Derek Walcott

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 20:12

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is a poet and a playwright. He was born on the island of St Lucia into a world divided between native Caribbean patois and the well-honed vowels of British colonialism. He started writing poetry at the age of eight. Today, aged sixty-one, he's just been given the WH Smith Award for his ambitious narrative poem Omeros, which transposes the characters of Homer's famous epic to a fishing community in the West Indies.

Presenter0:55

His admirers say he's one of the greatest exponents of the English language alive today, and a future Nobel Prize winner.

Presenter1:02

Now professor of poetry at Boston University, he still returns frequently to the island of St. Lucia, where, in a house near the beach, he writes and paints. He is Derrick Walcott.

Presenter1:14

You wrote your first poem at the age of eight. Do you remember what it was?

Derek Walcott1:17

Well, I don't remember writing the actual first poem. I remember writing from as far back as I can remember.

Derek Walcott1:23

And, you know, you feel a triumph at that age that you can get a rhyme together, or rhymes together, and the shape.

Presenter1:30

And who did you show them to?

Derek Walcott1:32

My mother, who was a schoolteacher, um and did a lot of recitation around the house, a very good poetry of Shakespeare, another of Tennyson and, you know my father, who died when I was one, also wrote verse and evidently, you know, ran amateur theatricals in Castries in St. Lucia, so that she would remind us very repeatedly how she'd played Porsche in, you know, the Merchant of Venice scene. Not not the whole play, but scenes from

Derek Walcott1:58

from Porsche's Peach and um I remember she also knew Cardinal Woolsey's farewell address, you know. So I heard that kind of sound at home when I was very young from this be very beautiful um young widow, my mother.

Presenter2:10

So when did you actually say to yourself, What I'm going to do with my life is be a poet?

Derek Walcott2:14

From very young, I mean, that's I always knew that's what I wanted to do, um, to write, particularly poetry.

Presenter2:20

I suppose casting you away on a desert island i is is no hardship. I presumably that's where you write best, is it, when you're just alone sitting on a

Derek Walcott2:28

Um, well, I don't know how desert it should be. I mean, I'd like to have some trees around and, you know, some water and springs and stuff like that. But, um

Derek Walcott2:37

The beaches in the Caribbean are generally full only on weekends when people come out for a swim, but you can be on a beach that goes for miles in which there's nobody else at all. There is that.

Derek Walcott2:46

Isolation, which can be encouraging. I mean, you almost feel a sense of extinction if you're walking around in that, you know, very beautiful.

Derek Walcott2:54

It's not an emptiness, it's rich, but um

Derek Walcott2:57

Yeah.

Presenter3:00

And if if you were sitting on such a beach, would natural sounds be enough for you, or is music important to you? Would you need music if you were going to be there for a long time?

Derek Walcott3:07

Well, the thing is I don't really listen a lot to music. I mean, I don't play music a lot. I I very listen very rarely listen to the radio or put the record on. Um so some of the songs that or music that I've chosen

Derek Walcott3:20

It's really you know, there are ones that I associate with a pe particular period of my life or they're written by friends or, you know, they they excite me because I feel like dancing or moving around, you know.

Presenter3:30

So tell me about the first one.

Derek Walcott3:32

The first one is a lesylphide.

Derek Walcott3:35

And that has to do with first love and, you know, being on an island and I was probably what, nineteen or something.

Derek Walcott3:43

and I associate the sound of that with the sound of the water and the sun and the you know, beginning as a as a young writer.

Presenter4:45

The Waltz from Les Silfide played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Carrion. A masochistic experience for Derek Walker.

Speaker 44:52

Yeah.

Presenter4:53

Uh

Presenter4:54

So you you go back home to St. Lucia two or three times a year and and you work when you're there. Wh where do you live when you're there?

Derek Walcott4:57

Yeah.

Derek Walcott5:01

Um, I don't have a house there, although my mother did, and we lived there and grew up there. Now when I go back, I generally rent a

Derek Walcott5:09

Cottage near a sea wall, right onto the beach near to hotel.

Derek Walcott5:13

And it's small, but it's very comfortable. It's you know, it's a wooden cottage with a small kitchen. And, um, I get up very early in the morning.

Derek Walcott5:20

and have cup of coffee and the inevitable cigarette and um begin to work. And I sometimes think I get up for the cigarette and the coffee not ready to work.

