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The Literary Desk · Interview · Issue 21

Dante Micheaux interviews Derek Walcott about White Egrets

Dante Micheaux · Derek Walcott · Joseph Brodsky · Seamus Heaney

Dante Micheaux interviews Derek Walcott for issue 21 of The Wolf, dated August 2009, while White Egrets was still to come out. Micheaux asks what drew Walcott to the subject, and he answers that the sequence is set in the valley of Santa Cruz, where egrets settle on the lawns against the hills. He links their whiteness loosely to age and permanence but says the poems are about serenity, and compares the birds' awkward walk and graceful flight to Baudelaire's albatross.

The next questions turn to friendship. Walcott recalls Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney as companions free of jealousy, with a shared undergraduate-style humour, and says he learned concentration and respect for the poem's intellectual aim from Brodsky and boldness of vocabulary from Heaney. He then says he has moved beyond wanting the approval of New York, London or Paris, and that he writes from where he belongs, which young writers find hard to do. On painting he refuses to rank it against poetry and does not treat paintings as illustrations. The three poets once tried to sum up their styles in a phrase, and his was Wish You Were Here.

Micheaux asks about the Caribbean. Walcott likes hotels but warns that small islands can be smothered by tourism and that landowners are offered little for their land, and he describes living again in St Lucia as physical, with sun, salt and constant travel, including a first visit to Nigeria. Asked about a line in which he says his best poems are behind him, he defends imitation, learning by copying like an Old Master's apprentice. He says his publisher discouraged him from including his satirical poem The Mongoose, and that he expects no new collection after White Egrets unless a long poem arrives.

The closing answers cover film, where he storyboards in watercolour but finds location swallows his plans and cannot capture the weight of a leaf or stretch of water, and younger poets. He admires Charles Simic, though not when he turns too surreal, and argues that rhythm is memory: a good poem confirms what the ear anticipates, and a generation has been misled by a casual attitude to metre and by poor teaching. Readers of Walcott's late work will find his own account of it here.

Work
White Egrets
Author
Derek Walcott

Poems in this selection

  • White Egrets
  • Epitaph for the Young
  • The Mongoose

Imitation is a way to be original.

Derek Walcott, The Wolf, issue 21

I absorb, I'm a sponge.

Derek Walcott, The Wolf, issue 21
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