Three Tuesdays: November 28 and December 5, 12 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Online
Derek Walcott was a mapmaker, a painter, a namer of the flora and fauna and people of the islands in the Caribbean Sea. He carried Dutch, English and African blood in his veins. This mixture and the education he received from erudite school masters, and his teacher mother, gave him enormous vitality that led to powerful yet delicate poems that show a dazzling command of meter and rhyme. Walcott was also ambitious. He wanted to name the topography of the islands in the way that Homer would have named the islands of the Aegean Sea.
In three intense sessions we will read poems from throughout Walcott's oeuvre to identify and explore the naming, the political and social concerns of the poet, and also his crafting and sculpting of the line to make his poems seem as necessary and eternal as monuments built to withstand any blows Nature or Man can inflict.
Walcott's father died young of what Derek called an absurd malady: an ear infection. The father was an accomplished painter. And the young Derek, his twin brother Roderick, and his sister Pamela, grew up with the model of the painter father and the reader mother. Derek started to write poetry as a nine year old. As a teenager he was selling his first book( paid for by his mother) on the streets of Castries, Saint Lucia, his birthplace.
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. The islands he named, their trees and flowers and fish and birds, and fishermen and farmers have become part of humanity's literary treasure.
Come and explore the islands of this painter of words.
Three Tuesdays: November 28 and December 5, 12 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Online
Required Reading:
The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948 - 2013 by Derek Walcott (9780374537579)
Recommended Reading:
What the Twilight Says: Essays by Derek Walcott (9780374526832)
Indran Amirthanayagam is an American diplomat, poetry publisher with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions (www.beltwayeditions.com); editor of The Beltway Poetry Quarterly (www.beltwaypoetry.com) and director of The Poetry Channel on Youtube. (youtube.com/user/indranam). He writes poetry in English, French, Spanish, Haitian Creole and Portuguese. He has published twenty three books, including Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant, Blue Window (Ventana Azul), The Migrant States and Uncivil War, and his forthcoming book is Powet Nan Po A ( Poet of the Port).
REFUND POLICY: Please note that we can issue class refunds up until seven (7) days before the first class session.
(This book cannot be returned.)