 This lecture would not be a success without all of you. So it is my honest and greatest pleasure to be in your presence today. So I'm going to give you a round of applause for all being here. I'm very happy when I see this kind of attendance. I know as normal functions we start to feel from the back, but we have a very nice crowd and I'm sure tonight will be just as warm, just as encouraging and just as thought-provoking. My welcome here is a very short one because the night is, of course, not about me. This is the memorial lecture for Derek, Sir Derek Wolcott. Let's take a moment. As he has touched the world, I'm sure for everyone inside here, there's something of his work, of his life that has touched you. The reading of the poem today is just an example of what the world has experienced. So can we give him a round of applause? So without further ado, let us start the program. It's not about me talking. I'm going to hand you over because tonight we are looking at celebrating, Sir Derek, by looking at what is the poetic traditions and that's what the lecture is going to focus on. It is only natural that we should start with some of our well-known poets and their work, displaying their work. So let's give a round of applause for all of them and they will run one after the other and then we'll applaud them again after. Mr. Robert Lee, Ms. Jane King and Mr. Kendall Hippolett. White Cedar in Memoriam, Derek Wolcott. This poem begins with four lines from Derek's, the prodigal poem and those four lines will recur again within my own poem. And Derek's four lines are these. Make room for the accommodation of the dead, the amounts that multiply by the furrowing sea, not in the torch-lit catacombs of your head, but by the Amonbrite's Pume Blown Cemetery, White Cedar in Memoriam, Derek Wolcott. I thought it was over, the season of lila carpets, along verges on green lawns, petals of paue stepping off currents of soft air, settling with tender ease on earth's lanes. But here they are again, in May, everywhere, with the morning bassoon of wood doves and, yes, indeed, incredibly, to me ignorant of seasons of flora, I see the fragrant Easter spider lily blooming from unexpected corners of my without you days. Make room for the accommodation of the dead, you muttered, in a dark saying that seemed to mute memory, to remove yourself to needle-leaved casurinas of Pigeon Island, out of our too familiar embrace, too smothering adulation, or borrowing eyes searching out your diaries, and the cascading cedar blossoms raise the gray heron to serve chastened ledges of beccune point, the forlorn pool, deserted studio, vacant easel, and their mounds that multiply by the farrowing sea. After gentle curtsies through golden late afternoons, to Lacomet and Martinique and Mazook, past delicate carvings of white cedar figurines in the sculptor's garden and other such benedictions, meantime, autocrats of mammon desecrate your groves and beaches, they set iron beasts to holy roots of the blessed cedar with arrogant pride, they mock the memory of your protests, they will not heed angry alarms of scissor-tailed gulls, stubborn silence of drought, so we want your gray-eyed fierceness here, not in the torchlit catacombs of your head, not entire some fictions of some mythical you, but impossibly, like Atlantic breakers glimpsed through bamboo of violated praline, here, now, heraldic egrets lift your lines from more unfortunate mola chic, with the awkward grace of their perfect symmetry, the flowering mauve of cedar tumbles through green fern around Souffre, and will leaf your last book, not near your beloved bent piton, but by the amonbrite, spume-blown cemetery, white cedar in memoriam Derek Wargold. Beneath my bedroom window, naked children are hunting with sticks, each tries to kill a butterfly. This is not a metaphor, it is a true thing I can see from my window, and so what? Outside, marlene is washing. The only time she can boss the house is when her mechanic is out, so then she makes her child cry. She never fails to be rough and unkind to him. Well, it's hot. When Celestina lived there, the blows impacting with her flesh echoed in her lonely patient silence. She could not conceptualize her suffering, tried not to inflict it on us. She did not. An Indian doctor lived here once. He visited me while Miss Flo was ironing, shocked us with a woman he came by in casualty, you'd swear to be stride to eat her. Miss Flo got hot. She said, if you know that man, and the things that woman do him, he joined seven days, and so he marries she. Say he's satisfied. Leave me seven months pregnant with Paul. When he sleep, she tie knot with rope around him. When she pour in, she catch it in a tensile, and give to him for cocoa. Her own child say, if you tie man, he must stay, but you must take what you get. True, is it not? If I go by the rum shop, for Miss Jean to sell me some onion or soap, she will serve me first, and sudden silence loudly cry, you don't live here. I write syllabics. What else have I got? There are a thousand paves where I live. The naked children say, I did tell you not to play by the white lady butterfly. A thousand people live by me. But my neighbors, they are not. The theme of tonight's lecture is tradition. A vital way in which the tradition gets passed on is coming across reading the works of those I've gone before you, and absorbing that, and paying homage to it by eventually writing your own work. Tradition. Once as a child, I opened books, hoping each was casket, precious, with words, thoughts that had sapphired in the dark, deep underground in a man's mind. I searched for feelings that had cycled into language. A word like lust, winked like a ruby in a navel. Mystery was emerald. Laughter was amethyst. And once I found, and then I lost. A strange word, one without facets. Whole, the word peace. Like a pearl. When I was young, I never wrote a poem. Words flickered, beautiful, and wild in their closed cases, bright with the richness of their maker's minds. And as a child, it was enough. I played, and then returned to them. I don't recall when I became a thief. Or why, perhaps losing that pearl, I made my head a casket, locked up the wealth of meanings that I had not mind. Words are the only diamonds you can't steal. Now the words rattle in my skull. Loaded dice in a cracked cup. And I'm afraid to throw them. And there is no way to return them, except sometimes as now within a poem. