Poetry About Life

As a poet and a playwright, Derek Walcott spent a lifetime portraying, and bridging, the complex societies of his Caribbean homeland and European heritage. Blending folk traditions and avant-garde techniques, he invented in English a poetic language as lush and dramatic as a tropical landscape. But the conflicts between the two cultures during their long and tangled history are necessarily central topics in Walcott's work. Within his original narrative of West Indian life, a pervasive theme has been Walcott's consciousness both of estrangement from his native land and of isolation as a black artist in America.

Walcott was born on St. Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles, in 1930. His father was a British artist who died when Walcott was a few years old. His mother was West Indian and taught in a Methodist school; After attending college at Castries, he studied French, Latin, and Spanish at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. When he was eighteen he self-published a book of 25 poems. He taught school and then moved to Trinidad, where he wrote art and theatre criticism.

In "Blues", the title echoes Langston Hughes, another alienated black writer, Walcott describes a violent, racist encounter he suffered early on in Greenwich Village and mocks sociological clich�s about deprivation. The poem was printed in The Gulf (1969), and, like The Castaway (1965), the name of the book itself indicates the separation. The poet's historical and personal explorations have indeed led him down lonely paths.

He addressed his growing remoteness from his own Caribbean roots most tellingly in the Joycean self-examination of Another Life (1973), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), and Midsummer (1984).

Sea Grapes (1976), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), Collected Poems: 1948-1984 (1986), and Arkansas Testament (1987). His most ambitious volume is the book-length poem Omeros (1990), a retelling in sixty-four chapters of the Homeric epics in a modern-day Caribbean setting, similar to James Joyce's Ulysses. Nowadays he has even a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at several colleges.

In the seventies and eighties, Walcott published poetry volumes regularly. From 2010 to 2012 Walcott was professor of poetry at Essex University. Nowadays Walcott has been offering conferences and lectures in different colleges. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Blues

Those five or six young guys
lunched on the stoop
that oven-hot summer night
whistled me over. Nice
and friendly. So, I stop.
MacDougal or Christopher
Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some
saint's. I wasn't too far from
home, but not too bright
for a nigger, and not too dark.
I figured we were all
one, wop, nigger, jew,
besides, this wasn't Central Park.
I'm coming on too strong? You figure
right! They beat this yellow nigger
black and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scared
on case one used a knife,
I hung my olive-green, just-bought
sports coat on a fire plug.
I did nothing. They fought
each other, really. Life
gives them a few kcks,
that's all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloddy mug
pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved
from cuts and tears,
I crawled four flights upstairs.
Sprawled in the gutter, I
remember a few watchers waved
loudly, and one kid's mother shouting
like "Jackie" or "Terry,"
"now that's enough!"
It's nothing really.
They don't get enough love.

You know they wouldn't kill
you. Just playing rough,
like young Americans will.
Still it taught me somthing
about love. If it's so tough,
forget it.

Midsummer, Tobago