and I've always premiered the plays with them, and I know the actors and I write for them—it can be very painful unless you find a director who understands exactly what you want. And even then a minimal gesture, a little thing that's, you know, out of alignment with what you meant, can be distracting. But generally, when I have been lucky, as I have been recently with a young director from England, then you can see a lot of things that you never thought were possible, coming out of the actors, and the staging. But yes, I really enjoy working with the company.

Was this young director from England directing your plays here, or in the States?

No; well, he did the Odyssey at the Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Barbican, then he came out and did a stage reading and also directed another play called The Joker of Seville, which we took to Boston. So the company love him and he's a terrific young guy, and it's nice to work with him. Sometimes, though, particularly I think in the American theater, there's so much self-torture about motivation, tragically.

When we were swimming the other day, right near here, you and Carlos Fuentes were talking about production of plays, particularly with the American Repertory Theater.

Be careful here now—

Okay—

But go ahead—

I just wondered if you had another director there, or did you direct your own?

No—I think the thing that happened with that play—if I have to make a lot of excuses, which I think I need to—is that a musical is a very complicated, long process which requires—there's so many aspects to it that it requires a lot of time to get right. And in that particular case, whatever the book was, it needed a lot of work, and the music—it was just too short, and the conditions were—this is a particular example of what I was saying—and since I write a lot of musicals, the hours and length of time it would take to get one right, I would think we should be steadily working on for at least six months or a year.

How long have you been working with Paul Simon?

About a year and a half now.

And how much longer do you think you'll be working on it?

He might be listening. I can't talk—but it's going very well.

So you work together daily on the music and the book?

Well, not daily, because he's in New York and I'm here sometimes, and sometimes I'm in Boston, and you know, we have to get a little closer together now, because we're getting close to the end.

Do you see yourself in the future doing more theater than poetry, or more epic poetry or lyric poetry, or do you play it by ear day by day?

Well, I have a lot of work now—I have a couple of films—scripts—that are required, that I have to do, and then there are a couple of musicals—there's a lot—and there's a new book of poems, and then there's supposed to be a book of essays—plenty to do.

That's exciting for all of us—

It's terrifying. It's frightening.

It's wonderful for us. Were you a great seer of films all of your life?

Um—Yeah, certainly in St. Lucia. Absolutely. And in Trinidad to some degree. Not so much in the States now, because, you know, everybody gets so busy doing their own work, you hardly have time to go to the movies—I haven't been for a while. When you don't go it's always a thrill to go and find out how exciting a good film could be.

I think the—I'm trying to think very carefully here. I was wondering this morning, for instance, whether you get the same kind of echo, inner reverberations, that you get from a book, as you might from a movie. And probably not—but I think the films that you do want to see again, that have a classic symmetry to them—some of the obvious ones—their refrain is almost like a line of poetry, it's beautifully done it manages to have a reason—it all adds up to a sound—the sound of itself.

I think for instance of My Darling Clementine by Ford. It's a movie I keep seeing, over and over, and admire every shot in it, and so on. Obviously Kurosawa. And Treasure of Sierra Madre I think is a great film that you can look at over and over. I don't know how many movies you can do that with, though—all the names I think are by obvious artists, like Fellini, Kurosawa and so forth.

I know that one of my favorites is Kurosawa's Dreams.

I haven't seen that. I think Seven Samurai is—well everybody says probably the greatest movie—but it's one of the great—absolutely one of the great movies, I think. The full Seven Samurai—the complete thing.

I wonder if you've seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as many times as my husband has.

It's an amazing film.

He and Peter Matthieson can quote great passages of it.

I think what's astonishing in a director like Huston, and for every writer, especially a playwright, is how short these movies are. In essence—short in terms of content, and the volume, the width of the movie—see today, I think people—if you're going to do a movie like Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it's going to be two and a half hours long, and—conceptually, I don't think they can do it any more. I don't think they have that fantastic sense of economy, that Ford and Huston, for instance, had. When you think of the content of Treasure … and the amount that happens—it's astonishing.