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that these poets need a round of applause. That's resounding, wonderful. Are you feeling the goosebumps? Are you ready? This tonight is great. It has started off on such a wonderful note. It's going to be wonderful. It's going to be something that you would not forget. At this moment, I'd like to invite all of you to focus on our screens, where we would have an introduction to our guest speaker. MacDonald Ernest Dixon was born in Castry, St. Lucia, in 1944. He attended the Cannon Laurie Anglican Primary School and St. Mary's College. And from quite early on, he manifested the multifacetedness which continues to mark his work as an artist. As a student, while he was filling his exercise books with adolescent poetry, he was also covering pages of his drawing books with sketches. After graduating from the St. Mary's College, he joined the Royal Bank of Canada and later the National Commercial Bank of St. Lucia, where he went on over a 30-year period to forge a successful career in banking. During that period, he rose steadily to the highest banking position at the Royal Bank of Canada, becoming its first local manager. And when the National Commercial Bank of St. Lucia was established, he was at the helm there as its first managing director in 1981. Dixon also went on to serve in the capacity of trade and commerce advisor to the government of St. Lucia. MacDonald Dixon is an established and well-known poet, novelist, short story writer, actor, photographer, and painter, who is also actively involved in the world of theater as a playwright, actor, and director. He became interested in the arts at an early age and was just 16 years old when he came across Derek Walcott's 25 poems while exploring the shelves of his school library at the St. Mary's College. In the mid-1960s, Dixon was swept up in the maelstrom of activity by the St. Lucia Arts Guild, which was started by Derek Walcott and his brother, becoming involved in performing and directing. He acted in a range of plays from European classics like Odiepus Rex and Julius Caesar to Caribbean comedies such as One for the Road. In directing also, he ran the gamut, the modernistic, the queen, and the rebels sits comfortably in his directing portfolio alongside the mock doctor, a Caribbean adaptation of Molière's The Doctor in spite of himself. Dixon's first publication was a collection of poems entitled Pebbles, 1973. He then set his hand to writing plays, and his work began to appear in several magazines and anthologies throughout the region. When the Arts Guild ended, he continued to write plays, drawing heavily on his knowledge of folk heritage and local history. His play, The Folk Musical, Tinde, directed by George Fish Alphos and featuring music by Charles Cadet, was St. Lucia's theatrical presentation at Carifesta V in 1992 in Trinidad. In his writings, Dixon seeks to recreate the history of his people's myths and legends to serve as a reference for contemporary and future writers in his country. He also has a short story collection, Kaoum, to his credit, along with three novels, the latest of which, Saints of Little Paradise, takes as its subject the initial contact of two civilizations, that of Europe, with that of the new world, and their capacity to connect with one another and progress towards fusion. An accomplished photographer, Dixon's love of country is continuously transcended through his photography of St. Lucia's landscape and rich cultural heritage. Dixon's biography of works includes and are not limited to novels and short stories, Saints of Little Paradise, Book 1, Eden Defiled, 2012, Miss Begotten, 2009, Kaoum, 2009, Season of Mist, 2007, Poetry, Collected Poems, 2003, The Poet Speaks and Other Poems, 1993, Pebbles, 1973. Plays, The Glass Doll, A Soldier Always, The Chosen, Diablo Terre, Tinde, Calender, The Last Lamp. Dixon continues to guide and bridge the gap to the new generation of writers, directors, and artists. He helped develop and stage One for the Road with Kingsley Powlett, 1972, co-directed Melania Daniels, Jesus of Conway, with Drenia Frederick in 2003. His exploratory theatrical work and readings with St. Mary's College students, St. Lucia's Writers Forum and 2019 Guidance on Jesse Meyers and Monique O'Geese, A Little Folk Tale, St. Lucia's Theatrical Contribution for Carifesta XIV are all part of the mentoring that has marked his continuing artistic journey. Dixon has steadfastly served his country over the years in many important positions, including that of acting governor-general of St. Lucia when required. Though Dixon's character and personality continue to reflect that of a modest man focused on work and not accolades, the societal recognition of his work and contribution to the arts is manifested in him being awarded the St. Lucia National Medal of Merit, 1993, for his long-standing contribution to literature and photography and the Cultural Development Foundation's 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award for his invaluable contribution to the arts in St. Lucia. I present it to you Mr. MacDonald Ernest Dixon, our lecturer for tonight. Your Excellency, sacred, distinguished guests, ladies, gentlemen, Gopichas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We are all Caribbean people, blessed with an outrageous imagination. So imagine you are floating out to sea, seated and inflated in a tube from a truck tire. You can swim, there is no fear. Imagine at the peak of comfort, you feel a tug on the side of the tube. Suddenly you're being dragged seaward. The water underneath you receding. You look up ahead on the horizon, suspended is a wall of gray heading towards you. This, in a peanut shell, is how I felt confronting Walcott's work for the first time as a schoolboy at St. Mary's College in Form 4. I was carefully burrowing like a crab through the fertile soil of English literature, looking on with indifferent eyes, as scans, loving what I read, but uncertain of the purpose why I was reading it. Being the language of the world of work, it was an imposition, a chore, to learn every facet, every phase of its grammar until I can achieve a level of competence to master the Cambridge School Leaving Certificate to get a job. I delved headlong into several texts, immersed in the mysteries of sound, language, and place, acquiring an interest in history along the way. I have related this story so many times in so many interviews, but I think it's worth repeating again here, and I just saw it a while ago on the screen. I think it's very important in the context of the conversation that I'm starting tonight. Browsing through a back shelf at the school library searching for old books on St. Lucia, I stumbled on a dusty pamphlet entitled 25 Poems. The work was by a young St. Lucia writer, Derek Walcott, published about 10 years before. I recognized the name. However, by then, the offer had disappeared from the landscape, but he had a twin brother, Roderick, affectionately called Roddy, who I knew although some 14 years my senior. Their mother, Teacher Alex, had taught my mother in standard two at the Methodist School on Chisler Street, and they remained in touch. My mother credited Teacher Alex with showing her how to sew. Well, it was about 15 or so years after the war, about 10 years after the 48th fire. Things were very hard in St. Lucia. