Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet and playwright, won WH Smith Award for Omeros (transposes Homer to Caribbean); professor of poetry at Boston University.
On the island
Eight records
that has to do with first love and, you know, being on an island and I was probably what, nineteen or something. 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.
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.
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 the New World
I think Molly can be a terrific poet… The two lines I like out of that which um a very haunting uh 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… It's so emblematic of the poverty and the and the lyricism and the poignancy of the whole experience is there in those words.
This is from by a fr good friend of mine. We work together a lot, Galt McDermott here. I like the song because it's such a objet trouvet thing… I like the forthrightness of it and the and the rightness of it.
You Can Call Me AlFavourite
The next one is by Paul Simon and uh I Don't Dance… But whenever I hear this, I get up and I move around and it's just it's just wonderful rhythm.
This is another molly. Sometimes it sounds a little too polemical when I hear it. But at least it's got the the truth of Mahdi's belief in it. about um the Rastafari movement and it's so sincere and so direct…
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:14Do you remember what your first poem was?
Well, I don't remember writing the actual first poem. I remember writing from as far back as I can remember. And, you know, you feel a triumph at that age that you can get a rhyme together, or rhymes together, and the shape.
Presenter asks
2:10When did you actually say to yourself, 'What I'm going to do with my life is be a poet'?
From very young, I mean, that's I always knew that's what I wanted to do, um, to write, particularly poetry.
Presenter asks
3:00If you were sitting on such a beach [on a desert island], would natural sounds be enough for you, or is music important to you?
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 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.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
8:22Some people would think it was quite an arrogant thing to do to adapt Homer for your own purposes and your own people [in Omeros]. Have you got an answer for that?
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. 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 planned, patterned template thing.
Presenter asks
10:28Is that what you meant when you wrote in one of your autobiographical poems 'I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy'? There's a certain bitterness in that.
Well, yeah, because um English literature, you know, and the English language was supposedly the preserve 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. 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. So that that doesn't exist any more.
Presenter asks
22:02How embarrassed or how flattered are you when people such as Robert Graves say that you use the English language better than any English-born poet?
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 says that about you. You just swallow, you know, and Tears come to your eyes and you say, My God, that's it. Nothing more to say.
“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.”
“It was a shock to go back, because I'd forgotten how poor. The place could look, especially around the city of Castries, that some of it looks so … 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. … And actually the the the affection deepened in in with the understanding.”
“The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel of a sail. The horizon threads it infinitely. Action breeds frenzy. I lie sailing the ribbed shadow of a palm Afraid lest my own footprints multiply”
“Certainly I speak French Creole, but I think when I when I do it um and I do it quite naturally. 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.”
“I don't think I'd take anything except a blank piece of paper because it just sounds too vain, I think, to I think the thing about poetry doesn't offer any compan the poem doesn't offer any companionship to the person who wrote it. … It's never good enough.”
“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. And the commemoration of that I think is exquisite in this poem.”