Ruth Padel sat down for an interview with Aida Edemariam of The Guardian, her first since she resigned her post as Oxford Professor of Poetry after it was revealed that she had alerted the media to allegations of sexual harassment against her main rival, St Lucian poet Derek Walcott. Here are some excerpts, with the link to the entire interview below:

More revealing is the way she describes suggestions, a year ago, that she be considered for the post of poet laureate. (“I would like to start a steady, syncopated drumbeat for Ruth Padel as the next laureate,” wrote Bel Mooney in a letter to the Observer, describing Padel’s achievements, then, betraying the embattled elitism of a small world, “she would bring vivacity to the ancient honour, as well as being tough-minded enough to withstand the philistines.”)

“I always said I didn’t want to do the laureate,” says Padel, “because I was too scared of the post getting in the way of work. I thought there were some poets, and Carol Ann [Duffy]’s one, who wouldn’t let it do that, but there are some who would, and I was probably one of them. What I know about myself is that I always want to please – I want to give people what they want. And if you have lots and lots of people asking you for things you get very scattered, and I’m sure Carol Ann is strong enough to be absolutely clear about her priorities, but” – her voice is very quiet now – “I’m not sure that I would be able to do that.”

Is that what happened with the Oxford job? I am referring, she knows, to the misguided emails to journalists. Her voice drops even further. “That may be.” I can see how it would work – the thrill of being in the running for such a prestigious job, the flattery of being asked for information, the frisson of having a nugget of gossip she could provide, the wish to please a student (as she later, slightly unbelievably described it, after her resignation) who was concerned about a man with Walcott’s supposed reputation being given a teaching post. Still unsolved, however, is the mystery of who sent the dossier – “I have no idea – whoever it was was no friend to me, but it’s water under the bridge now.”

She has, understandably, no wish to revisit the episode, but she seems to struggle, a bit, with her newfound media training-by-fire: her instinct seems to be to answer a question directly put; experience tells her it would probably be a bad idea, the two imperatives keep flashing across her face. Did she want the job very much? “I don’t really know. I didn’t expect to get it. I would have loved to do what I’m doing now, which is taking poetry into the science labs, going round college to college. I would have found the lectures daunting, but I would have enjoyed the challenge of them. So I don’t know – it became … I’d never been part of a campaign before, and other people …”

The day before she resigned she was having lunch with “some old friends, and one is an artist, and the other is an actor. And they were talking about their work, and it was so interesting. And I thought, ‘This is my life. I like talking about work, thinking about work, and where I am and what I’m doing.’”

Is there anything she regrets? “I think I should talk less.” She laughs. How about the emails? “Do we need to talk about this really?, because it’ll just be picked up by other papers. I mean, I wrote things in response to people who asked me about things. And I think that’s probably all I will say.”

Poetry not being a paying sort of job, she’s made a complementary living from journalism for years. Could she not guess it would be picked up like that? “Um … no, I didn’t. I didn’t have any idea.” What has she learned from the whole thing? The answer to this is a lot less hesitant. “Not to trust people. And also to breathe more deeply before I answered things. And um ….” – very quietly – “it was a very important moment when I realised, with those friends of mine, I love doing my work, what I love is doing my work. I don’t care about the high-profile stuff – of course I care about the service of poetry, but I would have liked to do the work. But now I want to get back my writing – that’s the important thing.” Quite.

For the complete interview and photo credit go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/28/ruth-padel-poetry-darwin-oxford

A famous musical flop is returning to Broadway. Paul Simon’s The Capeman, which lost $11 million on Broadway in 1998 and earned Simon the nickname “The Flopman,” is being consider for next years’s  Public Theater season, the New York Post reports. Oskar Eustis, the head of the Public Theater, is in talks with Simon about bringing the show back next year. “Oskar loves ‘The Capeman,’ ” a Public Theater spokesperson says. “He loves the music and the story. He has met with Paul Simon, but there are not concrete plans at this time.”

Well, they may not be “concrete,” but there are plans, according to the gossipy Post.

Eustis, sources say, wants to do a concert version of the show. The book—by Nobel Prize winning Derek Walcott—will be pretty much eliminated, which is a good thing, sources say, “because it’s dreadful.” But Walcott’s lyrics — and Simon’s tunes — are haunting. “Born in Puerto Rico,” “Satin Summer Nights” and the gorgeous “Time Is an Ocean” are first-rate songs that got lost in the mess that wound up on Broadway.

“The Capeman” was never recorded, but Simon made a studio album, “Songs From the Capeman,” the year before the show opened that’s well worth hunting down.

Simon performed songs from “The Capeman” at BAM last year, which is where Eustis got the idea of bringing back the show. Simon, the Post reports, might perform in the Public Theater version as well.