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons, after I arrived on the scene, my mother would visit her beloved teacher to sew a few things for me on her sewing machine. On finding that chapbook, never did I dream it would open my eyes on a new world of discovery that would survive in tandem with reality and set me on a course of study that would occupy an entire lifetime. About the same time, I also discovered Henry H. Spring, St. Lucia Historical, Statistical and Descriptive 1844 at the Central Library, and that book had a similar effect on me. Born at a period when the Walker twins, Dunstan Saint Thomas and Leo Spa St. Helen were in their prime, and through them I came into contact with Harry Simmons, I could not have been more privileged. Under these enormous influences, I learned to look inward, an exercise that was not encouraged by our regular teachers who fed us on diets of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Goldsmith, the Brontes, another father from the pages of the only literature they knew. There was a feeling of inferiority about our own after being told directly and indirectly that as a people, we never produced anything worthwhile to benefit civilization. He was of wood, drawers of water, the implied. This negative philosophy was ridiculed by M.S. Isere in his classic poem, Kaedon with two opium natale, returned to my native land 1938, and I quote from that poem, those who invented neither powder nor compass, those who never subdued steam or electricity, those who never explored sea or sky, but know in their deepest recesses the land of sufferance. It was from this prodigious position I launched forward. Hoping to find an olive branch to keep me afloat while I searched for evidence to disprove the status quo. Already, I had stumbled on a language from the streets separate and distinct from the rigid rhythms of school and there in that lay an aorta of hope. There was longing and dilemma. I longed for the purity, parts of my psyche yearned for the unimaginative. After being brainwashed for generations by priests and teachers into believing we were unoriginal and non-creative, it would take more than a few cutlass blows to hack through my thick skull. On top of this, salesmen in three-piece suits arrived from foreign ports and built markets on these falsehoods. They resold to us our own homegrown cotton as cloth for our clothes. They transformed the brown muscovado into clear sugar for our cakes, jellies, and jams. Tuned our pallets to saltfish, bully beef, flour, cornmeal so that we remain net importers of goods in perpetuity. When we were old enough to acquire their taste in fashion and furnishings, they came with their Siae's, Roebuck's catalogues or Montgomery catalogues and other paraphernalia to garner and repatriate or hard-owned coppers leaving us impoverished. It was profitable to them for us to stay poor, distracted from creating things and so remain hewers of wood and drawers of water and do not believe that this situation is not still in existence today. It's under the disguise of the fallacy of foreign direct investment and I can assure you this is a fallacy. But did not a part of me produce sugar to swell the pockets of Europe? Did we not ferment molasses to invent rum? Did we not cure tobacco leaves for the social revolution that strangled the world with bad habits? There's no hate in me recalling this. There's no painful journey back to realism. I only want to establish facts. Let us begin with Gregorian chants, peeling off the veneer of church organs, digest the notes, discard the Latin lyrics and superimpose a creole prosody. Wasn't that what we did? Here is a music born from mimicry, the simple act of superimposing another tongue over an ancient language that lives only within the portals of his church. Preserved of the strong order of Popea oozing from the armpits of old men after high mass, racing down the aisle with the Ita Misaes still hot on their breasts for the nearest rum shop. If the Latin chant is the root, the creole song is its stem. Together they are a whole. I select one from the other is to uproot the tree. A flower bag is held together by its thread. Pull a loose end and the sides, the assembly like a curtain drawn apart to reveal an unset stage. A mark, simplicity becomes the dough waiting to be kneaded into a mastiff loaf. The baker softens it with his sweat. All that is missing, as Walcott said, is the love to transform it into art. On Osmoil Island, before internet and what is today West Indian or Caribbean literature, public libraries were small institutions with a limited hoard of books. This coupled with the awkwardness of learning a foreign language and claiming it as your own did not provide impetus to create a nation of readers. But there were a few of us who in spite of the hardships, regardless of battling tongue twisting phrases, weather conditions and draconian librarians who were very quick to tell you, silence please. We visited these institutions daily after school to exchange books, borrowed the previous day and to meet with the girls of course. The girls for me were an added motivation although the most I did was to wave from a distance. I had little interest in subjects other than literature and history. French as a second language did not inspire me. The closest I came to being enthralled was to recognize its proximity to our local creole, forbidden in school but spoken at home. In four form, I started contemplating writing as a profession. It was necessary to channel all efforts into my essays but alas, a presentation brother who had the dubious distinction of being my English language teacher never understood my subject matter and my marks were ridiculously poor. I wrote about things I knew. The company around me, the space I occupied, the food, farin and pear, rose sardines, acra and bake and everything else that caught my eyes. But poor brother, eccentric as he was, he