Train Schedules

Kenneth,
Would you have enjoyed your reading of those tedious train schedules (I think that is what they were) had you been in the audience? Some might suspect that there is a hint of exasperation with an audience that would thuderously applaud such a tortured reading. There is a hint of this even in your tone. Are you wondering if they are supoortive because they belong to your "community" or because they really are engaged by this kind of poetry?

I just read William Logan's extensive review of Derek Walcott's latest Selected Poems in the Sunday Times and it read like a eulogy, not of the man, but of his work. In the end, he is brilliant, smart, a writer of distinguished lines, but in the end a poet who has not written a memorable poem. Which is damningcriticism. I wonder where Walcott is left? I wonder if Walcott's community will have to come to the rescue? In many ways, I suspect that Walcott's poems are just too long. Perhaps a shorter-poemed poet would have a more lasting legacy because people could remember the poems whole and quote them. I am going to start writing shorter poems and I will force unsuspecting children to learn them by heart.
The thing is William Logan is in Walcott's community, and yet he is not. Walcott is the exile poet. Does that mean that exile poets like me will find pleasure in Walcott? I like Walcott, but I have never felt I belonged in Walcott's community, not in that closed and rigid sense of the idea of community. Walcott's community has at times included Joseph Brodsky, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney--the big guys. But Walcott is black, and he is from the Caribbean and in many ways he belongs to my community. Yet reluctantly, at that. And at some level my declaration of a community smacks of hubris. Which is my point. I do think communities exist, but I do think they have to be self-consciously created communities that exist for the convenience of politics, economics and emotional support. Like nations our communities are invented. They are, thankfully, far more porous than national borders.
I thought of writing poems like your poems, Kenneth. I decided to check the train schedules in Jamaica. I ended up with three poems. Trains are not very big in Jamaica. And the schedule is really a suggestion, not a rule. So you see the problem? I can write a poem about how to get from Kingston to Montego Bay without a car. Same basic idea. Unfortunately, it will not be quite dadaesque as your work. Will your community applaud me?
I can assure you that if you read your poems with passion, grace, elegance and conviction, no matter what they heck they are about, I know a lot of people who would enjoy your poems. People who do not even know that you actually have a community. Some of them will be black, and exiled.