Remembering a legend and his artistic ensemble, in this month of mourning for Derek Walcott - a much-loved Nobel laureate of our times! (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017).
In this candid interview with Edward, Derek Walcott deliberates on a host of issues close to his heart - on the English language, on being a Caribbean writer, on V. S. Naipaul, on the importance of the figure of Robinson Crusoe to him, on Heaney, on his guru Robert Lowell, his style of writing, and lots more...
Reproducing below, a wonderfully taken interview - i would personally rate it the best Derek has given - where he opens his mind and heart to everything about Derek - the artist!
INTERVIEWER: What would you say about the epiphanic
experience described in Another Life,
which seems to have confirmed your destiny as a poet and sealed a bond to your
native island?
WALCOTT
There are some things people avoid saying in interviews
because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. I have never
separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a
vocation, a religious vocation. What I described in Another Life—about being on the hill and feeling the sort of
dissolution that happened—is a frequent experience in a younger writer.
I felt
this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of
immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the
beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that’s forceful in a
young writer, it can make you cry. It’s just clear tears; it’s not grimacing or
being contorted, it’s just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting
into what it has seen. This continues in the poet. It may be repressed in some
way, but I think we continue in all our lives to have that sense of melting, of
the “I” not being important. That is the ecstasy. It doesn’t happen as much
when you get older.
There’s that wonderful passage in Traherne where he talks
about seeing the children as moving jewels until they learn the dirty devices
of the world. It’s not that mystic. Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: “Such a
sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we
look upon is blessed.” That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference.
It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his
nature. I’ve always felt that sense of gratitude. I’ve never felt equal to it
in terms of my writing, but I’ve never felt that I was ever less than that. And
so in that particular passage in Another Life I was recording a particular
moment.
INTERVIEWER: How
do you write? In regard to your equation of poetry and prayer, is the writing
ritualized in any way?
WALCOTT
I don’t know how
many writers are willing to confess to their private preparatory rituals before they get
down to putting something on paper. But I imagine that all artists and all
writers in that moment before they begin their working day or working night
have that area between beginning and preparation, and however brief it is,
there is something about it votive and humble and in a sense ritualistic.
Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different
physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense,
without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it’s like the habit of
Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in. Any serious
attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. I haven’t noticed
what my own devices are. But I do know that if one thinks a poem is coming
on—in spite of the noise of the typewriter, or the traffic outside the window,
or whatever—you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that
cuts out everything around you.
What you’re taking on is really not a renewal
of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity, so that what’s in
front of you becomes more important than what you are. Equally—and it may be a
little pretentious-sounding to say it—sometimes if I feel that I have done good
work I do pray, I do say thanks. It isn’t often, of course. I don’t do it every
day. I’m not a monk, but if something does happen I say thanks because I feel
that it is really a piece of luck, a kind of fleeting grace that has happened
to one. Between the beginning and the ending and the actual composition that
goes on, there is a kind of trance that you hope to enter where every aspect of
your intellect is functioning simultaneously for the progress of the
composition. But there is no way you can induce that trance.