wanted me to create parodies on my literature texts or commentaries on news items on BBC. I cannot describe what I've never seen, heard, smelled, touched or felt. Nothing on our syllabus covered the 20th century as it was probably last reviewed at some point during the long reign of Queen Victoria 60 years before as we were still a crown colony and a backwater of empire. In St. Lucia, we were yet to hear of the emergence of C. L. R. James, Maze, Hearn, Walcott, Selvon, Nipole. We schoolboys were not aware of BIM magazine although there were whispers from other islands like Barbados and Trinidad that books about us existed. There were rumors of one George Lamming in Barbados and a fellow from BG writing in England who in time would emerge as Edgar Mittelhauser. Mid-Retro of the year came my apotheosis. After trespassing across the first page of 25 poems, I knew I had found the missing link to my reading fair. Haven't taken into account all idiosyncrasies including denials, feeling of inferiority and dispossession, my mother's own colonial upbringing that taught her the fallacy of knowing your place which she tried to pass on to me but with little success. I was reborn. My mother stopped me from going overseas to study art, protesting that I would end up broke and drunk in a gutter. I did not readily concede but her constant pounding forced me to defer to law which to my surprise she was also adamant. Law, she said, was a sure quick road to hell. You will never see the face of God. With all alternatives, I plotted at two professions simultaneously giving priority to the one that would put food on the table and pay the mortgage. Writing became a serious chore after I started following the St. Lucia Arts Guild and came under the mentorship of Roddy Walcott in 1962. He taught me all I needed to know at the time about writing plays, thus stimulating a long and lasting interest in theater which is overshadowed by the absence of a physical playhouse on this island up to today. A condition which persists and annoys me intensely. Nothing can be more depressing for me to talk about. How could this have occurred in an era of consciousness, rebirth, black power, enlightenment and rejuvenation of the Caribbean persona? If I could relive the past, I would enter the arena of partisan politics. If only to ensure that that dream of a national theater became a reality. But of course, there's no guarantee I would win. And now, it's too late to regret. I accept that a germ, one's own, can remain in hibernation for life without being born. But I refuse to concede that the situation is forever. Why am I telling you all this? I feel like boasting about unfulfilled promises from a past that was once filled with promise. In answer to the why in your minds, I did believe for some time that I was alone from my generation, seriously pursuing the arts. Walcott and Company, 12 to 15 years, my seniors, adults with families of their own or with families on the way. It was natural to feel pigeonholed in a cubicle by myself. Not until I met Robert Lee again about 1969 at Royal Bank of Canada, I knew him as a junior at St. Mary's College while in my senior year, but never realized we shared a common interest. I recall long discussions on new books at the Voice Bookshop on Bridge Street. Those first early offerings of West Indian literature, Robert also gravitated to the arts guild and began writing himself. There were others emerging, and I would like to mention here, Earl Long and the late Arthur Raymond, whose earliest pieces appeared in the college magazines of the decade and showed much promise. You cannot imagine the elation I felt no longer being crucial on these shores, alone in this cultural forest with its abundance of low-hanging fruits. Secretly and independently, each of us were scribbling notes on all surroundings, observing color of saying, finding meter in sentences falling off a fishmonger's scarlet tongue. Robert was regretting lack of knowledge of the countryside manifested in his poem, Lusca. While I decried damage caused by a man named Progress to the dying countryside, we learned of Walcott's entry into the international arena with In a Green Night in 1962, of Garth St. Thomas's success with Ciro and a Room on the Hill, both prose, and of Stanley French as a playwright with Rip of Fahelin, all this happening outside all shores. I recall some years ago while speaking to Dr. Lenox Honeychurch, a well-known Dominican historian, who asked, what you have in St. Lucia making you produce all these great Creole writers? He was not referring to Creole as a language, but more to imagery, customs, people, and place. If we were mobilizing the language to create fields of meaningful expression, it was because we believed the tongue we were forced to learn was inadequate to cover the entire scope of humanism that represents the bricks and mortar of St. Lucia's life. We sometimes take for granted the phenomenon that is Walcott. Without realizing the immense favor he has done us writers by monopolizing the St. Lucia idiom in body, soul, and spirit, with a down-to-earth pragmatism that is his distinct individuality, which in the process provides us if a yard stick longer than an English yard to measure our own work. He has minded every metaphor under the sun, beginning before we knew ourselves and learned to recognize our first scribbles. His poem, 1944, was published in The Voice in October of that year and heralded his entrance on the local stage, giving notice to the world that a 14-year-old had mastered the art of cloning meltonic verse. He has left us now, but not before bequeathing his Adam's task of naming things to succeeding generations with confidence that we can create our own images and varied circumstances, assuming all the tacitly that we accept to continue the monumental show he undertook all on his own without compromise. If there is any collective reasoning among us in the wake of Walcott, it is our understanding of our place, time, and purpose. The unique situation of having to exist in a land of two languages that merge free and independent of the other, each maintaining its viscosity to produce an inflection thick to the air like molasses, yet smooth on the tongue like a tongue of white rum. Speech that is as lyrical as it is musical, providing us with the basic ingredients for poetry, is indeed a rare privilege. It is indeed a rare privilege, Venus and Husha. It is not by happenstance that this island seems to have more poets per square mile than any other place on earth and don't blame it on Walcott. Like any