DEREK WALcorr
211
DW:
Yes, it's Blake's grain of sand.
DM:
In your poetry some words seem to have a different meaning than in
most poetry in English. Take the word "sugar," for example. The costs of
sugar, the human costs are alive in the poetry, which makes the word new,
in a sense, or reveals what the word really means.
DW:
Well, the word "wheat" for me will always be a literary word. It's a
word out of poetry; it's not a word out of agriculture for me. It's not a word
that I know - it's not a
world
or word that I know. When you plant wheat,
that's
work,
but wheat in tapestries, wheat in literature becomes a pastoral
word that has no work in it, in a sense. I think that may be the difference,
because sugar is not a pastoral, though it may appear to be a pastoral thing.
The fields of sugar in the Caribbean are divinely beautiful, are supremely
calm
and so on, but there's a lot of blood and sweat in the earth for it. I think
the same is true of wheat, and when a northern writer writes about wheat,
he's writing close to the idea of bread, of survival. The wheat in the Bible is
hard-work wheat; it's not a literary word. The same thing would be true, I
imagine, of olive oil in Greece or, if you change places, of the coconut. For
one person it's picturesque and archaic and literary. For another person it's
something that smells and grows.
DM:
What voice leads you from line to line?
DW:
I was thinking today, at fifty-seven I may have not wanted to be a
poet but an anthology, which I don't mind, because I enjoy so many voices
that my own is irritating. So what you ask, what leads me from line to line, I
hope,
is any poet who is inhabiting the next letter. If poets can shift like
shadows and an
A
may belong to Dante, and
aJ
to Homer or Pasternak,
those letters aren't my property. And Ijust hope I don't have the vanity to
believe that they are. So what leads me, I imagine, leads anyone who is
serious and admits the generations that precede the word, and one is only
adding, if one can, to that general sound, with a very small sound of one's
own. I think every poet of any modesty hopes to make just a small
contribution to the sound of the world's hum, and does not by any means
wish to be individual or be praised for his style or whatever.
Just to come to a conclusion, and not because he's my friend, I think
Seamus Heaney, for instance, could have done a very nimble thing. He could
have danced away conspicuously, with great levitation and skill, from the
haunting shadow of Yeats, and turned into something very aggressively dif- .
ferent. But he knew that gradual absorption
would
lead to his own voice.
And, for instance, in the phase that he's now gone through in his last book,
The Haw Lantern,
his use of the abstract noun as a whole territory and not
just as an abstraction is very different from the way Yeats emblematically
used abstract nouns. Seamus uses a language now that is not concentrated
and fine and provincially exquisite or right, but one that is passing into a lan–
guage of understanding, of exchange in a territory where the
blocks
of the
