On visual art:Firstly, perhaps this isn’t quite what Derek Walcott had in mind, but check out the knee painting:
Also, I really liked the description he used about all poems having a necessary light and contour. And David: I remember Walcott saying that all art inspires a joyous transcendence (or something or other, I can’t remember quite how he worded it)– but that it’s music that does it quickest. When I was writing my Watson proposal last semester, that was exactly the dilemma I was trying to describe. In both poetry and choral music I experience that sense of fullbody joy that art incites, but when singing in a choir something happens beyond the space of inhabiting or of even reading a poem out loud. I don’t know how to describe it, and it makes me a little bit nervous to admit– it seems to diminish the importance of poetry, but it really doesn’t.
Then D.W. quoted Pasternak:”Great poets have no time to be original.”I guess if you’re Derek Walcott you can say that. Thinking about this some more, I can almost agree, if we consider time spent as synonymous with focus, it does seem that a poet spending time focusing on originality would sink a poet in a quagmire of ego and overwork in the office of bad verse.
By the way: SURRENDER YOUR IDENTITY TO THE WORK. thoughts?
Also: did anyone notice that he clapped for himself a bit at the beginning of the Q&A? And that he signed books, even though he made such a hullabaloo about the importance of the work over the American Capitalist Egotistical Fame thing?… I guess he does have “More experience in humiliation” than we do.
Also, he said “quickest.” And then he said– not necessarily “better.”
Maybe my dilemma with music is merely a Hip-Hop/Pop sort of problem in that the beat sometimes takes precedence moreso than in a choir, where the voice is the star with not much competition. As I perform, I am expressing my own “poetry.” Because of this, performing enhances the importance of poetry for me. Though probably half the audience will not hear a single word I say.
This is interesting to me, the idea of performance and its impact on the word..hmmm