other overflow from river, sink, gutter, pond, Walcott has had an odd way of burrowing into our psyche whether we want to let him in or not, more so for the older heads than the newcomers. In earlier years, most of us were exposed to the same syllabus at school, the same school, of course. Already we were from the same country, either Protestant or Roman Catholic, exposed to the same social conflicts, customs, practices, politics. There was a distinction between what was rural and what was town, and those from town wanted to experience the countryside and its rustic lifestyle, romanticized in some of our early poems like Robert Lee's Luska from his first book, vocation 1975. There was a privilege, nobility in poverty, which ran like a thread through our juvenilia until Kendall came on the scene and dared to call a speed a speed. There was great empathy and understanding for those without a voice and the poets spoke out loud and eloquent to deaf ears in certain circles. If anything, the political directorate who has for generations given lip service to the arts called them Johnny, come laters. Some of you too young to know that. And there were also other demeaning epitaphs like madmen and crazy and things like that, aimed to denigrate the persona but succeeded only in achieving the opposite. People began recognizing the artists as one with them in their camp. Walcott went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature and the mantra changed overnight. But not necessarily for the better, more like Plist on hold. As aptly described by the maestro himself in his homecoming poem, Ansary for Garth's Entoma. What others make of life will pass them by. Like that far silvery freighter threading the horizon like a toy. For once like them, you wanted no career but this sheer light, this clear, infinite, boring, paradisical sea. But hope, it would mean something to declare. Today, I am your poet, yours. All of this you knew, but never guess you'd come to know there are homecomings without hope. It is not ironical to find several of this inclusion writers tackling topics Walcott had already written about, protest, social inequity, and dysfunctional development. Not as mimics, the assonances and rhythms may sound similar but listen well to hear independent thought ringing through the clear distinctive voices. Let us examine three poems on Denry. First by Walcott, then Dixon some 18 years later and Kendall Hippolett, still by 10 years. I cannot read through all of them in detail but I will quote enough for you to evaluate similarities and differences, hoping that you appreciate their treasured individualities. And I quote first from Derek's Return to Denry, Rain, that's from in the Green Night, 1962. Imprisoned in these wires of rain, I watch this village stricken with a single street. Each weathered shark leans on a wooden crutch contented like a cripple in defeat. Five years ago, even poverty seemed sweet so Asia and indifferent was the air, so murmurous of a livian the sea. Any human action seemed a waste. The place seemed born for being buried there. Denry from Peyinatal, Dixon, to 12 volume one, June 1st, 1976. There is no disgrace where poverty heals injustice. Bugles of progress tuned to a north wind go unheard by men four miles away from wind and rain. You cannot change. Divorced the fisherman from his net, the planter from his plot, and purity would die from shock. And third, a village guide if you return, Kendall Hippolyte, bearings, 1986. Return to Denry, you'll find a village like a chronic sore foot. The same one street like a used and worn bandage. Homes clot in the raw flesh of hillsides. Development schemes have quarterized the hillslopes. And they are waiting for us, the zinc ointment, the sterilized white dressing of some industry or other, some light manufacturing, some fly by night concern of factory, hotel, can't tell yet such slings go by appointment. What is it? In the solution earth, the water, the air, that makes some of us gravitate to poetry, why go through the exercise of sweat and tears, sculpting lines to fit a page? The answer is not simplistic. Those of us who labor at the craft know this. Wolcott pointed to a direction. He bolstered our confidence in the use of the people's language, metaphor and place. But he cannot be blamed for this torture. There is a force far greater than his omnipresent stature, greater than the fluted music he weaved on the back of words. It is this inanimate being, difficult to pinpoint at a glance, but can be spotted showing its face through our humble lines. Or philosophies may differ, or themes far apart, but all our horizons remain constant. In preparing this paper, I went back to read Confluence, nine Saint Lucian poets, 1988, among a list of others. Having not read Confluence for several years, I was able to rediscover its freshness. I delved into previously undiscovered regions, led by lines which on the surface seemed obvious, but were deeply rooted in my subconscious. For those who do not remember, Confluence is a 1988 anthology edited by Kendall Hippolyd. Highlighting, of course, the work of nine Saint Lucian writers, all of whom were born after Walcott, except for me. When I say after, well, I was born, and I'm not talking about Walcott now as Derrick Walcott, but Walcott the writer. It so happens by a remarkable coincidence. 1944 was published in the same month I was born. And I have reason to believe I was born on the first and it was published a week after. I was amazed by the variety of themes, right to us, hopelessly in love with love, with their country, landscape, people, light themes, variations of themes on race, class, creed, religion, romance, politics. Some of the poets like Irvin Desi are not known in local circles outside his group of friends, but display a marked dexterity in handling a multiplicity of situations, infusing them with local color, reasoning, and metaphor. For those of you who are here that do not know of his work, permit me to introduce him by reading one of his short poems. And I quote from Islander Nine as a gray, gray villager. As a gray, gray villager worn by this world, her head is swayed with scars, her waist bound with bandanas, her pale balances on her head, or carrying this as she comes rarely spills her sorrow. You are an ocean murmuring as it moves. You fill this cluttered room with a handful of clothes. You say scores of friends have swept past like fish scales. Modern mechanisms have slowed the paths of wood dogs. Recall the live scene, the chorus, the shrill chanson, or being solemn. You fill this