“The Capeman” tells the story of Salvador Agrón, a Puerto Rican gang member who murdered two teenagers in Hell’s Kitchen in 1959.

The original production starred Ruben Blades as old Salvador and Marc Anthony as young Salvador.

If Eustis can get Anthony to play old Salvador in the Public’s concert version — and if Simon’s in it, too — you’re looking at a hot ticket.

Read more at http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/theater/flop_secret_LnXWmOJrTf39LB0gbRTTSO#ixzz0XdaRPxJ6

“Há de chegar a hora
em que, com alegria,
você vai se cumprimentar ao chegar
à porta de casa, em seu próprio espelho,
e cada um sorrirá diante da acolhida do outro,

e dirá, sente-se aqui. Coma.
Você amará de novo o estranho que era si mesmo.
Dê vinho. Dê pão. Devolva seu coração
a ele mesmo, ao estranho que amou você

desde que você nasceu, que você ignorou
por outro, que o conhece de cor.
Tire as cartas de amor da estante,

as fotografias, os bilhetes desesperados,
tire suas própria imagem do espelho.
Sente-se. Celebre a sua vida.”

Derek Walcott

Often times, I attempt to condense the world onto the head of a pin. The following is such an endeavor:

…fill the element
with signatures of your own frequency,
echo-surroundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver gleams in the dark of the whole sea.
Seamus Heaney “Station Island” XII

Each poet provides, whether explicitly or implicitly,  a justification for their particular aesthetic project. Poetry is, after all, a fine art—un-useful, un-servile; such an art needs justification. What ends will it achieve for the poet? For the readers? For the poet’s community? We might ask these questions relative to the rubric of history, culture, politics, economics, psychology, or religion. Such considerations, however, are not at least directly the poet’s; they are certainly our own. Perhaps this is unavoidable. Yet we are not at a total loss, for poems are things made of language—the very means by which we share our considerations and reflections. The poem, as a topos of the community of language, provides us with the place of sharing in our understanding not only with the poet who has created, but with other readers who also experience this place.  Therefore, insofar as our inquiry arises from and returns to the experience of reading the poems themselves, perhaps we might join our own reflection on the ends of a certain poet’s aesthetic project with that poet’s own explicit or implicit reflection.

I’m often fascinated with words more than ideas. Thus, when I attempt to insert logic into my rhetorical endeavors, I sense the voice of a sophist arising from the darkness of the mind’s trash can. It’s an intellectual weakness which I’m ill-prepared to fight.

As some of you may know, when I’m not writing prose about food and other topics or trying to convince The Cheese-Hater to taste a piece of cheddar, I write poems. I went to graduate school what now seems like a thousand years ago at Boston University, where I studied with Derek Walcott. And though he’s generally thought of as a chronicler of empire, Caribbean history and the vagaries of the human heart, one of my favorite of his poems happens to be about lemons (though really, it’s also about empire and the human heart). It was originally printed in his 1976 book, Sea Grapes, but you can get it now in his Collected Poems: 1948-1984, which I can’t recommend highly enough and which has been my solace more times than I can count over the last twenty years. “Sunday Lemons” itself has some of my absolute favorite lines of poetry in existence, including “as the afternoon vagues/into indigo”— a perfect description of what the afternoon does, especially when you’re feeling uncertain about your place in the world, which is often the feeling Sunday afternoons seem to produce.

Sunday Lemons

Desolate lemons, hold
tight, in your bowl of earth,
the light to your bitter flesh,

let a lemon glare
be all your armour
this naked Sunday,

your inflexible light
bounce off the shields of apples
so real they seem waxen,

share your acid silence
with this woman’s remembering
Sundays of other fruit,

till by concentration
you grow, a phalanx of helmets
braced for anything,

hexagonal cities where bees
died purely for sweetness,
your lamps be the last to go

on this polished table
this Sunday, which demads
more than the faith of candles

than helmeted conquistadors
dying like bees, multiplying
memories in her golden head;

as the afternoon vagues
into indigo, let your lamps
hold in this darkening earth

bowl, still life, but a life
beyond tears or the gaieties
of dew, the gay, neon damp

of evening that blurs
the form of this woman lying,
a lemon, a flameless lamp.

The Department of Liberal Arts, Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of the West Indies-St. Augustine will host a conference honoring Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott under the theme “Interlocking Basins of a Globe” on January 12-15, 2010, in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.

Paper topics will originate from a range of standpoints to approach Walcott’s work, such as the politics of exile and belonging; literary ghosts and confreres; the visual imagination; rethinking the sublime; time, landscape, and myth; Caribbean contestation; and Walcott as critic, commentator, and journalist.