Presenter5:28

Do you have a routine then for writing or or is it meticulously planned or do you just find a phrase?

Derek Walcott5:33

Yeah.

Derek Walcott5:35

Sometimes it's seven, eight o'clock, um and then, you know, it's very lulling because then you can hear the sea outside and if it's rough it's nice because then you can hear the surf crashing.

Derek Walcott5:44

Makes her sleep well.

Presenter5:45

It's very interesting that you go back because you you've written a lot about the the the severity of exile, but you've also written about the disappointment of homecoming. But obviously your your going home is still an inspiration to you.

Derek Walcott5:56

Okay, him

Derek Walcott5:58

It was a shock to go back, because I'd forgotten how poor.

Derek Walcott6:02

The place could look, especially around the city of Castries, that some of it looks so.

Derek Walcott6:07

drab and so poor and small and so on, that it took it was quite a shock. And then gradually going back, you didn't resign yourself, you began to understand where you came from again.

Derek Walcott6:17

Um

Derek Walcott6:19

And actually the the the affection deepened in in with the understanding. Um

Derek Walcott6:25

And there was no consolation, it was just that

Derek Walcott6:28

You had to balance off the beauty of the place with some of the poverty uh that you saw around you.

Presenter6:33

And were those the kinds of reasons that you decided you wanted to write this latest work, this epic work, Omerus?

Derek Walcott6:39

Yeah.

Presenter6:39

Because it's about those people, isn't it?

Derek Walcott6:42

It sounds so superior or so uh patronizing or sometimes so wrong to describe

Derek Walcott6:48

the beauty of a people that you you really love and you you know, you grew up among and the fact that they're supposedly inarticulate and

Derek Walcott6:56

I think it's a privilege to try to articulate that kind of life, and that's what I try to do in the book.

Presenter7:01

But why did you decide to to to take on the Homeric form, as it were? Why di d did you just decide that being

Presenter7:08

Shipwrecked in the Aegean, you know, maybe much the same as being shipwrecked in the Caribbean.

Derek Walcott7:11

I'm just saying it's big.

Derek Walcott7:13

Well, I think I I've said somewhere, the elation that one feels in Homer, to me the archipelago at the time of Homer has the same kind of um sensation of the dawn of a literature, the dawn of a people, you know, and to be born, I mean, like in Paul's song, I mean, to be to be h there at the at a lucky time, to be able to have the privilege of wanting to express that, I think, is stupendous for me.

Presenter7:39

We'd better have your second record, I think. Tell me about it.

Derek Walcott7:42

This is born at the right time. I like Paul Simon's work a great deal, not only for the music, but in this particular thing, it's like a carol and the words and the lyrics. I think he's an excellent poet.

Speaker 47:58

Down among the reeds and rushes, A baby boy was found.

Speaker 48:06

His eyes as glew in a century ago

Speaker 48:10

So there was brown.

Speaker 48:15

Never been lonely, never been lied to Never had a scumping fear, nothing you nigh

Presenter8:22

Paul Simon's born at the right time from Rhythm of the Saints. I suppose, um, Derek Walcott, some people would think it was quite an arrogant thing to do to adapt Homer for your own purposes and your own people. Have you got an answer for that?

Derek Walcott8:36

Well, the point is, I would not have undertaken this if I had read The Iliad and the Odyssey and knew them well, because they're already there.

Derek Walcott8:43

The book is not really patterned on them. It rather is um a thing of echoes, you know, going across going across the ocean rather than a sort of

Presenter8:49

Uh

Derek Walcott8:52

Planned, patterned.

Derek Walcott8:54

Template thing.

Presenter8:55

It's uh won you over us um a hundred plaudits and and not a few thousand pounds, this WH Smith Literary Award. How much does that kind of recognition mean to you?

Derek Walcott9:06

I was really pleased and astonished at the reception that it got, because

Derek Walcott9:10

It didn't matter to me whether it was ever reviewed even.

Presenter9:14

But but do awards um mean much to you? You once wore won um a a genius award in the States, didn't you?

Derek Walcott9:21

Well, I'm gonna, yeah, I know. Um so did Joseph Brodsky and several other people.

Derek Walcott9:26

It's nice to get it because it gives you four or five years of a great deal of security. And the tough thing is when they take it when it's finished, not when you get it.