cluttered room like a handful of clothes. Perfect example of a similarly rooted in time and place. Any writing on the work of St. Lucian poets in the aftermath of that great tsunami that was walkered would be woefully incomplete without special mention of the contributions of John Robert Lee and Kendall Hippolyd, formidable representatives from the first generation after the laureate. Or was it? Let me begin with Robert Lee. Actually, I jumped ahead already. John Robert Lee. John Robert Lee represents one man's spiritual journey, meandering through thorny labyrinths of faith, which began long before 1975, when a young Robert witnessed his father, Alan, relishing a dessert of fresh ripe mangoes on a Sunday afternoon, and began to contemplate seriously his romance with the written word. Engulfed by greenery in his little harbor at La Caillère on the outskirts of castries where he lived. Intoxicated by night sounds from crickets and a distant high-fi, it was easy to observe and dream. Or was it? With Robert, one is never certain. I would like to believe it was a combined attack by all the senses on an inquisitive persona aroused by such things as the stale or lady's scent of righteousness that crawls from under French sotans. Or images, as he describes later in a city affair, soft candlelight settling from Mont Pleasant to Mont-de-Donne, to Mont-Fortune. Sudden scattering of fine drizzle, remembrances of yards, rooms, first loves, and evenings coming down to town. I'm acquainted with most, if not all, of Robert's earliest will, as he is, of course, of mine, in particularly poems in vocation, 1975, as we shared and critique each other in those giddy-headed days. Lines still ring in my ears with a nostalgic clarity, transporting the spirit back to a happier time when everything was pleasant, young, vibrant, and carefree. And I quote from Robert, that ritual of word and gesture, wrists uplifted, fingers plucking outwards, scratching at this altar, daring faith and hope, changing them into some clarity, again from vocation. We spent many a Saturday afternoon discussing this. Robert's journey may not be as historic as his humoric counterpart, but is a journey no less filled with its own sagas recorded at every milestone along the route, sorrowful as 14 stations of the cross, yet joyful as joyful mysteries of the Holy Rosary in Roman Catholicism. One common yet profound misstatement is to assume that Robert is just another simple Christian poet whose sole aim is to win souls for his maker. Nothing is further from the truth. Robert's faith is subsumed within his being and becomes one with his poetics. He does not expound on his faith in a loud, canonical voice like our modern-day televangelists, nor like El McGantry from Sinclair's novel of the 1920s who transformed his God into a business of extortion by proxy. Robert's tone is soft and resonant. You may accept or reject. There is no project. In his poem, Prodigal, we hear rumblings of that deep-rooted truth struggling to be whole in a world surrounded by irony, good or bad. He leaves it to us to speak for ourselves and I quote, laborer, man of earth, teach me the divining certainty within your palms that I may even now plunge down soft hands into this heart of dirt and stone to cup them firmly full around the darkening root of soil. Kendall Hippoly. Now as a writer, I approach the work of other writers, especially my contemporaries with humility and respect. This is brought with it a certain amount of reluctance to review my peers as I do not wish to ever give an air of aloofness or snobbery. It may be a personal fetish, but it has kept me away from writing objective criticism which I find necessary for the development of artists in origin and elsewhere. But this is not meant as an apology, but to explain an innate shyness that has dug me from birth. One, I am still unable to shake off. Regardless, sometimes a work emerges which allows me to summon willpower to proclaim its virtues. Here I have chosen to look at Kendall's poetry through the lens of the last work of his that I've really read over and over, Fault Lines, People Tree 2012. I have browsed through his latest collection which I had planned to publish last year by the same publisher, People Tree, but I have not read it closely enough to comment fairly. Kendall is a rare poet with the ability to stimulate all your senses at once in a single line. Like some named Comet that appears once in a lifetime, he dazzles, not with the overwhelming flair and luminescence, but with a deliberate muted brilliance that burns deep into the shadow of your soul. Kendall professes not to glorify the banalities of life around him or to adulate God's wretched of the earth to a point where living conditions is vaporized into the cosmos of synthetic metaphors and cosmetic beauty. His work, however, peeps into a world of harsh reality that acknowledges a tacit acceptance of fate. If you will do nothing to stop the world from spinning off its axis, then stop bubbling about it and shut up. This is what the lines shout back to me. Not knowing what to expect when you first approach poems in Fault Lines and in his other work like Islands in the Sun, Versailles II, 1980, Bearings 1986, and Night Vision 2005, you stumble on a thread stitching through the poetry, binding poems together into a cohesive hold, armed with purposeful resolve like a William Blake. Kendall stitches the spiritual and natural together in a firm bond that brings clarity to a world sometimes dazzled by shifting smoke and mirrors. I see parallels between Blake's imagery and Kendall's talk realism. These motifs have lodged in my subconscious since reading poems like Your Main Street Ends in Soweto, History, Islands, and Castries, which of course is dedicated to John Robert Lee. I want to go beyond the obvious, beyond what visuals the written line conveys to images that leapfrog into other dimensions as inner layers of thought unravel. For this, we need to be bold to stomach a sense of forbidden juxtapose against an unbridled acceptance of fate. In Blake's New Jerusalem, images of the creator's face shining on a city built on clouded hills of an English countryside among the great hogs of industry is an example of the coming together of the darkness that morphs into the light of hope and ultimately realism. This interesting amalgam is also captured by Kendall in four lines. And I quote, a place where days and days and days you only see in people you rarely know and you are ready starting to accept, believe that's how it is, that's how life goes. Well, if a city is a