Seven Samurai is long—and Lawrence of Arabia is long. It's when they're long and empty—I think that's the thing, you know.

Let's get to poetry a little bit, since we've talked about everything else—

How can you interrupt John Huston for poetry?

Well I don't know—since you're a poet I'm going to force you to—your poetry is made so vivid, I guess by the movies you've seen, and whatever you've read, but especially by natural observation, and the echoes of music, and the intensity of your memory. Could you say how you most often begin a poem? Is it sort of a sudden psyching of one of your swifts crossing the water, or the curlew, or the scarlet ibis? Or is it the feel of the trade winds, or the beat or melody of the surf, or an old song, or a vision of a painting? Which of your senses do you start through? Or is it through an idea, or a phrase, or an event you've experienced? An emotional crisis?

This is the point at which all poets get very pompous. And they give these enigmatic answers and say, well, you know, generally it comes this way and so forth—I don't really have an answer, so I'm going to cut down on the pomposity. But I would say—if it were explainable, then it might disappear. It's not explicable. I think perhaps to a musician a phrase might come and then it can develop, and develop into a huge thing. And I think—like music it may come in some notes whose equivalent is words, you know? And those words may be a phrase that just comes out of the air. Not necessarily out of the immediate experience, you know? And then out of that I think the thing begins to develop.

And Graves said he thinks that every poem begins with half a line and then the next half of a line. That the sound of it is that. And I think that that's pretty true. That what you hear is the second half of the same line. Not the beginning. I think the beginning is prose. I think if you go one two three four, and you get the first line right away, then it might be pretty good, pretty competent, but not a really inspired thing. I think what can happen, is that maybe that phrase, that's the half-phrase, is continued, and I think that margin on the right gives a structure for the left. This is Grave's theory, and I think—I'm not saying this only applies to me or to everyone else—there are all sorts of theories—but you can't say that it comes out of something related to an object that you're looking at or an experience that you have—it may just be something that you don't quite know the meaning of, and that's the pompous and mysterious part of it.

But it is—I mean I do think that when it does come, it comes—as Keats said, you know, it comes like leaves come to a tree, you know? Either it comes that way or it doesn't come at all. So what may appear to be leaves on a tree, are really like artificial leaves on an artificial tree. But you know that when it does happen. And when it does happen the poem seems to go right through and finish itself down to its roots. I don't think it starts from the roots, but like it starts in air and gets down to roots. Or something. A lot of this is nonsense in a sense, but it just—we're trying to explain something. So I don't have an argument or a reason for saying this; I think if you have an occasional poem, a poem aimed at a subject, yes, you can do that, because that's your craft, and you can make it happen. As to when it can happen, and when it does happen, I think it's just the continuous practice of verse that creates poetry.

A real labor of the imagination.

Yes—I guess the craft—I mean working at the craft—creates I think for young writers, what they must do every day, is just write—they don't have to write on a subject—when I teach my class I tell them, don't try to finish a poem, just go as far as you feel is honest and then abandon it. But there's this desperation to complete things that the young have, you know?

So when you start a poem you don't necessarily know where it's going, or have a vision of the end, even if you can't hear it—

Well I think one of the reasons why I use rhyme, is because rhyme takes over, right? There's one kind of reason—there's a reason, which I think is a prosaic reason, which says, this is the subject, and stick to it, you know? And this is the prose reason. Whereas if you use a rhyme—let's say you're heading toward the end of a line, then you find a rhyme—whatever the design of it—it could be far down, but—I think all poems are based on the concept of rhyme. Every poem is based on that idea. It's used or it's not used, but the instinct is that. So if you are using rhyme, when it does happen, when you're heading towards those last couple of syllables, and you're desperate, and you don't know what it's going to be, and if it does happen—it can alter meaning. It can absolutely lift meaning in a certain direction or in another direction, and what you then do is you have to follow what the subterranean thing that has suddenly emerged dominates in your direction. And you keep following that, and you're still trying to maintain direction, some original direction, but you're discovering what you're writing, as you write it, you know? And that's when it becomes magical. But that's not common. That's not often.

