Word: walcott
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Delighted at first, that is. Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who won the prize in 1992, recalls a similar burst of joy followed by a prolonged state of siege. "The phone rang endlessly, and a lot of invitations came. It was a really terrible time, not terrible in a bad sense but terrible in how exacting it is. For a while you can't work, because it's so demanding." What Walcott characterizes as the Nobel's less than phenomenal influence on his book sales didn't make up for the chaotic fuss. What did soothe him, however, was the prize...
Even those not on trend speak to how the culture and its expectations have flipped. Anne Stringfield, 24, works at a New York City publishing house, lives in the trendy East Village and moonlights on the side, typing for Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. But as she sits in a New York restaurant, dressed in black and adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses, she says she often feels unchic around her friends. She is single, while most of them are in serious relationships. Her apartment is in the expected dishabille, while their cupboards are filled with martini and highball glasses, their furniture...
Even readers who tend to veer away from poetry find themselves propelled toward the work of Derek Walcott. It's not just because the West Indian Nobel laureate has the classic gift of mixing ease with eloquence and of deepening, dignifying his most private moments with the high and burnished diction of a sunlit Shakespeare. Even more, Walcott has strained and struggled all his life to match sun and rain, to marry the world of autumn leaves and opera houses that he learned to love on paper with the unrecorded "pomme-arac" and fireflies of his long-colonized islands...
...Bounty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 78 pages; $18), Walcott's first collection of poems since he won the Nobel in 1992, finds the 67-year-old wanderer sitting on the veranda in the last indigo hour of the day, "watching the hills die" and imagining a world where he will exist no more. All the master's gifts are prodigally displayed here: an ear that finds liquid music in "fast water quarrelling over clear stones," a wit that sees death--the state of wordlessness--as "beyond declension," and an attentiveness that not only observes squirrels "spring up like questions" but also...
...faculty members when he says that "Harvard is the center of a flourishing poetic culture." Creative talent includes both the well-known poets on the Harvard faculty--such as Professor of English Peter Sacks and Briggs-Copeland Lecturer Henri Cole--and poets living in the Boston area, like Derek Walcott, Frank Bidart and new Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Harvard also boasts such nationally acclaimed critics as Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Helen Vendler and Fredric Wertham professor Barbara Johnson. And the university's Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position often held by practicing poets, is presently occupied...