west-indian-poets

"It's ten years since I heard, and Then one day a letter comes. It's neutral stuff, until I Delve into the envelope Again and find your photo, Handsome still, and not a line To tell me why you sent it."

"My uncle [mother’s brother] wrote rather twee books of memoirs in the period between the two World Wars. They’d be deeply embarrassing to read today. In the 19th century my mother’s family were involved with the Pre-Raphaelites, and a direct ancestor of mine was Lady Byron’s lawyer, who advised her to leave the poet because of her husband’s affair with his half-sister. A much earlier ancestor on my mother’s side was chaplain to Richard Corbet, Bishop of Oxford, who wrote the poem ‘Farewell Rewards and Fairies’. In his ‘Brief Lives’ Aubrey describes them getting drunk together in the cellars of Christchurch, Oxford."

"A poet of my kind Skates on the thinnest ice."

"Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!"

"The shivering birds beneath the eaves Have sheltered for the night."

"The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet, A chafing savage, down the decent street; And passion rends my vitals as I pass, Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass."

"Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate Against the potent poison of your hate."

"If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!"

"Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!"

"The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls, Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze; But looking at her falsely-smiling face, I knew her self was not in that strange place."

"Deep in the secret chambers of my heart I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch I bear it nobly as I live my part."

"I have forgotten much, but still remember The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December."

"Oh some I know! I have embalmed the days, Even the sacred moments when we played, All innocent of passion, uncorrupt, At noon and evening in the flame-heart’s shade."

"I know the dark delight of being strange, The penalty of difference in the crowd, The loneliness of wisdom among fools"

"And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept."

"I do not consider English to be the language of my masters. I consider language to be my birthright. I happen to have been born in an English and a Creole place, and love both languages. It is the passion, futility and industry of critics to perpetuate this ambiguity. It is their profession. It is mine to do what other poets before me did, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Burns, which is to fuse the noble and the common language, the streets and the law courts, in a tone that is true to my own voice, in which both accents are heard naturally. (1983)"

"I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who believes in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be fascist. (1987)"

"People who are offering revenge, they are just an enemy. But when you offer peace and love, that infuriates people. And you get killed for that. That's why Christ is killed, that's why King is shot, that's why Gandhi is killed. The idea of a man believing in the universal brotherhood is totally unendurable to someone who would prefer to have that man talk about revenge. (1990)"

"The Caribbean creativity is phenomenal. It is an astonishing phenomenon. The kind of writing that has been produced in these islands is such elaborate work. It was inevitable historically and culturally. But it is still as astonishing. Now you're talking about writers of equality, of Jean Rhys, Saint-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, V. S. Naipaul. And these people are different colors and different races. (1990)"

"I love the opulent poetry of Tishani Doshi and the more formal work of Derek Walcott and Christian Wiman."

"...a master wordsmith. These words are his, from his poem "The Schooner Flight": I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation... Doesn't that last line just fucking give you chills, coming hard on the heels of what preceded it? Goddamn. Much respect."

"...no matter how you look at Walcott, Walcott is a major figure; he is a Miltonic figure, a Shakespearean figure, a Chaucer figure. He stands in Caribbean literature like those figures: Chaucer, maybe Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton-those major, major massive figures who have already covered generations of work. And others come along who have their own value, their own work, but these guys have always already done more than anybody else. You look into the past, they've already done the past; you look into the future, they've already done things in the future. So he's a significant poet because he is the major poet, in terms of form and style, concerns, themes, and so on. And I very much look to him for form and so on. In terms of the ideology and the content, as I say, I think there is certainly a difference, as I move more and more into Christian poetry. You couldn't really describe Walcott as a Christian poet - not in that strict sense of the term. Our concerns have been independence, how we deal with the politics of the situation and so on...He has done his work and I think those of us coming after have to do our own work. We can't repeat him. We should not. We should learn from him and move on."

"I like the magic that operates in many of Derek's plays, the lushness and the exquisite wordcraft of them, and the fact that he uses Creole and music."

"Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul."

"The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain."

"I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

"I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars."

"You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart."

"Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life."

"Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand when the sunrise brightens the river's memory and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound. Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens over its lost name, when the hunched island was called 'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned, its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries, that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees. These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space for a single God where the old gods stood before, The first god was a gommier. The generator began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw, sent the chips flying like mackrel over water into trembling weeds"

"No masterpieces in huge frames to worship, … and yet there are the days when every street corner rounds itself into a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase, canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue, the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise."

"Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic."

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."

"I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style."

"you can't separate your growth from your soil. (1968)"

"I don't read poetry for pleasure. I read to be terrified in a way. And people who terrify me from their size and the grandeur of their imagination now are people like Pasternak and Neruda, a lot of Latin-American poets, Lowell - very few English poets - Ted Hughes a little...very few English poets now in fact (1968)"

"I have always believed in fierce, devoted apprenticeship... I have always tried to keep my mind Gothic in its devotions to the concept of master and apprentice. The old masters made new masters by the discipline of severity. One's own voice is an anthology of all the sounds one has heard. As it is with children, so with poets. (1983)"

"When I was in hospital I found I could hardly read or writ. In these circumstances I began to write poems. I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. One night I dreamed I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine gun fire. The next morning I wrote it out , Carentan O Caretan, and as I wrote I realized it was not a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire"

"I did not wish to protest against war. My object was to remember. I wanted people to find in my poems the truth of what it had been like to be an American infantry soldier. Now I see I was writing a memorial of those years, for the me I had known, who were silent."

"For people may not know what they think about politics in the Balkans, or the vexed question of men and women, but everyone has a definite opinion about the flavour of shredded coconut."

"It's complicated, being an American, Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time. Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem."

"All that grave weight of America Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome. The future in ruins! JH Honesty seems to me to be the best legacy I can leave the world."

"Where is the Mississippi panorama And the girl who played the piano? Where are you, Walt? The Open Road goes to the used-car lot."