Presenter9:34

It's rather a

Derek Walcott9:37

Um n no, well no, I don't think so. Uh it has a very bad connotation, this idea of of a genius um

Derek Walcott9:47

I'm not denying the fact that I was prodigious, I'm not denying the fact that I wrote well very young.

Derek Walcott9:53

To me, it's a gift, and I feel blessed that I was gifted, and I felt that I was gifted, but I also felt I had a sense of direction that.

Derek Walcott10:00

I wanted to continue the work that my father did. My mother encouraged me. You know, my brother encouraged me. He writes also.

Presenter10:06

But you you once said that uh that when white writers praised black writers, they seemed to be saying something rather patronizingly, he he's done rather well, hasn't he?

Derek Walcott10:10

BAAA.

Derek Walcott10:16

Oh, yeah, for a long time. I mean, I'm sixty-one, and when my when my books came out, obviously uh a lot of writers of my generation.

Derek Walcott10:24

It was a sort of a pat on the back, you know, welcome to the club, you're doing well, that kind of thing, you know.

Presenter10:28

Is that what you meant when you wrote in one of your autobiographical poems, you you wrote I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy? I mean there's there's a certain bitterness in that.

Derek Walcott10:36

Well, yeah, because um English literature, you know, and the English language was supposedly the preserve

Derek Walcott10:43

of English people. So it was rather like if you did well you were appointed a prefect and then head prefect, you know, and that sort of thing. Or you were part of the team or the club.

Derek Walcott10:53

And that went on for a while, but I think there's a whole generation of people now. I mean, what used to be the Commonwealth and even what used to be England is very changed.

Derek Walcott11:02

So that that doesn't exist any more.

Presenter11:05

Record number three.

Derek Walcott11:06

Number three is Parrot's ten to one is murder.

Derek Walcott11:09

It's uh the incident is it's Parrot, the great Trinidadian Clips, who was born in Grenada.

Derek Walcott11:16

Had an incident once outside of a nightclub in which he was carrying something which he calls a wedger, which is a razor, to protect himself or a gun, I think. He says he has a pearl-handled wedger in his back pocket. And these people attack him outside of a nightclub, and then he's brought to court and he is mentally brought to court, imaginatively brought to court, and then he defends himself and says there were ten of them against me. And there are lines in that that are fantastic because there's a Calypsonian called Pretender. All these people have names like Lord Pretender, Lord Melody, Lord Kitchener, and so on.

Derek Walcott11:50

And the great line in that to me is, well, they're going to cut me down as small as Pretender. Well, Pretender is a short Calypso. And the image of him being sliced up and the pun him cutting me down as small as Pretender when he's a great Calypsonian. And the fact that if he's attacked by these thugs and they slice him up, they're going to cut him down to be the same height as Pretender is fantastic.

Speaker 412:14

And the way they coming up like they want to devour But in the heat of the excitement is then I'll remember In the next man's pocket I'll forget me wedger I don't know what to do but I just can't surrender So they go cut me down just the smallest pretender You could imagine all the planning to dig out my liver But as the crowds are together I started to shiver

Derek Walcott12:17

Uh

Derek Walcott12:18

Find the hit.

Derek Walcott12:21

Uh

Derek Walcott12:32

Let's do one and more down

Presenter12:40

Ah

Presenter12:44

Sparrow and Ten to One is murder. Can we go back to your origins, Derek? You said your mother was a schoolteacher and and your father a painter who died when you were very small.

Derek Walcott12:50

Mm-hmm.

Presenter12:56

And he died when you were very small, you said. Both your grandfathers were white, weren't they?

Derek Walcott12:57

You said.

Derek Walcott13:01

Um I guess so, yes, in my yeah.

Derek Walcott13:04

On their mother's side, too.

Derek Walcott13:07

In other words, all mixed um

Derek Walcott13:09

this mixture that happens in terms of the whole melange of the Caribbean experience is the strength of the Caribbean, uh that it contains all these worlds. Because in Trinidad, you know, you contain I mean, one

Speaker 213:18

That doesn't

Derek Walcott13:21

One street internet that has a history of the world in it. I mean, you know, the China may be a Chinese grocer, an Indian merchant, a Lebanese person, an Africa, a French Creole. I mean, that's all there, you know? And yes, you can say that's true of any street in London maybe, but um or parts of London or parts of New York. The point is it's on an island in a very exhilarating climate with a great future.