The organizers describe the conference focus:

Poet, playwright, essayist, critic, dramatist and painter, Derek Walcott, is recognized as one of the world’s greatest living writers. Among his many awards and honors is the Nobel Prize for Literature which he won in 1992. The conference “Interlocking Basins of a Globe” will explore the multifaceted nature of Walcott’s work. It invites reflections on his evolving thought and analyses of Caribbean civilization – his beloved Antilles, and the cartography of its origins. His far-ranging poetic imagination gives metaphoric expression to the creative possibilities of the ambivalences that exist within the New World psyche.  Its axes of loss and plenitude form the ground of unprecedented possibility, facilitating unique intersections between cultures that enable a leap into the new. Walcott theorizes the world of the Americas.

Walcott’s vision evolves from a desire to inhabit and be nourished by multiple worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, this response to New World history and sensibility has been, in some measure, shaped by his lifelong dialogue with the work and theories of other Caribbean creators and thinkers; and, on the other, from his acknowledged apprenticeship to literary ancestors and his collaboration with writers from across the globe. These streams have fed debates about the nature of his relationship to the Caribbean, and to Europe, Africa and Asia.  His many essays and commentaries often respond to such concerns and the politics of that relation contribute to the complex tapestry of his drama and poetry. 

For more information, see http://sta.uwi.edu/news/ecalendar/event.asp?id=728 or contact Jean.Antoine@sta.uwi.edu, Paula.Morgan@sta.uwi.edu, or Barbara.Lalla@sta.uwi.edu

Renown historian Marcus Rediker gave an informative lecture at Cornell University on the subject of  the Slave Trip: A Human History. Click on the link below to listen:

The Slave Trip: A Human History Lecture

Rediker is the author of the influential work, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, and  The Slave Ship: A Human History.

“The sea is history” (Derek Walcott)

Recently, a dear friend and colleague told me about an experience she’d just had with a trusted spiritual teacher. “I’d been telling her about my marriage and its frustrations,” my friend said. “It’s a good marriage in many ways. My husband’s a good friend, good lover, and good father.”

When the teacher said “that’s a lot!” she had agreed. “But, as I told her, we have an insane amount of petty conflict. We have such different styles. I worry that my fate is to go all the way to old age without ever having the deep, true love I’ve always wanted.”

Then the teacher taught my friend a profound lesson. The teacher looked lovingly at my friend and said, “That question is not about your husband at all. That question is asking you to fall in love with yourself, and to love the person you see in the mirror with your whole heart. The real question is whether you will learn and practice a ‘deep, true love’ for yourself.”

Profound words! This is potentially life-changing advice to anyone longing to find a partner, or to anyone who keeps trying to change the partner they have. “If only he would tell me he loves me more often!” If only she would get a better job!” If only she would lose (or gain) weight!” “If only he would stop complaining about my weight.” “If only she’d want more sex!” “If only he learn about foreplay!” “If only she or he would appreciate me more!” “If only he or she would give me the love I need!”

The wise teacher replies, “If only you would make a spiritual practice of learning to love yourself. Like all learning, that requires commitment and practice.”

I’ve edited Derek Walcott’s beautiful poem Love After Love below. It illuminates the path:

The time will come when, with elation….
you will love again the stranger who was your self….

[the one] who has loved you all your life, and who
who you ignored for another, [the one] who knows you
by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes.

Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life!
There’s an easy way to know if we’re doing this. As Adyshanti says,

When we start to suffer, it tells us something
very valuable. It means we are not seeing
the truth, and we are not relating from the truth.
It’s a beautiful pointer. It never fails.

Blessings to you dear visitor. Remember to feast on your life today!

====================================

You may post a response here, or email me at drvlee1234@aol.com.

una magnifica raccolta di poesie del Nobel Derek Walcott. Un autore unico, “per la capacità di creare una grande poesia partendo da dati biografici, collegati alla sua terra nativa, le Indie Occidentali, dove storicamente si è realizzato un incredibile crogiolo di popoli, razze e culture” (da Wikipedia) E per essere in grado di innestare su tali suggestioni  il fascino della grande lirica occidentale (non per niente, una sua raccolta si chiama Omeros) e la lezione poetica del XX secolo.

