Shame On You, Mr. Walcott

It's astonishing to me that a writer as celebrated as Derek Wolcott would condescend to spewing such clichés of "terror at the blank page" or tired Romantic notions as to "whether he can make a successful poem again" to a national audience. Do we need this "great Nobel laureate" to reinforce such narrow, sophomoric and unsophisticated notions of what it means to be a writer at this juncture in time, when so many ways of writing and thinking are available to us? Walcott insists: "Anyone [meaning any poet] who tells you otherwise is lying." Well, Mr. Walcott, I'm telling you otherwise: I wrote nearly 13,000 words on why you are dead wrong on my Poetry Foundation Journal here a few weeks ago. Shame on you, Mr. Walcott, for dumbing-down a discourse instead of raising the bar as a laureate should.