Presenter13:41

But what was the atmosphere of that island when you were born into it in nineteen thirty?

Derek Walcott13:45

Well, I grew up very feudal. I mean, there were some French uh

Derek Walcott13:51

Creole

Derek Walcott13:53

People who had very large estates, you know, a very simple feudal system almost of people working in the canes, you know, that sort of setup.

Presenter14:00

And where did your family fit into that in in

Derek Walcott14:02

Well, we were in town. My mother was a school teacher, so she had a, you know, a sort of medi sort of lower middle class, I guess, if if you have to categorize it. Uh the other thing about the Caribbean too is that having servants is a very normal thing because people just want to work. You know, so there'd be girls around who and a cook and stuff like that. You know, it wasn't a matter of class, it's a matter of employment.

Presenter14:23

But it sounds as if your parents were were more educated, more cultured, if one can use that word, th than maybe the average.

Derek Walcott14:30

Well, I think a teacher would be, you know, she'd have to be. And that's just my mother. My father wasn't, you know, he wasn't around. Besides, it wasn't.

Presenter14:36

If she was walking round the house quoting the merchant of Venice,

Derek Walcott14:39

Well, yeah, not quite standing up and doing it, not walking around. She'd perform it, you know.

Presenter14:43

Yeah.

Derek Walcott14:43

Um

Presenter14:45

But having a a a gift for language, obviously, and a a consuming interest in it, as you say, from the age of eight, that must also presumably have set you apart from the rest of the Las Me. Did that estrange you from the the kind of street boy side of you?

Derek Walcott14:51

Must

Derek Walcott14:59

It it's very difficult to describe this because, for instance, one had to learn Latin and you'd say, What am I doing in this hot school room in 1938 or 39 or whatever, studying Latin? But it it was never odd, it was never strange because I think the discipline was so simple that that's what you did. But to have to, you know, to recite Shakespeare and to do a Latin unseen and to continue to do that until as you went through college, or for some friend of mine, for instance, to be studying Greek in Harrison College, that's what it was, that was your education.

Derek Walcott15:33

So all over the empire the public school system of education was a terrific thing.

Presenter15:38

Some more music.

Derek Walcott15:39

This next one is Benyaminojili singing.

Derek Walcott15:44

O paradiso from

Derek Walcott15:46

The opera L'Africana. And I've always liked it because um well, because you like the music, but also it's supposed to be the moment when Vasco da Gam is discovering.

Derek Walcott15:55

The New World

Speaker 416:12

Oh, my God.

Speaker 416:30

Yeah.

Presenter16:47

Benjamino Gili singing O Paradiso from Meyerbeer's L'Africana, and that was recorded in nineteen twenty three. Whi which poets, Derrick Walcott, were your inspiration in your teenage years?

Derek Walcott16:58

The great thing about growing up in a place that didn't have a lot of money was that the libraries could only buy the best, so you didn't have junk.

Derek Walcott17:06

Carnegie Library or the libraries that you had.

Derek Walcott17:09

Access to

Derek Walcott17:11

only had the classics, you know, Dickens and Scott and

Derek Walcott17:15

Shakespeare and so on. Um and not a lot of trash in between because they couldn't afford trash.

Presenter17:20

But were there any modern poets who inspired, do you think?

Derek Walcott17:23

Well, that team later, I think.

Derek Walcott17:25

with uh you know friend friends of mine who uh older older gentlemen older men who showed me you know writers like

Derek Walcott17:34

Elliott and Thomas and stuff like that, and then that was exciting and awkward in the Faber series.

Presenter17:39

Did you try to imitate them now?

Derek Walcott17:40

Absolutely, yes. Oh, definitely. I mean, poem by poem, I'd try to write today I'd try to write a Norden poem, tomorrow I'd try to write a poem by George Barker, to the day after by Spender.

Derek Walcott17:49

I copied everybody, I think so. And then what happened is if you copy everybody, finally somebody says, Oh, what an original voice.

Presenter17:56

Did you think it took courage, then, to do what you did?

Derek Walcott17:59

No, well, no, because I just knew, you know, that's all I wanted to do, that's what I wanted to do, and I knew I'd do it all my life.

Presenter18:07

But you needed to know you could make money from it, for sure.

