DEREK WALCOTr
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inside because you can get stanzas written by people who may be in
Montana, and the poetry still feels closeted, it still feels tight. It's some sort of
screwing tight of the mind that has happened, I think, which may be
derivative of a misreading of William Carlos Williams, a misreading of
Japanese or Chinese poetry. A lot of people who practice what they think is
Chinese poetry forget the
width
of the thing, and think it's all minimal and
modest. There's a great epic width to Chinese poetry. It's an immense
country. And when somebody talks about a river in China, it's not a brook up
in
Vermont
I
do
feel that American theater is closeted and chambered and dark and
small and so on. But why is that? I think what's missing is a kind ofwidth of
the imagination that very few American playwrights have. Alien subjects
aren't approached. They aren't wild enough, I find, for the size of the coun–
try.
If
you measured the height ofAmerican theater - when I say height I
mean in terms of its concept and what it dares to do - you'd imagine that it
was written in a country no bigger than, say, half ofWales.
DM:
So it's almost agoraphobic?
DW:
Well, it's enclosing; it is shuttered. There are a lot of themes that are
just not approached by American writers. One of them, obviously, is the epic
of the Indian or the epic - in theater - of crossing the country. I don't just
mean the Western; I mean something with a scale and width to it like Whit–
man's poetry. You don't get that feeling of scale in American theater. And it
doesn't have any
tribal
power. It's all very hermetic and private and indi–
vidualistic and diaristic. It's very prosaic and journalistic, in that sense, and
very conservative in form. I suppose why I say that is to point out that
when one talks about an outdoor theater, there's no outdoor literature.
There's no reason why American literature shouldn't have that width to it.
DM:
In northern literature, is there a feeling of having been pulled up by the
roots?
DW:
I speak from a position of luck and privilege, because I share two cli–
mates, but perhaps the fact that poets keep wearing shoes, you know, gives
them small feet or tight feet and corns. A lot of modern poetry is like having
corns.
It
hurts. It's tight and small.
And I don't mean just going barefoot up on the Cape. What I mean is
to
be
barefoot in spirit. Maybe I'm being too Gravesian, but I think if that
doesn't happen poetry dies. If a man keeps walking on leather, on concrete
every day of his life, and if you take that to represent the spirit of poetry,
then it's going to get corns, it's going to get withered and chilblains. I think the
poet goes unshod , and that's for the whole feel of the thing. To walk about
barefoot, as Whitman said, really is the first need.
And the shape of the human foot is not a matter of style. A lot of
modern poets are stylists. It's French prose poetry or it's Williams or its
southwest or whatever. It's like different cuts of shoes, styles of shoes.