That's beautifully said. I rhyme more often than not rhyme, and a number of poets I've recently talked with seem to be against rhyme, feel that they have left rhyme behind, and that contemporary poets should. And I never thought—

I'll tell you something—let me interrupt here for a second, because this always infuriates me. For one—American arrogance can be astounding. American arrogance about esthetics. America believes a lot of things—it also believes—I'm talking about the worst aspect of arrogance of American esthetics—for instance the idea that they invented breathing—right? That the American pulse is somehow different from the Victorian pulse. And that it works in free verse. The American pulse is free verse, and you don't breathe in and out, but there's some other kind of rhythm—I don't know what's between breathing—inhaling and exhaling, but a lot of people who—when you say this thing about saying we have gone beyond rhyme and we have gone beyond X or Y—I have had too many maimed students. I think, crippled students, who have come to me from certain classes from somewhere, in which they have been told not to use rhyme, there is too much melody. Someone has said to me, once I was told—try to avoid music. This is the only culture in the history of the world that has ever said that about verse. Absolutely. This is ridiculous—it's absurd. The apocalypse. Armageddon.

Americans say, and I've heard it a lot recently, from platforms from classrooms—that Whitman is the father of American poetry, and Dickinson is the mother. Some advocate moving, today, in the father's direction.

Oh, but—we need two hours—Dickinson is the greatest American poet. Okay? She is wider and deeper than Whitman. She is more terrifying than Whitman. There is no terror in Whitman. There is no fear in Whitman. There is an elegaic kind of fear. I'm not criticizing Whitman. If you think, if one thinks that because Whitman wrote in a line that basically was based on Italian opera, not on inventing American rhythm. And the Bible. Which are old books. I don't mean opera—but I mean it's a form from another thing. People misunderstand Whitman when they say, when they quote him and he says, cross out his over-due accounts. He's not saying that you don't have any debt to Greece and to Rome, he's just saying, you know, we've paid it; it's okay. That's what he's saying. People misinterpret it to mean, you should not acknowledge a debt to Greece and Rome. That is ridiculous. How can—Whitman would not allow someone to speak to him that way.

When you learn finally to come to Dickinson and realize that here in a box-shape, you know, very tight stanzas, that are like little prisms of things—all this experience is contained, and that the half-lines are staggering—Astonishing. Frightening—that that little box contains more in it that the loud, amplified line of Whitman, then you are a mature person. Then you have grown up.

Then the box is a prism, not a prison.

Exactly.

What do you have your students read, in the way of poetry?

Well I tend to—I let them do a lot of Auden—and by heart, too—because I think that Auden is a great twentieth-century poet; I think for intelligence, for wit, and the courage of his forms, for instance, that he's astonishing, more so than Eliot or Pound, so I do a lot of that—then I do Hardy, because very few people discover Hardy. I do a lot of George Meredith—a discovery to a lot of people—I do Modern Love, which is a great poem. And Larkin and so forth. So I tend to do writers who are, if you want to use the jargon, which I detest, formal, and so on. And sometimes you should give them exercises. You see one of the crippling things that has happened I think to the young American writer, is if you give them a simple exercise, like a composition, a pentametrical composition, right?—what you see is terrifying. Because [what] you generally see is somebody who, like a horse galloping, collapses, or breaks his leg, when it comes to the Caesura. The rhythm goes off. They can go so far—they can go for five syllables. The second half—especially if it's going to rhyme—goes into an alarming banality. And you can judge from the second half of the pentameter if that person is gifted. Because, it's okay to write, you know, to splice the verse down the line and do it, you know, for so many beats, and not do it in verse. But when you give them a simple thing to do—and you hear that happening, and something has gone off, there's no point in arguing about saying, you know, the American ear is different to the English ear, or whatever, you know? But that's not a test—it's one of the things that you see happening. So sometimes the exercises I do, I tend to do, is not to force the pentameter on them, but to point out that if they can't do it, then they've got a problem. They have a problem.