place just so, then this plenty shack with couple condo, jalapé, SUV, spin fast, pace low, so it comes, so it goes. The poem is the poet's medium of communicating, sometimes biographical, fictional, most times reportage. In Kendall's work, there is no crassness, no rass sayings to draw the reader, only a calm flowing melody that forces heads to nod, to nod in agreement. Our quest to harness the moment and ride into a future full of hope and promise inspires us to write. An urge to color the collective effort is our inspiration. We create with passion and poetic force that match the morbid patriotism of the colonizer. There's a timeless surge when it strikes, transforms a simple work of art into a vain component of classic dimension. It is seldom direct and often manifests in the subconscious, as would an indirect reflection in a mirror. In this abstraction, which can be considered the heart and soul of our poetry, I move into the next generation, which is the generation after, and I move on to Adrian Auger, who is quite possible, the generation bridge between writers like Dickson, Robert and Kendall, coming immediately after Walcott, and those emerging in the 90s and the new century. Adrian writes in the tradition of the Grand Line, echoes of Walcott's tale of the islands, but here the simile begins and ends in Adrian's distinctive voice. And for example, I quote from Cowan's People, Naval Spring, Naval String People Street. Sometime, something finally broke the chain of decades of feeling out of place at London's finest, of homesickness at Brixton Market, and living the illusion of West End shopping, West End window shopping, sorry. While Adrian explores the same landscape, visit the same homes met by the same people like the writers before, he does it placing his distinctive hallmark on his lines. They may read off the page like grand gestures, but cannot be denied a sense of place. And now I walk the beaches of a man in the afternoon gaze, and the pools are still clear, yet with the vacancy of lifeless eyes, the amon bears her age, her roots now in detestation of rough times. There is also modest downs, somewhat of a late bloomer, a kinder, softer son. Although from the generation immediately after Walcott, his work did not begin appearing in print until the 80s, but important enough to note here if only an account of his recording of life in his beloved South viewport. Modest poetry runs the full gamut of culture, politics, religion, place, with patriotic zeal that is indelible in Lucian, with lens focused on the Southern consciousness, unearthing the same shards Walcott plowed through two generations ago. And I quote as a sample of what modest is worth, the American rash. Without ever crossing or river banks, they young can speak like American. They down-cork and KFC, purchase ships and spaghetti like American. They shoot at each other like bales of trash. They rob banks now when they run out of cash, like American. Which brings me to the new boy on the block, Vladimir Lucian. Sound in Ground, People Tree 2014, is Vladimir's first published collection, which won him the Boca's Prize. The name Sound in Ground at first glance, evokes enigma, a mystery within a mystery, but as I read, I discover revelations. The work is not in the peppery voice of 25 poems, which was also a first collection, but it is seasoned with the same brand of spices. Once inhaled, the aroma is forever imprinted like a relic on the mind. From early, I learned to separate with a knuckle of church and school from the street, attempting to find a correlation which most times was too subtle for my tender heirs, which led me to the imagery of spices. This I discovered while waiting to board a plane at Palisades, a port in Jamaica, listening to a higgler hustle on the airline clerk about exuberant overweight prices leveled on poor people who travel aboard to make a living. Images danced in my head, all Caribbean, all spice. St. Lucia became clove. Garth, St. Thomas, Siwo came to mind. Jamaica, Pimento, sipping through the work of Roger Mayes, three novels, Barbados, Chive and Time, from Lamming in a Castle of My Skin, and in quick succession, Ghani's Pepper Pot with Wilson's Harris Palace of the Pica, all steaming together in a bouillon. These books formed the nucleus of my renaissance and built the conflict inside. On one hand, there was English literature with its high-pitched flutes and drummers, everything regimental. On the other hand, there were clean, clear voices recognizable like a mat on my doorstep. Like I hear in the work of Adrian, Modest, and Vladimir singing to me a new kind of testament. They evoke fresh feelings, the good kind. Civilizations clash, still begging to reject one and accept the other, both pulling hard, saying both, they belong, accept, accept. But there's also a third language that comes parceled with folk tales and tribal trappings. One that is not easy to shunt. In its distinctive sound, I hear in sounding ground. Between lines, it compels me to pause. Vladimir is a cross observer of his surroundings with his air to the ground, likewise Adrian and Modest. They center back and forth across between land, people, and light, which in St. Lucia creates that interesting dynamic in the language when the lambushwi erupts on tasting seawater for the first time. But back to Vladimir, unlike Walcott in his first collection 66 years before, before everything, adult suffrage, internal self-government, independence, black power, West Indian literature, and internet. When he struggled to keep the line straight, knowing in his heart, it was not his own. And remember, he had no yardstick. The only thing he had was English literature. And he came up with such lines as these. All harped hills, waves, walking like a minstrel that lied to me of joy. All leaves that were school to a learning boy. What is that any man saves? A broken blossom or a ruined rhyme. Vladimir has already acquired the freedom thanks to those who have gone before, that the young Walcott fought so valiantly to attain in order to confront his muses. And here is a line from Vladimir, a quote from Vladimir. Here somewhere near the dark pond that dons its hat of water lilies past the parcel jar. A plant waits in the patience of its stem for a man who will pay to use its leaf. Suffice it to say for now, the journey continues. Tradition lives on. And I would have ended here, quite frankly, and be quite happy. But I cannot leave out a women poets. Or women poets, although their output may seem modest in relation to the work in the public domain, they stand shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts, visiting regions of self where men were dread to go. Their understanding of relationships, landscape, and place present a unique vision that even Walcott seemed reluctant to capture with such intensity in his lifelong dissertation on people and country. Through Jane King's unique voice, one stumbles across discovery of a place through landscape locked in another country, and in so doing discovers the real self. In Intercity Dub for Jean from Performance Anxiety, People Tree, 2013, I found myself sitting next to Jane on a London train around the city. A fascinating journey with a twist. On arriving at the right destination, I realized I was in the wrong place. There is a factory blowing smoke rings across the railway line. You knew it took me time to learn that this country wasn't mine. After reading Fellow Traveler 1994, I relived all the quizziness of coming off a ferris wheel at Coney Island in George V Park around 1964 when it visited here. Weakening, lightheaded, stomach rumbling, as the poems plastered my mind with a plethora of sensations. Jane confronts us with the alternate thoughts that either we are afraid to dream or are not within the ambit of the male perspective in relation to poetry. Knuckled to the ground by such rare pieces as yellow girls, couplets, neighbors, home am I, Sahara spell, and transitions, I rise again only to double over on such pieces as stepmother and cliches for an unfaithful husband, and I don't think she's talking about Kendall, I hope not, which I feel duty bound to quote in its entirety if only to show the profundity of the poem, although brief. So, the game was worth the candle, was the candle worth the cake, now you have it and you eat it. Does it make your belly ache? In the poetry of Monica Casely, I find a softer love, maternal instincts, laid there as only a mother knows, and I'm quoting from her, my unborn child. I tried to tell you that I was coming, but you had no time to listen. Even when I knocked at your door, it was to my father you opened, and when in the aftermath of love, I held on to you, it was to my father that you clung. Hazel Simmons McDonnell, in her own homecoming, sets the stage to dispel Walcott's earlier pessimism, and I quote, that one small rock as this, one infinitesimal speck on the sea's face can spark a heart to flame with joy. In the poetry of Melania Daniel, I found intense personal moving passages where the poet bears her soul to the world, where a languorous sea wishes, washes up sympathy, offering rifts of seaweed to comfort me, where waves roll over in dying agony, groaning requins for our friendship, lost in love, drifting like flotsam, I mirrored you. Loving in an idyllic landscape that morphs into the object of her desire or rejection, and if allowed to run wild, can become a tragic obsession who storms the gates of my fantasies, who invades the territories of my dreams, saddled on my emotions, who comes riding my thoughts as Melania, mystery lover, mind-free. Patricia Turnbull is a solution writer who lives in the Virgin Islands. Her work reflects the loss of home, nostalgia, and hope for meaningful change. There is, one hopes, still standing there, a landmark that was never in this plan, left over from a simpler time wiped out, right after sea beds were exhumed to reclaim land for schemes that scattered squatters, lodging there too long. There are others, like Kamaya Lisette in the UK, and Kanissa Lubren, the latter making a name for herself in Canada. All men poets show that they approach the craft with the same dedication and zeal as their male counterparts, unperturbed by obstacles, real, or imagined. They have nothing to prove to the world, but their own unique genius, which they continue to wrap in the mantra of love of country. In them, the future is assured, though diverse, but relevant as a continuance to the dream which started on these shores in 1944. Poets writing in cruel and other forms, special mention must be made of our dub poets, like Russ Eisley, who fuse new sounds, new beats to music. Those poets who seek to return the poem to its origins, the spoken word, or through the medium of calypso, reggae, or rap, performance poetry, or spoken word poetry, which is very popular and more attractive to those who do not want to read. Many poets are dedicated to writing in cruel or mother tongue. Walscott work reflects his own obsession with cruel, and I refer to poets like George Fischalfons, Marcine Jean-Pierre, Moussa Jean-Pâtisse, Alsace Ismeral, and others. They need their own space for full attention, and for which I do not think I have the necessary competence. There's George Goverd, contemporary of Kendall-Hipplett, who only recently published his first collection in 2016. He's a talented poet, and in the walk of fame, writing both in English and Creole, and of course, the long-awaited conclusion. Oberlise are replete of stories involving the clash of creeds, and our faith has been enriched by seemingly unblemished cultures mutating into more fickle customs. But in so doing, we create new dimensions, richer and more diverse than those that have gone before, providing platforms for the innovative imagery. Perhaps it was this same sentiment which came to Walscott, and which he expressed so eloquently in his Nobel lecture, brick of ours, and the love that resembles the fragments is stronger than that love, which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. Time does not permit me latitude to delve into other labyrinths like St. Lucien prose and plays, but I make one promise to visit the scene some of the time in another manuscript, and of course, I would like then to talk very generously of the Walscott brothers as playwrights. There is hope, of course, for all of us, in the symbolism of silence, the blankness in the storm, the opacity of tropical nights. Those of us cursed with the graceful poetry must learn to wrestle with the muse, take it when she gives and follow where she leads. There is no light brighter on the page than the line that breathes. I have said a lot. Let us resolve to part in good graces by living the lion in the tall grass of the savannah, sweating flies with his tail as he peeps into the mirror of our past. The visions will not go away, just leave them alone. And I end with a few lines from Edward Braffitt's Islands, which I think is very symbolic of my lecture tonight or my talk tonight. So my island drifts, plundered by butterflies. The dog lifts his morning to heaven. Let's see up here. Thank you very much for your patience.