{"id":3530,"date":"2017-04-14T15:28:08","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T22:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3530"},"modified":"2017-04-14T15:31:21","modified_gmt":"2017-04-14T22:31:21","slug":"the-late-great-derek-walcott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2017\/04\/the-late-great-derek-walcott.html","title":{"rendered":"The Late, Great Derek Walcott"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[contextly_auto_sidebar]<\/p>\n

Folks, This week CultureCrash guest columnist Lawrence Christon looks at the legacy of the Saint Lucia-born, US-residing poet Derek Walcott, who died March 17. I share Christon’s fondness for DW’s verse, and was pleased enough to meet the poet once or twice at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Inst in CT, which I covered in the mid-’90s.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n


\nIt\u2019s been nearly a month since Derek Walcott died and I\u2019m still
\nwaiting for a major publication, or even a minor one at this point, to
\ncome out with an authoritative summary of his life and work, the kind
\nof commentary on his esthetic that puts him to rest with the
\nilluminating glow reserved for the truly extraordinary.<\/span><\/p>\n

It looks like it\u2019s going to be a long wait. Except for The New York
\nTimes\u2019 extensive obit and an appreciation by fellow West Indian Hilton
\nAls in The New Yorker, there\u2019s been virtually nothing, not in places
\nwhere you would expect it, like Harper\u2019s, The Atlantic or The Paris
\nreview. Not in the once-literary Esquire, nor the culturally emaciated
\nLos Angeles Times, which ran an amateur freelancer\u2019s marginally
\nembarrassing essay and shunted Walcott\u2019s actual obit over to the
\nAssociated Press, which could not resist mentioning sexual harassment
\ncharges. (The half-mad titular poet in Saul Bellow\u2019s 1975 \u201cHumboldt\u2019s
\nGift\u201d protested, \u201cI have a thick dick!\u201d as a matter of pride; and as
\nadventurers of the flesh, e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas would not
\nhave made the cut in today\u2019s flinty literary scene. How times have
\nchanged.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Need we be reminded that Walcott, a 1992 Nobel Prize-winner, was one
\nof the greatest English-speaking poets of the past 70 years, with a
\nbrilliant gift for putting us in an exact setting and extending that
\nmoment, that immediate blend of sight and smell and sound, into
\ndeepening metaphors that reached into history, place, art, political
\nconditions, memory, emotion, and the ongoing dialogue between the
\nrecurrent and the fleeting, all with a language that, as with the
\ngreats, offered a sensual satisfaction of its own?<\/p>\n

Robert Graves, no slouch himself, observed: \u201cWalcott handles English
\nwith a closer understanding of its inner magic than most\u2014if not any\u2014of
\nhis English-born contemporaries.\u201d Not even one of Walcott\u2019s peers, of
\nwhom there are precious few, have stepped up to pay homage as Auden
\nmourned Yeats: \u201cHe disappeared in the dead of winter:\/The brooks were
\nfrozen, the airports almost deserted,\/And snow disfigured the public
\nstatues;\/ The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Review of Books ran an excellent piece on April 6, but it
\nseemed more a happy accident inasmuch as it dealt with Walcott\u2019s
\ncollaboration with painter Peter Doig on a book called \u201cMorning,
\nParamin,\u201d and otherwise made no mention of Walcott\u2019s passing. (Though,
\nto be fair, both the NYRB and Paris Review went to press before they
\ncould mention his death.) Walcott was an expert watercolorist, incidentally,\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

which helped vivify his poetry\u2019s address to the mind\u2019s\u00a0eye.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what gives? Why the shameful, or shameless, neglect? The truth is
\nthat this ignorant indifference extends to the genre itself.<\/p>\n

I spent a couple of days reading through numerous poetry websites,
\nmany of them connected with prestigious foundations and publications,
\nand was dismayed to see that, with a few crossover exceptions, their
\nlistings of our top 20 or more contemporary poets contained completely
\ndifferent names, as if no one knew or even heard of anyone else.\u00a0 I\u2019m
\nnot speaking of familiars like W.S Merwin, Billy Collins or Kay
\nRyan \u2014 they\u2019re not even mentioned. If poetry editors can\u2019t agree on a
\nlist, how are us civilians expected to keep up? And what does this say
\nabout consensus figures in the English-speaking landscape?<\/p>\n

