Happy Birthday, Walcott

"Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery."

Derek Alton Walcott

*****

Here’s what bums me out: Derek Walcott is one of the best contemporary poets that exists, one of the first poets I was introduced to early on, a poet who lives in this tiny planet of ours, a poet I suspect I’ll never meet in the flesh (that’s what bums me out).

That aside, I love love love this man … his votary extends across many disciplines: poet, playwright, writer, visual artist, and so on. His poem, A Far Cry from Africa, is one of the most intense poem’s I’ve ever posted on, a poem that hits close to home with me because of my own mixed ethnic background.

Like I told my Facebook friends, you should check it out if you can, tell me what you think (or better yet, tell Walcott!) … and Mr. Walcott, you should come out to Aurora, Colorado and visit me, your humble fan …