DEREK WALCOTr
209
have are regimes that are not just opposed to the idea of poetry because it is
seen as something effete, but as something that is really threatening. We're
in
a time of ideas,
heavy
ideas, not ones that are as emblematical or as simple
as, say, the Church versus the State. We are in a whole area of conscience
that is articulated, that has to be articulated within the regimes themselves.
Looking at a poet like Seamus, for instance, it would be very easy for him
not to concern himself or to concern himselfon a level where his conscience is
not so tortured.
It
would be very easy to write a kind of poem which is ab–
stract and which is theoretical. But to share, to be involved in - take someone
like Adam Zagajewski - is not only physical. There is a small community of
conscience that exists all over the world now that brings poets closer to–
gether into a very small brotherhood. They may come from anywhere,
from India or Poland or wherever. But it's like a concentration camp.
DM:
Is there another danger of oversimplifying, oftaking an issue at face
value and writing a poetry that has a pro and con?
DW:
Exactly. Those choices are even more demonic than those raised by
the average, say, nature poem - if you want to call it that - because the
temptations are enormous. One can then move into being bard, spokesman,
martyr, even coward as a role. And all of these are roles offered by the
regime, by the
exterior
regime, and the poet can be tempted, without know–
ing that he has been tempted, to become anyone of those. I think a lot of
great poets at some point move into that kind of high flatulence in which they
may be believing at the time that they are absolutely necessary, that their
voice, that particular pitch of the voice is necessary for the time. It exists in
all
great poets, but it's just that part of the great poet that you turn from and
say sometimes: Oh, give me a break, knock it off, cool it down, you know -
whether it's the "prophetic" vision of a bitter prophecy or whatever it is.
Unless it has that kind of
total
devastating light or blight that exists in Blake,
for instance, who is talking the truth. You sometimes hear it in Yeats, you
hear it
in
Virgil, you hear it
in
Frost. It is that bardic voice that, after a certain
age, a poet is attracted to without knowing that he is on a platform bellowing.
DM:
The theater gives you satisfactions that poetry might not, or allows
certain parts of your voice to express themselves that poetry does not.
DW: Well, there's a bit of sadness about poetry. Once a poem is finished and
it goes away, it's severed from you, it's not yours. Whereas in the theater,
the playwright is the one who takes all the blame and the burden. And, of
course, there's the sharing of that elation or that despair by several people.
Twenty people, thirty people can be
in
that boat together. So, in a sense, yes,
the personal elation, when it's multiplied, can be ecstatic. But also, by contrast,
so can the personal despair for which you are responsible. Multiplied by
twenty - right? - this makes you twenty times more depressed than if you
wrote a bad poem [laughter]. If you write a bad poem, you just throw it
away or hope you realize it's a bad poem.
If
you write a bad play, you