DEREK WALCOTT, ISOLE, ADELPHI

Un paio di decenni fa Iosif Brodskij ebbe a scrivere di Walcott: «Per quasi quarant’anni, senza sosta, i suoi versi pulsanti e inesorabili sono arrivati nella lingua inglese come onde di marea, coagulandosi in un arcipelago di poesie senza il quale la mappa della letteratura moderna assomiglierebbe, di fatto, a una carta da parati». Un arcipelago al quale, da allora, non hanno mai smesso di aggiungersi nuove isole, ma le cui coordinate sono rimaste immutate: dalle promesse giovanili di In una notte verde – imparare «a soffrire in giambici accurati», «lodare finché amore duri, i vivi e i morti bruni» – alle riflessioni sull’arte e sulla vecchiaia del Prodigo. Una dedizione totale alla poesia e una preoccupazione per la condizione umana nate dalla volontà di rimanere fedele a un’epifania precoce – magistralmente narrata nel poema autobiografico Un’altra vita – che, alla maniera di Dante, ha segnato e continua a segnare il corso di un’intera esistenza. Ripercorrere l’avventura letteraria di Walcott significa assistere al dispiegarsi di un dono poetico capace, come forse nessun altro ai nostri giorni, di coniugare il lampo lirico dell’istante «in cui ogni sfaccettatura» è «còlta in un cristallo di ambiguità» con il gesto aperto e impersonale dell’epica. Il risultato, sulla pagina, è un’opera di straordinaria versatilità formale, magnificenza linguistica e precisione metaforica, costantemente illuminata da una compassione ampia, come nei grandi poeti di ogni tempo.

Mappa del nuovo mondo di Derek Walcott
Tempo verrà
in cui, con esultanza,
saluterai te stesso arrivato
alla tua porta, nel tuo proprio specchio,
e ognuno sorriderà al benvenuto dell’altro,

e dirà: Siedi qui. Mangia.
Amerai di nuovo lo straniero che era il tuo Io.
Offri vino. Offri pane. Rendi il cuore
a se stesso, allo straniero che ti ha amato

per tutta la vita, che hai ignorato
per un altro e che ti sa a memoria.
Dallo scaffale tira giù le lettere d’amore,

le fotografie, le note disperate,
sbuccia via dallo specchio la tua immagine.
Siediti. È festa: la tua vita è in tavola.

Arcipelaghi
Alla fine di questa frase, comincerà la pioggia.
All’orlo della pioggia una vela.

Lenta la vela perderà di vista le isole;
in una foschia se ne andrà la fede nei porti
di un’intera razza.

La guerra dei dieci anni è finita.
La chioma di Elena, una nuvola grigia.
Troia, un bianco accumulo di cenere
vicino al gocciolar del mare.

Il gocciolio si tende come le corde di un’arpa.
Un uomo con occhi annuvolari raccoglie la pioggia

e pizzica il primo verso dell’Odissea.

St Lucian Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott is scheduled to give the Anatol Rodgers Memorial Lecture (ARML) in Nassau, Bahamas, on Thursday, November 12 at 7pm. “Art, Politics and Caribbean Culture: An Evening with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott,” which is free and open to the public, will take place at the College of the Bahamas’ Performing Arts Centre on Poinciana Drive. The evening ends with a book signing.

“It is truly an honor for the College to have Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott as our special guest for this year’s Anatol Rodgers Memorial Lecture Series,” said Chair of the School of English Studies, Dr. Marjorie Brooks-Jones. “One of the most prolific writers of our time, Walcott represents the very best of Caribbean artistry, intellectual achievement and culture. His visit to the College is a once in a lifetime opportunity not to be missed.”

The ARML was established four years ago by the College’s School of English Studies to provide opportunities for students, faculty, staff and the public to hear from the region’s most talented and well-known writers. In 2005 Haitian American scholar and author Joanne Hyppolite gave the first presentation. Guyanese poet Fred D’Aguiar, Jamaican Scholar Dr. Carolyn Cooper and Ghanaian writer and Emmy Award winner Kwame Dawes spoke each subsequent year. Both D’Aguiar and Dawes held writing workshops for students and writers in addition to giving lectures. The series honors the late educator Anatol Rodgers, the first female and third Bahamian principal of the Government High School. Rodgers was an English teacher with a passion for the subject who touched the lives of generations of some of the country’s outstanding citizens. Her family’s support of the series enables the College to host internationally renowned scholars and writers each year.

Dr. Brooks-Jones expressed the School’s pleasure with the growth of the series, the offshoot of outreach efforts that began as early as 1979 when the College hosted Jamaican writer John Hearne. “I’ve always been struck by the desire, the wish of people, to listen to and to participate in conversation with scholars and artists, and that’s really a service that we try to provide,” said Brooks-Jones. On Friday, November 13, The Construction Seminar Group hosts Walcott at the Bahamas Culinary & Hospitality Management Lecture Theatre. There he will give the keynote address on the issue of “The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on the Development of the Caribbean.” The registration fee is $100.

For the original report go to http://www.thenassauguardian.com/art/295828792709483.php

Another breakupiversary, and I’ll admit, I feel kind of proud. I’ve had a couple of bad days this week, but if I think about the difference between where I was a month ago and where I am now… well, it’s huge. As sad as I might feel sometimes, I feel like I have myself back and that’s something to celebrate. It reminds me of this wonderful poem by Derek Walcott:

Love After Love 

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
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.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

PS The Halloween murder mystery was SO fun. We all drank lots of red wine and pulled out our worst French accents. And I was the murderer!

