Why was I looking for such a thing, you ask? Surely, live fast and die young is the classic recipe – hopefully leaving a beautiful book, or three. Well, I was already older than Keats when he died, and had been studying with Derek Walcott who had just set about his masterpiece at age 60, and also had a sneaking admiration for Chaucer who’d only settled to his own masterwork around 60, so I believed there had to be a way of going about this over the long haul.
I got around to reading another book only last year. It’s the only one I can judge the tone of in any way from direct knowledge, having known the subject Derek Walcott for a year in 1989 when I was studying with him at Boston University.
Why did I want to read a biography of a poet I knew myself? Why does anybody read a biography? To know more! And Bruce King’s “Derek Walcott – A Caribbean Life” is not disappointing in many ways – it gives the dates, the degrees, the marriages and – more importantly – the financial details of how Walcott’s career – in poetry, plays, film and finally the Broadway musical – progressed to the Nobel and beyond. King is very good at giving you an overview of the literary business at the highest level – how Joseph Brodsky took over from Robert Lowell as Derek’s mentor, for instance, coaching him to act more “coolly” to build a stately and dignified manner, as befits a major contender, and even arranged a major Italian literary prize for him, to be awarded only after Brodsky’s death. And there are traces in the book of the man I knew, but only fleeting snaps – he isn’t quite alive.
When Derek Walcott taught his poetry class at Boston University in 1989, Joseph Brodsky came to sit in one day, a hawk nosed Russian man, stocky, with wispy red hair straying off his balding pate. I remember being highly offended when he turned to us in the class and said, “You are all – what? – twenty two? You don’t know anything yet…” I shifted in my seat thinking: “I’m the same age Keats was…I’ve actually learned quite a lot.” But he was certainly right in what he said. What we learned we learned later, after we stopped studying.
One poem I took to Walcott for his opinion was an imitation or response poem of my own called “Another Duchess”, which took off from Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”, which you’ll find here:
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/duchess.html
My own poem was a first draft and though not bad, all over the place, with some lines a lot longer than others. Walcott’s comment was succinct: “it doesn’t work if you break the line length.” Basically, if I was going to imitate a poem in couplets and lines of ten beats, all the lines had to have ten beats as well as a couplet! Rocket science, eh? Well, it took me a few years to get that poem right, but eventually it was picked by Peter Forbes, then editor of Poetry Review, to be the opening of a New Poets feature on my work in Poetry Review and the poem got a lot of attention. The version below is the final one, once I’d fixed up all the loose bits that Walcott objected to, but if you want to know what it was like to start with – just imagine one or two lines taking a bit too long to get to the rhyme!
Try Atar's writing exercise
Find a poem you like and write an imitation of it. You can take the same subject or you can just take the form and turn the subject upside down. But take the poem on, without cheating. It may take a little bit of work to get it right, but it’s something you can share with someone else if you do: everyone loves a good cover version!
Another Duchess
That's my last Duchess passing in the hall,
sounding as if she had a world to call
her own, other than mine, in which she breathes
at least, while I'm inclined, these days to wheeze
whenever I hear female tread go past;
and every time the cough subsides
I see her painted on the inner wall
of my eye and I have to scrub the balls
of my palms on my brows, till I hear fall
of her foot or at least another who can drive
the famished feast of her face from the curve
of every tray, replacing it with a starvation diet dish
of someone pleasant, pleasant is the very least
I'll be content with‑ but they're not her.
Sorry, sorry‑ really, let's not bother
talking anymore about her, are you
comfy there on that side? There, I'll throw
my pillow in there for you, there how's that?
Neck better? Just a minute to put out
this fag. We have all night. The dawn won't come
while we're still in a sweat. Relaxe. The gleam
on the windowsill reminds me of her teeth.
I'm sorry‑ can you get my wallet out from underneath
the jacket?...What d'you mean why not just talk?
She isn't somebody you'd simply walk
up next to in the park, make some remark
apropos of the mating ducks, oh how they clear
the water with their wings, would she come eat
dinner? That night, another night? Maybe?
I want her more than ducks pawing the flood
want air. Just can't get clear of her to flight. Shan't
be mentioning it again. Come here. The glass
of water and another rubber. Look, the light.
I wonder if she's cold now, or holding somebody's hand?
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