Do you give them any poetry in translation? Russian, or German?

Oh yeah, sure—anything is good—I do Adam's poems: “Going to Lvov” is a great poem. I do it all the time.

That's Adam Zagajewski.

I do different people—I make it international if I can—I do Lorca—

I would have guessed that. Rilke?

I'm beginning to think Rilke is kind of dangerous for people at a certain age. Like liquor. Booze. Drugs. Metaphysical booze, in a way. Just whiskey, in a way. I think—The Duino Elegies—maybe toward the end of a course, but not before. Not too early.

How about contemporary Russians like Ahkmatova or Mandelstam?

I tell them to read—they don't always have to take it up in class, but I ask them to read, sure. And other Spaniards apart from Lorca—Aleixandre, and Latin American poets—early Vallejo is superb—Borges—again Neruda I think is someone you want to keep, because I think it gets—pretty flagellant—I mean as an influence, you know what I mean? A rhetorical thing can happen.

Before we run out of time I think I'd like to ask you to do some reading. And then if we have time we can come back and talk some more.

Okay—

Do you want to read, or recite? … Before you start, just let me ask you how you know so much about ornithology, and sailing, and sea battles, which seem to me to dominate Omeros in a way.

Well if you ask Stephen Crane, how do you know so much about the Civil War, he would have said, books. I mean it's right out there, you know—the sea is out there—the one thing I don't feel that I am is a scholar, really—I don't think of myself that way—academically. So I don't think that if one looked at it hard that the history that's in the books is anything serious or anything profound; I think it—I think part of the superficiality of the knowledge of history here is part of the experience of being Caribbean, but it shouldn't go too deep. Because if it goes too deep you tend to think “dispossessed,” that the history belongs to somebody else, and it's not yours. And since there is no chronicle here—that's a whole subject that necessarily one needs to go deeply into—I don't believe in the expression. Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it, because look at how many know history and are repeating it anyhow, you know?

All right, this is a section from Omeros about coming home to an island that is changing—coming to the south of the island and driving north towards Castries and noticing what's been happening. In it there's a reference to a taxi driver who has died hurrying to make a lot of money with the tourist trade.

Drivers leant over the rail. One seized my luggage
off the porter's cart. The rest burst into patois,
with gestures of despair at the lost privilege
of driving me, then turned to other customers.
In the evening pastures horses grazed, their hides wet
with light that shot its lances over the combers.
I had the transport all to myself.
                                                                                                                                            “You all set?
Good. A good pal of mine died in that chariot
of his called the Comet.”
                                                                                          He turned in the front seat,
spinning the air with his free hand. I sat, sprawled out
in the back, discouraging talk, with my crossed feet,
“You never know when, eh? I was at the airport
that day. I see him take off like a rocket.
I always said that thing have too much horsepower.
And so said, so done. The same hotel, chief, correct?”
I saw the coastal villages receding
as the highway's tongue translated bush into forest,
the wild savannah into moderate pastures,
that other life going in its “change for the best,”
its peace paralyzed in a postcard, a concrete
future ahead of it all, in the cinder-blocks
of hotel development with the obsolete
craft of the carpenter, as I sensed, in the neat
marinas, the fisherman's phantom. Old oarlocks
and rusting fretsaw. My craft required the same
crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion
of the hand that stenciled a flowered window-frame
or planed an elegant canoe; its time was gone
with the spirit in the wood, as wood grew obsolete
and plasterers smoothed the blank page of white concrete.
I watched the afternoon sea. Didn't I want the poor
to stay in the same light so that I could transfix
them in amber, the afterglow of an empire,
preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks
to that blue bus stop? Didn't I prefer a road
from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax
of colonial travelers, the measured prose I read
as a schoolboy? That cove, with its brown shallows
there, Praslin? That heron? Had they waited for me
to develop my craft? Why hallow that pretence
of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy
of loving them from hotels, a biscuit-tin fence
smothered in love-vines, scenes to which I was attached
as blindly as Plunkett with his remorseful research?
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched
roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church
above a bleached village. The gap between the driver
and me increased when he said:
                                                                                          “The place changing, eh?”
where an old rumshop had gone, but not that river
with its clogged shadows. That would make me a stranger.
“All to the good,” he said. I said, “All to the good,”
then, “whoever they are,” to myself. I caught his eyes
in the mirror. We were climbing out of Micoud.
Hadn't I made their poverty my paradise?