Derek Walcott18:10

No, not really, no. I knew he could make money as a poet, you know. Um.

Presenter18:14

Well then how are you gonna live? How are you gonna feed yourself? I mean that that takes a certain courage, doesn't it?

Derek Walcott18:19

Well, if you're growing up in the Caribbean, you can always eat and swim. I mean, you can always get a mango.

Presenter18:24

Record number five.

Derek Walcott18:26

I think Molly can be a terrific poet. And in this next song, No Woman, No Cry.

Derek Walcott18:33

The two lines I like out of that which um

Derek Walcott18:36

A very haunting uh

Derek Walcott18:39

when we used to sit in a government yard in Trenchtown. And the the poignancy of that is his remembering becoming a singer, becoming an artist, becoming a

Derek Walcott18:50

The put

Derek Walcott18:52

and describing how he and his woman or wife or girl would sit in a government yard is a sort of barrack yard, a place that, you know, the government would put poor people in, like housing.

Derek Walcott19:06

And Trenchtown is a very desolate part of Kingston. And then there's a fire going and they're just cooking some porridge. It's very sad, but it's it's it's plaintive and it's got it's so accurate, you know. It it's in a government yard in Trenchtown. It's so emblematic of

Derek Walcott19:21

of the poverty and the and the lyricism and the poignancy of the whole experience is there in those words.

Speaker 419:36

No, no man, no dry.

Speaker 419:43

No woman, no crowd.

Speaker 419:48

No, won't man look right.

Speaker 419:53

Yeah.

Speaker 419:55

They live.

Presenter19:56

Bob Marley and the Wailers and No Woman, No Cry. You've actually written a poem called Cast Away, Derek Walcott. I don't know that it it offers any help for the isolation of the situation, but um can you quote us a bit of it, or read us a bit of it?

Derek Walcott20:11

You can only create

Derek Walcott20:12

something you hope can be a work of art alone. And in this case, it's set in the Caribbean, I imagine, but it's also the the image of Crusoe as someone who has to begin afresh with whatever tools are around.

Derek Walcott20:25

And the tools may be a piece of paper and a pencil or something, or a canvas or brush.

Derek Walcott20:31

But I think that's what it's about, the isolation that is part of creativity.

Derek Walcott20:38

The starved eye devours the seascape.

Derek Walcott20:42

for the morsel of a sail.

Derek Walcott20:45

The horizon threads it infinitely.

Derek Walcott20:49

Action breeds frenzy.

Derek Walcott20:53

I lie sailing the ribbed shadow of a palm

Derek Walcott20:57

Afraid lest my own footprints multiply

Derek Walcott21:03

Blowing sand, thin as smoke, bored, shifts its dunes.

Derek Walcott21:08

The surf tires of its castles like a child.

Derek Walcott21:13

The salt green vine with yellow trumpet flower

Derek Walcott21:17

Annette

Derek Walcott21:18

Inches across nothing.

Derek Walcott21:21

Nothing.

Derek Walcott21:22

The Rage

Derek Walcott21:23

with which the sand fly's head is filled.

Presenter21:28

You you always do write in you've never written a poem in your native um pato in Creole, have you?

Derek Walcott21:34

Certainly I speak French Creole, but I think when I when I do it um and I do it quite naturally.

Derek Walcott21:41

If I'm putting it down on paper, I don't want it to become a literary exercise. Once I have the melody right, once I'm not talking with an affected accent, or I'm not pretending to be somebody else, including pretending to be somebody that sociologically I'm not. I am not a fisherman on a beach in Groslet. That's not what I am. I'm a professor of poetry at Boston University, and that's how I think.

Presenter22:02

How embarrassed or how flattered are you when when people such as Robert Graves say that you use the English language better than any English born poet?

Derek Walcott22:13

Well, that was a tremendous compliment. I remember I came home from the beach and saw this letter from Jonathan Cape in which Graves had said that, and I was astounded. What can you say if if someone of the statue of Graves um

Derek Walcott22:24

says that about you. You just swallow, you know, and

Derek Walcott22:28

Tears come to your eyes and you say, My God, that's it.

Derek Walcott22:31

Nothing more to say.

Presenter22:34

More music.

Derek Walcott22:36

This is from by a fr good friend of mine. We work together a lot, Galt McDermott here.