PPS How brilliant are these eyelashes? Took me 30 minutes to put them on and I had minimal peripheral vision all night, but it was worth it!

The College of the Bahamas, in conjunction with the Construction Seminar Group, will host the Caribbean’s first Nobel Prize winner for literature Derek Walcott in November. This will be the first time that the Bahamas has ever hosted a Nobel Laureate.

Honoured by the MacArthur Foundation, the Royal Society of Literature and Her Majesty the Queen, Mr Walcott is an outspoken poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. He will lecture on the topic “Art, Politics and Caribbean Culture” at the college’s Anatol Rodgers Memorial Lecture Series on Thursday, November 12. He will also address the 2009 Construction Seminar on the impact of foreign direct investment on the development of the Caribbean on Friday, November 13. “Hosting a Nobel Laureate in the Bahamas is a highly celebrated achievement and comes on the heels of President Barack Obama being awarded the Nobel Prize for extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and his support for nuclear arms reduction,” the college noted in a statement.

For more go to http://www.tribune242.com/news/10242009_walcott_news_pg9

.

Una vez les di a mis hijas, por separado, dos caracolas
extraídas del arrecife, o vendidas en la playa, no me acuerdo.
Las usan como topes de puerta o reposalibros, pero sus paladares,
húmedos y rosados, son el canto insonoro de ángeles.
Una vez escribí un poema llamado «El Cementerio Amarillo»
cuando tenía diecinueve. La edad de Lizzie. Tengo cincuenta y tres.
Esos poemas que he alzado no se vinculan a traducción alguna
como si fueran hitos musgosos; cada uno baja como una piedra
al fondo del mar, asentándose, pero déjalos yacer, con suerte,
donde las piedras están profundas, en la memoria marina.
Déjalos estar, en agua, como mi padre, que hacía acuarelas
se adentraba en su trabajo. Llegó a ser una de sus sombras,
dubitante y difícil de ver bajo la luz solar del verano.
Se llamaba Warwick Walcott. A veces creo
que su padre, por amor o bendición amarga
lo llamó así en honor de Warwickshire. Las ironías
se mueven. Ahora, cuando reescribo un verso,
o esbozo en el papel que se seca rápido las frondas de cocos
que él hizo tan tenuemente, las manos de mi hija se mueven en las mías.
Las caracolas se mueven por el fondo marino. Acostumbraba a mudar
la tumba de mi padre de las ennegrecidas lápidas anglicanas
en Castries adonde pudiera amar a los dos a la vez-
el mar y su ausencia. La juventud es más fuerte que la ficción.

.
Derek Walcott
Una vez les di a mis hijas
.

Derek Walcott, who is the University of Alberta’s Distinguished Scholar in Residence, sat for an in-depth interview with the local Edmonton newspaper, the Journal. Here are some excerpts from the interview with a link (below) to the complete interview:

I’ve arrived at Derek Walcott’s downtown hotel 15 minutes early for our interview. But when I walk in the door, the distinguished Nobel laureate is already waiting for me in the lobby, sitting on a cosy chesterfield, a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in his hand.

From the waist up, Walcott, who’s been in Edmonton these past six weeks, serving as the University of Alberta’ first official Distinguished Scholar in Residence, is dressed in a professorial tweed jacket. From the waist down, he’s wearing plaid pyjama pants with bedroom slippers.

It’s an arresting image. Is it a metaphor, symbolic of a man who’s walked with kings, yet kept the common touch? Or does it merely suggest that at the age of 79, Walcott is long past the point when he bothers to dress up to impress newspaper reporters?

. . .

“I do not consider myself ‘un-modern,’ ” Walcott says, cheekily. “I think I write in an inevitable manner. That means I write as clearly as possible. I think that verse has a particular rhythm, and I think that verse should rhyme. I’m not preserving old ways. I’m just saying that what I’m doing is extremely natural.”

Most of the art of the 20th century, he dismisses as “fake.”

“I’m very vehement about abstract art. I’m very square,” he says. “I think that at the heart of every work of art there is a story, a one-two-three, a symmetry, and much modern art is about the rejection of that idea of symmetry as being old-fashioned.”

Walcott feels lucky to have grown up as a writer in St. Lucia, in a culture that wasn’t obsessed with novelty for its own sake, that didn’t despise traditional narrative or representational art.

“The luck that I think I have it that I do not live in a society that is excited by famousness, or the defiance of meaning,” he says. “The society I come from demands meaning, demands understanding, and that’s passe for some cultures.”

