Derrek Walcott, poet and 1992 Nobel Laureate for literature, today enters Taiwan as the focus of a week of readings, discussions and lectures on poetry sponsored by the Taipei City Government. The series, titled A Celebration of Poetry will include Chinese-American poet Arthur Sze, University of California at Davis professor Michel Yeh and local poets and scholars.
Walcott, Sze and Yeh were all originally scheduled to come to Taiwan for last September's Taipei Poetry Festival, which took place in the week following the calamity of Sept. 11, preventing their attendance.
Now 72, Walcott was born on the Caribbean island of St Lucia and has spent most of his life in Trinidad, though the last few decades have seen him shuttling back and forth between there and Boston, where he teaches at Boston University. A product of mixed African and European heritage, he has referred to himself as a "mulatto of style." In an opus spanning 54 years and growing, his poems have carefully and consistently mapped out the problems of tracing a personal identity out of a history that extends and multiplies rhizomorphously back into separate cultures. In The Schooner Flight, penned earlier this year, he adopts the voice of a mixed-blood sailor to declare:
"I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."
But Walcott's lifetime of questioning has not brought him answers, despite his ability to express his soul and its schisms of geography, language and culture. In Tiepolo's Hound (2000), an epic poem that posed his own life against that of the Caribbean born painter Camille Pissarro, he wrote:
"A ceiling from Tiepolo:
afternoon light will ripen
the sky over Martinique to alchemical gold,
a divided life,
drawn by the horizon's hyphen
and no less irresolute as I grow old."
Tomorrow in Taipei, Walcott will read his own poetry, which is frequently narrative and easy to follow, at an event with the heading: "Our wide country, the Caribbean Sea." His other appearances will take place Sunday, Monday and next Friday.
Michelle Yeh and Arthur Sze are the other distinguished US arrivals to take part the upcoming poetry happenings. Yeh is a leading scholar on Taiwanese poetry. Last year she, along with Nobel literature committee member Goran Malmqvist, released An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, a 600-page volume detailing the history of poetry in Taiwan and its various influences.
Sze is a second-generation Chinese-American who has published five volumes and contributed poems to top magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Paris Review and Mother Jones. He will appear with Walcott tomorrow and Sunday.
Tomorrow's reading takes place from 2pm to 5pm at Chungshan Hall (
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