Derek Walcott22:42

I like the song because it's such a objet trouvet thing. It's like a letter that a a girl is talking and she's talking so simply and the the melody is so so sweet and haunting. I like the forthrightness of it and the and the rightness of it.

Speaker 422:58

I met a boy called Frank Mill.

Speaker 423:02

On September twelfth, right here, in front of the Waverley.

Speaker 423:09

But unfortunately

Speaker 423:14

I lost his address.

Speaker 423:18

He was last seen with his friend, a drummer he resembles George Harrisona.

Presenter23:27

Shelley Plympton singing Frank Mills from Hare. We we have a series of set questions, Derek, that we ask our castaways before we uh set them adrift, but but let me ask you an extra one, if I may. If you could just take one piece of your work, or one something that you'd painted or poem that you'd written or play of your own, what what would you take with you to a desert island?

Derek Walcott23:48

I don't think I'd take anything except a blank piece of paper because it just sounds too vain, I think, to

Derek Walcott23:55

Yeah.

Derek Walcott23:56

I think the thing about poetry doesn't offer any compan the poem doesn't offer any companionship to the person who wrote it. I mean, you know, it's not.

Derek Walcott24:05

Good enough ultimately.

Presenter24:06

It's never good enough.

Derek Walcott24:08

No, no.

Presenter24:09

Do you keep them all in your head or?

Derek Walcott24:09

Keep the

Derek Walcott24:11

Some I think, I mean, uh I'm I I know friends of mine like Joseph Brodsky uh for instance can remember his work entirely, you know.

Derek Walcott24:19

Someone once asked me if I could and I began to read a long to recite a long poem and I got fright frightened because I thought, wait a minute, I seem to know all of this and I stopped because I thought this this sounds very vain.

Derek Walcott24:29

And uh

Derek Walcott24:30

But I I mean I I don't think I'd want there's only one thing I'd like to take.

Derek Walcott24:35

Apart from, you know, if I had a pencil and a piece of paper to try again, I think.

Presenter24:38

What about uh someone else's work, though? If you could take one other poet's work, just one poet, who would you take?

Derek Walcott24:43

One

Derek Walcott24:45

I'm very, very uh haunted by Delamere's poem Farewell.

Derek Walcott24:51

You know, he's a magical writer.

Derek Walcott24:54

From the beginning um

Derek Walcott24:57

When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes, Or the rain make lamentation when the wind sighs,

Derek Walcott25:06

How I shall fare this world whose wonder was a very proof of me

Derek Walcott25:11

Memory fades must the remembered perishing be

Derek Walcott25:15

Or when this my dust Surrenders hand, foot, lip, to dust again

Derek Walcott25:20

May these loved and loving faces please other men.

Derek Walcott25:24

That's wonderful. That's a great thing.

Presenter25:27

Why is that so great for you? Is that a near perfect grade?

Derek Walcott25:28

Because it's well, it's I think it's it's the whole thing. It's like um nothing belongs to you in this world and you you leave it behind.

Derek Walcott25:37

And the commemoration of that I think is exquisite in this poem.

Presenter25:41

Next piece of music

Derek Walcott25:44

The next one is by Paul Simon and uh I Don't Dance. Um

Derek Walcott25:49

But whenever I hear this, I get up and I move around and it's just it's just wonderful rhythm. And so I remember the first time I heard it, my daughters went with me and

Derek Walcott25:57

Boston and

Derek Walcott25:59

And it just got up and decided to move around. And I I've told Paul this, it's the one thing that gets me up.

Speaker 426:17

A man walks down the street, he says, why am I soft in the middle now? Why am I soft in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard. I need a photo opportunity. I want a shot of redemption. Don't wanna end up a cartoon in a cartoon grave.

Presenter26:32

Paul Simon, and you can call me Al. So these days, apart from sitting on the beach in St. Lucia, you sit in Boston, Massachusetts, teaching students how to write. Creative writing, they call it. Isn't it impossible? How do you teach somebody?

Derek Walcott26:43

I think over here there's a lot of contempt for it because um I think the impression is that you try to take people uh and try to make poets out of them. But the point is though, if it's a conservatory, if for instance you were a gifted pianist and

Derek Walcott26:56

You presume that you had someone like, I don't know, um

Derek Walcott27:00

Horowitz, if you were lucky enough. I'm not saying I am Horowitz, I'm saying

Derek Walcott27:04

that you certainly can help in terms of how you can interpret a line, how you can slow it down, you know, what you can put in. No, no, that's technical and it's it's always happened. There's always been

Derek Walcott27:16

People, you presume, who know more about the technique of the craft and it's always existed.