“Whatever is fashionable in New York is supposed to be fashionable all over the world, and that’s the arrogance that irritates me. But I don’t have to go by that New York thinking. In fact, I have to go by a culture that demands understanding of what it’s looking at or reading.”

That inherent human longing for form and meaning is what fascinates him about the phenomenon of rap music. In a way, he suggests, rap artists have rescued popular poetry from arid elitism.

“It’s not true, of course, that anyone can be a poet, or even try to be a poet,” he says with a chuckle.

“But I think the activity of rap is a very healthy thing. I think if young writers are trying to rhyme, which is what they’re doing, it’s like a formal protest, in terms of composition.”

“It startled me, when rap came around, because you might have expected that protest would go in a different direction, in a form of violence. And the shape the revolution took was a surprising shape, in symmetry of language, in rhyme and rhythm.”

In fact, Walcott sees intriguing parallels between the social commentary of contemporary rap artists and the social satire of 18th century poets like Alexander Pope or John Dryden.

“You have to rhyme with rap. You’re doing the same thing as a heroic couplet, with the addition of doing it to music. Certain things fulfil themselves because they’re human instincts. Why should satire be in heroic couplets, in rap, as much as in Alexander Pope? Because the couplet summarizes, it emphasizes, it economizes.”

” Da da, da da, da da, da da, da dat/Da da, da da, da da, da da, da dat,” he chants. “That’s a natural couplet instinct, to criticize anything, because of the rhyme.”

. . .

Some poets, of course, live lives of splendid isolation, alone with their words, writing for small, and invisible, audiences. Such a solitary existence has never been Walcott’s style. While he’s primarily known as a poet, the theatre is his other grand passion.

“I’ve always written plays, from very young. My mother used to act, so I know that background. I always formed companies of actors with my brother. I always loved to write and work with actors, because of the ensemble– that’s one of the greatest joys a writer can have, to write directly for an ensemble, to write with actors in mind,” he says.

But theatre comes with its own frustrations, especially American-style commercial theatre, he says.

“Celebrity is definitely one of the problems of theatre, too, now. I think the money is so big, it’s irresistible. There are people who make millions of dollars because of the way they look, not because of their talent.”

. . .

“The Nobel Prize has changed my life, in terms of getting to different places and seeing different cultures,” he says. “You have to reassess. To be in Mexico is very different than reading about Mexico. And I’d never really experienced the width of a prairie, of plain, and what that feels like.”

The place where he’s not, of course, is Oxford. This past May, Walcott was the odds-on favourite to win the prestigious post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He took himself out of the running, after his leading rival for the job, British poet Ruth Padel, helped to orchestrate a smear campaign against him, sending out anonymous emails to British journalists, digging up two incidents from the 1980s and 1990s, involving two former students who’d accused Walcott of sexual harassment. Padel won the poetry professor post, but resigned shortly afterwards, when her role in the messy affair became public.

The Oxford dust-up, and the old sexual harassment allegations are not subjects Walcott is keen to discuss.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “It’s just very boring. No, all I can say is that there are some people who stood up very pleasantly for me. A lot of writers wrote in protest of what happened.”

Besides, he says, the Oxford lectureship would have meant a lot of work.

“I would have had to write too many lectures,” he says with a twinkle.

. . .

The most horrifying thing about his time in Edmonton, though, hasn’t been the marking workload or even the bizarre weather. It’s crossing the North Saskatchewan. Most days, Walcott explains, he’s been picked up at his hotel, and driven to campus by Edmonton poet and U of A professor Bert Almon. For Walcott, who suffers from terrible vertigo, taking the High Level Bridge is a regular torment.

“I close my eyes,” he confesses.

The poet, who turns 80 in January, has kept a rather low profile during this U of A stint. But he’s scheduled to return next September, and the one after that. Perhaps, with a year’s lead time, the university might have the chance to organize something more akin to a Walcott mini-festival, staging one of his acclaimed plays or mounting a show of his paintings.

For his part, Walcott says he’s made good use of his time here, working on one play, adapting an existing theatre piece as a concert musical, and turning another play into a film script. But he hasn’t come to Edmonton looking for poetic material, he says.

“I don’t go looking for ‘content,’ ” he says. “I’m very lazy. I hope ‘content’ will come toward me.”

So will there be poems about Edmonton in Walcott’s future–and ours?

He flashes a mischievous grin.

“Maybe I’ll write about me charging a buffalo–but I don’t think so.”

