Diary: (2) Rachel DeWoskin & Kirun Kapur, Alone & Remembering Poetry Class in a Time of Pandemic, with Derek Walcott
Painting by Derek Walcott on the cover of his book Midsummer (1984)
Read Part One of this post here!
March 2022
Ah, Kirun!
That line from “Midsummer,” “the ooze and snarl of grumpiness embedded in a lovely line,” suddenly stands out to me in the context of your letter. Derek loved an anapest, yes, an intentional yet surprising extra foot. The messiness seems to me a little about his sense of humor, which you capture in your letter, and which I haven’t seen noted that often in the world’s conversation about Derek. He was wildly funny. And humor was a sometimes funny, other times stormy force in his classroom and his work, too, for all its seriousness. His joking about identity and love also often took the shape of listing what things were not, delineating presence and absence, maybe a habit having to do with exile, the absence of a once-home, half-lost language, or the ephemera of all human lives. Not to mention the (shared) almost pathological drive of writers to keep track, to make immortal what we know is begging to be broken or lost.
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