Oh, my president-elect crush burns strong: Barack Obama seen with poetry collection. Of course it’s not just any old poetry collection, it is Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems. A Nobel Prize laureate; a Caribbean poet straddling colonialism, post-colonialism, and the Western canon; someone who proclaims “.. either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”. Of course, as Bookninja warns, it could be a coldly calculated photo prop, but I like the idea of Obama reading Walcott. It makes sense, y’know?
Maybe Obama is just returning the favour. Walcott wrote a poem on the occasion of Obama’s election victory: Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama.
Read more:
+ Derek Walcott: The Schooner Flight (and I’ve always maintained that Walcott is re-writing Eliot’s The Waste Land with that poem)
+ Derek Walcott: The Sea Is History
+ A Life in Writing: Derek Walcott
+ Buy Walcott’s Omeros – an epic poem/novel-in-verse charting the “restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary”.