For the complete interview go to http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/study+poetry+plaid/2116761/story.html

Photograph by: Larry Wong, Edmonton Journal

Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill –
the net rising soundless at night, the birds’ cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

 And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in the silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
                                       it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven’s cawing,
the killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

 - Derek Walcott

… erhalten, denn ich habe noch nie ein Buch von Herta M. gelesen. Nennen Sie mich einen Banausen. Natürlich werde ich das demnächst einmal, wenn ich Zeit dazu finden werde und der Verlag so viele Exemplare nachgedruckt haben wird, dass auch für mich eines abfallen könnte, nachholen. Der zweite Grund liegt darin, dass diese Bepreisung deutlich gemacht hat, wie sehr dieses Lob noch den Werten des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts verhaftet ist. Als Derek Walcott ausgezeichnet wurde, freute ich mich über die Öffnung in die Breite der Weltliteratur hinein. Als Elfriede Jelinek geehrt wurde, dachte ich, das Komitee sei in der Gegenwart angekommen. Ich dachte, die Zeit sei reif, neuere Publikationsformen, wie sie internetnah geschehen, mit ins Augenmerk zu rücken. Pustekuchen.

Ich bin sicher, der Preis für Herta M. ist hoch verdient. Die wenigen Auszüge, die ich aus den Medienberichten entnehme, deuten auf eine ausdifferenzierte Sprache und geübte Registerakrobatik hin. Und immerhin hat sie einen Teil ihres Ruhmes mit Collagearbeiten erworben. Hier allerdings liegt meiner Ansicht nach auch die Crux. Denn die Collage hat sich im Zeichen der Digitalisierung weiterentwickelt, ist eine typische Montagetechnik des vergangenen Jahrhunderts, der bereits jetzt, so wenige Jahre ins Dreierjahrtausend hinein, etwas Anachronistisch-Beschauliches anhaftet. Den Lesern dieses Blogs brauche ich nichts darüber zu erzählen, wie sich der Umgang mit den fragmentierten Relikten der Moderne in eine Kulturtechnik verwandelt. Sie erleben es ja täglich selbst.

Nun, ich werde es vermutlich noch erleben, dass ein Autor meiner Generation und meiner Ausdrucksform zu weltweiten Ehren gelangt. Es wird jemand sein, der das digitale Nomadentum symbolisiert, wenn sich dieses bereits überlebt haben wird. Auch dann werden die Gazetten sich überstürzen, die Vergangenheit und deren in die künftige Gegenwart hineinreichenden Reminiszenzen aufzubereiten. Dann werde ich mich ein klein wenig mitgeehrt fühlen, was mir augenblicklich unmöglich ist. Und das finde ich nicht einmal schade, denn die Kräfte, die mir Auftrieb geben …

… haben wenig gemein mit der Suche in den “Großformen” der Literatur und meine Arbeitsweise ist eine auf andere Art anachronistische, da sie sich an der Mediation von Form und Entwicklung orientiert, weniger am Zwillingspaar von Progression und Tradition, von Rebellion und Stagnation.

Congratulations also to Barrack Obama! This is a fortunate move at the precise moment in history when his vision of a world freed of the spell cast by nuclear weapons and his encouragement of diplomatic endeavours over warfare need backing.

Quelle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPtg-gvgWhE&feature=channel

David Whyte says:

Enough

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.

Yesterday I was privileged to share an afternoon with poetry friends who often join together to celebrate the ancient oral tradition of poetry.  Our only rule is that we don’t read–we recite. We’ve learned that taking the time  to commit a poem to memory makes that poem part of  you, and begins to reveal its secrets. When you share it with others through recitation, still more depths are revealed. When we share without hiding our own vulnerability, a powerful exchange occurs.

Kim Rosen was a special guest of the group yesterday. An author and wonderful performer of poetry, she took us on a journey that renewed our joy in Mary Oliver, David Whyte, Walt Whitman, Billy Collins, Rumi and others. In her book, Saved By a Poem, she shares her journey of mastering poem after poem. She shares that mastery along with glimpses of exquisite vulnerability. Learn more about her at www.kimrosen.net.

In my work as a psychotherapist, public speaker and author, facing the refusal to open to life is a daily challenge. Sometimes that refusal is my own; sometimes it’s what holds back my patients. When we get out of own way, and allow grief, mourning and confusion to flow, we are rewarded by an equal measure of love, passion and and fulfillment.

Dear visitor, if you are among those who have not yet opened the door to your own magnificence, I offer you these profound words from Derek Walcott:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
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.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Blessings, dear visitor. You may post a reply here or email me at drvlee1234@aol.com.

When the perfect circle marries all beginnings and conclusions.

–  Paul Simon

I read a lot of music each week. Mostly, reading sheet music is an unconscious act for me: I simply understand what I am reading without needing to decipher what is before my eyes. But every now and then a piece of music calls me to slow down and savour the musical writing in the same way I would study and thrill at a gorgeous poem. Paul Simon’s less known song, “Quiet,” is one such composition that captured my imagination and collected me into contemplation today.