Presenter27:21

But doesn't it in the end become something like a a piece of carpentry that you're sort of looking at and saying

Derek Walcott27:25

Well there is a craft involved. I mean it is a matter of how do you make a good I think if you make a good box it's like making a good poem. I mean you really have to get the corners square if you're doing a quart train.

Presenter27:34

But if in the end all they all they uh created were kind of square quatrains. Life would become a little dull, wouldn't it?

Derek Walcott27:42

Well

Derek Walcott27:43

It's hard to write a good quadrain, right? It the thing about America is it does standardize things, it does pigeonhole and, you know, direct uh very strongly, it's very technological and pragmatic.

Derek Walcott27:54

And that's a little scary, and there is a kind of an odour of the academy to a lot of American poetry.

Derek Walcott28:00

But I I've had people who've um had their own books published. You don't try to influence them, you know, they go their own way and you don't try to change their style.

Derek Walcott28:08

But I don't think it's different from going to a conservatory, really, for music.

Presenter28:12

Have you any idea how many poems you've written?

Derek Walcott28:15

No, no. I mean actual poems.

Derek Walcott28:18

I don't know if I've ever written a poem. I don't think any poet ever says I've ever written a poem, even if it's Tinton Abbey or um it's not this pomposity of saying

Derek Walcott28:27

It never works. But when you think of people who wanted to burn what they did, when you think of Virgil wanting to burn his work or

Derek Walcott28:34

Somebody's saying it's it's all a disaster, it was never any good, you know.

Derek Walcott28:39

You say, Well, why should I believe less than that or more than that? The point about a poem is that it really is true.

Derek Walcott28:46

That if you think it worked

Derek Walcott28:48

Um

Derek Walcott28:50

It's it really is no longer yours. You don't have any

Derek Walcott28:53

If you don't have joy in it, you certainly can't take pride in it.

Presenter28:55

But it remains your passion.

Derek Walcott28:57

Oh, absolutely. Oh, yes. Yeah. Trying to get it right is the passion. Not doing it, but trying to get it right.

Derek Walcott29:03

It is a big thing.

Presenter29:04

Last record.

Derek Walcott29:06

This is another molly. Sometimes it sounds a little too polemical when I hear it.

Derek Walcott29:10

But at least it's got the the truth of Mahdi's belief in it.

Derek Walcott29:14

about um the Rastafari movement and it's so sincere and so

Derek Walcott29:20

So direct that it

Derek Walcott29:22

you know, from t from time to time I think, well, it's so popular now everybody wants to

Derek Walcott29:26

be a sort of plastic raster. But the depth of it is is very moving.

Speaker 429:31

Old pirates, yesterday, Rabbi.

Speaker 429:35

Fold I to the merchant ships.

Speaker 429:40

Minutes after they took a

Speaker 429:44

From the bottom list, But my hand was made strong.

Speaker 429:53

By the hand of the Almighty.

Speaker 429:56

We forward in this generation

Presenter30:00

Bob Marley and Redemption Song. So we have three set questions for you, Professor. First of all, which of the eight records would you need with you most on the Desert Island?

Derek Walcott30:09

I don't know, I think just to be up, I think Paul's song, Call Me Out, would be funny, keep me in a good mood.

Presenter30:14

Right. Um second question. The Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare are sitting on the beach next to the wind-up gramophone waiting for you. But one more book we'll put on top of the pile of your choice.

Derek Walcott30:19

Next to the

Derek Walcott30:24

Ulysses by Joyce.

Derek Walcott30:26

No question.

Presenter30:26

No question.

Presenter30:29

And uh third question, a luxury.

Presenter30:32

We'll give you anything you like.

Presenter30:34

As long as it's of no help to you at all in your plight on this island.

Derek Walcott30:34

Loneliness is lonely

Derek Walcott30:38

Well, I suppose a cotton of cigarettes would be the best thing.

Presenter30:41

How are you going to light them?

Derek Walcott30:43

Uh striking two Boy Scouts together. I mean two flints.

Presenter30:48

We'll leave you to discover how you're going to do it, and I shall say, Derek Walcott, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 231:01

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.