Poetry, in America at least, has been taking a beating for more than a
\nhalf-century, for reasons that overlap. The ’50s was the last decade in
\nwhich youthful rebellion expressed itself in literature, as in the
\nwork of the Beats and the epic cry of Allen Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl,\u201d which
\ncame out in 1955, (when T.S. Eliot was still a literary demi-god). In
\nthe Dionysian \u201860s, the shift in cultural energy turned to rock music.
\nIn the Reagan \u201880s, the warring politicization of the arts, both on
\nthe right and left, exacted its price on the hands-off autonomy of
\nart. By the aught years, movies, TV, cable and the proliferation of
\ncell phones and \u201cvisuals\u201d had all but crowded out the power of the
\nword as a mediator of experience, leaving us in an aural landscape of
\nnewspeak, psychobabble, academic jargon and a thin slop of everyday
\nspeech.<\/p>\n

As much as anything, the abandonment of the western canon has
\nencouraged a majority of artists, including poets, to make art as if
\nthe shock of the new were the only hit worth taking. Walcott<\/span>, in
\nsearching for his own identity as a poet, contradicted this willful
\namnesia early on. In \u201cOrigins,\u201d he writes:<\/p>\n

The flowering breaker detonates its surf.
\nWhite bees hiss in the coral skull.
\nNameless I came among olives and algae,
\nFoetus of plankton, I remember nothing.<\/p>\n

Clouds, log of Colon,
\nI learnt your annals of ocean,
\nOf Hector, bridler of horses,
\nAchilles, Aeneas, Ulysses,
\nBut \u2018Of that fine race of people which came off the mainland
\nTo greet Christobal as he rounded Icacos,’
\nBlank pages turn in the wind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Walcott<\/span> spent a lifetime traveling and educating himself in history
\nand art, writing through the split vision of race, the self and the
\nworld, the colonial place in civilization and vice-versa, shadow and
\nlight (as in the shade that rested between Christ and the cross). He
\nworked hard at cultivating an erudition that informed his work without
\nburdening it. The classics enriched his poems and painting (he was
\nless successful as a playwright). He had a sharp eye for exploitation
\nand ruin, but he gave no sense of the tradition of Homer, Shakespeare,
\nCezanne, Durer, and Pietro della Francesca, etc., as a progression of
\nWestern imperial decadence. He appreciated the best among his
\ncontemporaries, like Hart Crane, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop,
\nin friendship and critical appraisal.<\/p>\n

The best summary of Walcott<\/span> came from his late friend, the poet Joseph
\nBrodsky (also a Nobel prize-winner) who, in a lengthy 2010 piece in
\nTNYRB, wondered about<\/p>\n

\u2026the unwillingness of the critical profession
\nto admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man.\u201d
\nBrodsky writes, \u201cFor thirty years his throbbing and relentless lines
\nhave kept arriving on the English language like tidal waves,
\ncoagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of
\ncontemporary literature would be like wallpaper. He gives us more than
\nhimself or a \u2018world\u2019; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the
\nlanguage as well as in the ocean, which is always present in his
\npoems: as their background and foreground, as their subject, or as
\ntheir meter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Walcott<\/span>\u2019s last lines, echoing \u201cOrigins,\u201d observe the mountains and sea
\nof his native St. Lucia, and the cloud that \u201c\u2026slowly covers the page
\nand it goes\/white again and the book comes to a close.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s describing his own end, of course, but you can\u2019t help but feel a
\ngreat beautiful book has closed on us as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar] Folks, This week CultureCrash guest columnist Lawrence Christon looks at the legacy of the Saint Lucia-born, US-residing poet Derek Walcott, who died March 17. I share Christon’s fondness for DW’s verse, and was pleased enough to meet the poet once or twice at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Inst in CT, which I covered in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,34],"tags":[785,786,732],"class_list":{"0":"post-3530","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books","7":"category-literary","8":"tag-derk-walcott","9":"tag-guest-columnist-lawrence-christon","10":"tag-poetry","11":"entry","12":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3530"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3538,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions\/3538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}