I am heading for a time of solitude,
of peace without illusions,
When the perfect circle marries all
beginnings and conclusions.

–  Paul Simon, “Quiet”

I dusted off my water colours to paint my favourite phrase in “Quiet” so I could to share this lovely line with you. After singing a lonesome arc of melancholy, Paul Simon’s meaning and music crests on his highest sustained note — “CIR-cle.” Here, at the high point, he brings us into spiritual suspension; and at that sweet fulcrum between his rising and falling lines, he invites us to free float up in the ether before we gently tumble down to the mundane “all” of this Earth.

I am relieved that Simon places the word “circle”– and not “perfect” — in the Heaven of his composition. His choice of which word to place in the highest niche of his line tells us “Quiet” is no search for perfection, but rather, a plaintive yearning for the the peace that comes when we –finally– arrive back home where we started.

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome.

–  Derek Walcott, Love after love.

Back-to-school after summer break, back to work after the weekend, back in bed after another long day of family and work to-dos, there are many circles of many sizes being drawn in the sands of my life. It feels good to notice when my beginnings marry my conclusions and I start once again on my next meaningful cycle.

May you take time to honour the closing, and look forward to the beginning of your next circle. Shanti and Shalom.

**********************************************************************
*******       bright heart singing                          credits and links             *******
**********************************************************************

Image credit: Watercolour by jamm at brightheartsinging.wordpress.com.

Music credit: Paul Simon, Quiet. I recommend giving this beautiful song a listen at the iTunes store.

Poem credit: Derek Walcott, excerpt of Love after Love, published in Roger Housden’s, Risking Everything:110 Poems of Love and Revelation, p.5

bright heart singing, copyright 2009 – jamm. Creative commons attribution, non-commercial sharing only (translation: feel free to quote me in context or use this entry but please always credit me for my work, thanks.) http://brightheartsinging.wordpress.com

.

Yo vivo solo
al borde del agua sin esposa ni hijos.
He girado en torno a muchas posibilidades
para llegar a lo siguiente:

una pequeña casa a la orilla de un agua gris,
con las ventanas siempre abiertas
hacia el mar añejo. No elegimos estas cosas.

Mas somos lo que hemos hecho.
Sufrimos, los años pasan,
dejamos caer el peso pero no nuestra necesidad

de cargar con algo. El amor es una piedra
que se asentó en el fondo del mar
bajo el agua gris. Ahora, ya no le pido nada a

la poesía sino buenos sentimientos,
ni misericordia, ni fama, ni Curación. Mujer silenciosa,
podemos sentarnos a mirar las aguas grises,

y en una vida inmaculada
por la mediocridad y la basura
vivir al modo de las rocas.

Voy a olvidar la sensibilidad,
olvidaré mi talento. Eso será más grande
y más difícil que lo que pasa por ser la vida.

.

Derek Walcott

Desenlace

.

Derek Walcott – Caribenho (1930) – Dramaturgo, poeta, prêmio Nobel.

“Uma linha reta é a distância mais chata entre dois pontos.” Derek Walcott.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
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.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Homecoming: Anse la Raye

By Derek Walcott (1930-)

(for Garth St Omer)

Whatever else we learned
at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades,
of Helen and the shades
of borrowed ancestors,
there are no rites
for those who have returned
only, when her looms fade,
drilled in our skulls, the doom-
surge-haunted nights,
only this well-known passage
under the coconuts’ salt-rusted
swords, these rotted
leathery sea-grape leaves,
the seacrabs’ brittle helmets, and
this barbecue of branches, like the ribs
of sacrificial oxen on scorched sand;
only this fish-gut reeking beach
whose frigate stuck like buzzards overhead
whose spindly, sugar-headed children race
pelting up from the shallows
because your clothes,
your posture
seem a tourist’s.
They swarm like flies
round your heart’s sore.

Suffer them to come,
entering their needle’s eye
knowing whether they live or die,
what others make of life will pass them by
like that far silvery freighter
threading the horizon like a toy;
for once, like them,
you wanted no career
but this sheer light, this clear,
infinite, boring, paradisal sea,
but hoped it would mean something to declare
today, I am your poet, yours,
all this you knew,
but never guessed you’d come
to know there are homecomings without home.

You give them nothing.
Their curses melt in air.
The black cliffs scowl,
the ocean sucks its teeth,
like that long dugout canoe
like a small petal fallen in a cup,
reflecting nothing but its image,
you sway, reflecting nothing.
The freighter’s silvery ghost
is gone, the children gone.
Dazed by the sun
you trudge back to the village
past the white, salty esplanade
under whose palms, dead
fishermen move their draughts in shade,
crossing, eating their islands,
and one, with a politician’s
ignorant, sweet smile, nods
as if all fate
swayed in his lifted hand.