Diary: (1) Rachel DeWoskin & Kirun Kapur, Alone & Remembering Poetry Class in a Time of Pandemic, with Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott in his home office in Brookline, Massachusetts, during the time he was teaching at Boston University. Image: Brooks Kraft/ AFP via Getty Images

January 2022
Dear Kirun,
We’ve been writing to each other for twenty years now: poems, desperate notes, texts, epics on books, teachers, friends, husbands, children, ideas, politics, adventures, joys, sorrows, doubts, academia, rivers, weasels, wombats. But the last time we co-wrote or showed anyone else anything was our letter to the editor at the New York Times. We were trying, from the tiny pedestals of youth, to defend Derek Walcott when a colic-stricken reviewer had attacked his poems. And to say something about who he was to us, as a poet in the world and as our teacher. Now, from the shores of our forties, it reminds me of Didion’s hilarious and profound question in “Goodbye to All That”—was anyone ever that young? But I also think we were right to write, and to have thought carefully about Derek’s poetry while we were in his classroom and for all the years since. I know we’re both thinking about Derek’s work again during these plague years, and rereading into it ways to frame the terrifying frailty of human beings. I keep coming back to Derek’s idea, which he so often landed on in his workshop and the tumble of years and conversations that followed it: that the problem for poets and students of poetry is that we don’t understand love. He meant both in the world and in poems, of course, and also that we, as young writers, weren’t able to identify or take the risks necessary to making work that mattered. Those risks were intellectual, political, metrical, and emotional. They had to do with self and other, with landscape, boundaries, and with strangeness and familiarity.