That enough?

No, I think you should definitely read another. Obviously your mode is loving the world, so I'm sure there's another piece of the world you'd like to read about. I love the fact that you say you're impatient for sunrise. That the morning is your time, and you want to transfix the light in amber.

All that Greek manure under the green bananas,
under the indigo hills, the rain-rutted road,
the galvanized village, the myth of rustic manners,
glazed by the transparent page of what I had read.
What I had read and re-written till literature
was guilty as History. When would the sails drop
from my eyes, when would I not hear the Trojan War
in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman's shop?
When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse
shaking off a wreath of flies? When would it stop,
the echo in the throat, insisting, “Omeros”;
when would I enter that light beyond the metaphor?
But it was mine to make what I wanted of it, or
what I thought was wanted. A cool wood off the road,
a hut closed like a wound, and the sound of a river
coming through the trees on a country Saturday,
with no one in the dry front yard, the still leaves,
the yard, the shade of a breadfruit tree on the door,
then the track from which a man's figure emerges,
then a girl carrying laundry, the road-smell like loaves,
the yellow-dressed butterflies in the grass marges.

That's beautiful, and evokes the character of Helen in Omeros with her beautiful yellow frock—perhaps because I'm a woman and it's such a romantic image.

Well, I think I've taken enough of your time, and I thank you. If there's anything from your new work you would like to read I would love to hear it, or if you have a stanza or a few lines in your head that you'd like to end with, that would be very nice.

Well, I'm working on a new book, so I might read something that's new.

“Oedipus At Colonus”

After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke's amnesia,
learn, wanderer, to go nowhere like the stones since
your nose and eyes are now your daughter's hand;
go where the repetition of the breakers grows easier
to bear, no father to kill, no citizens to convince,
and no longer force your memory to understand
whether the dead elect their own government
under the jurisdiction of the sea-almonds;
certain provisions of conduct seal them to a silence
none dare break, and one noun made them transparent,
where they live beyond the conjugations of tense
in their own white city. How easily they disown us,
and everything else here that undermines our toil.
Sit on your plinth in the last light of Colonus,
let your knuckled toes root deep in their own soil.
A butterfly quietly alights on a tyrant's knee;
sit among the sea-eaten boulders and
let the night wind sweep the terraces of the sea.
This is the right light, this pewter shine on the water,
not the carnage of clouds, not the expected wonder
of self-igniting truth and oracular rains,
but these shallows as gentle as the voice of your daughter,
while the gods fade like thunder in the rattling mountains.

Well. Anything I say now would be anticlimactic. Thank you for reading from “Oedipus.” Not many writers are willing to share a work-in-progress. I can see, looking over your shoulder, that the page is still in your handwriting.

I guess we covered a bit of everything except the mischief of your poems—all the witticisms, the humor, the significant spelling, the diverse voices and dialects you do, differentiating the tone as superbly as the psychology of the speaker. You make me laugh, often, as I read. Do you laugh when you're writing, ever?

Yes!