Interviews
Barnes & Noble.com: Tiepolo's Hound traces the life of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. What attracted you to Pissarro as a subject?
Derek Walcott: One evening a long time ago, at the place I was staying, we were talking about painting and Caribbean painting and the subject of Pissarro came up. And we discussed whether he was a West Indian painter because he was born in St. Thomas. Of course, he then went to Venezuela and Paris. Should he or should he not be considered a Caribbean painter?
You never know how things begin. I think I wanted to write about the difficulty of painting and the excitement of painting in the Caribbean -- the relationship of light. I had an idea of parallel troughs or furrows that you might see in the side of a hill in a Pissarro landscape -- and that suggested Pissarro. And I wanted to do something about the closeness of painting to poetry.
Barnes & Noble.com: Early in the book you refer to your "awe of the ordinary." Is that an essential trait for poets? Is it a trait that connects poets and painters?
Derek Walcott: There's a little pun in there about "awe" and "ordinary" -- a very bad pun. The striving of all art is toward an essential simplicity, especially as you get older.
What invests with awe is not cathedrals necessarily, but what Larkin and Rilke say -- a glass of water, a stone. The same process is there with painting. One is not so much creating but simplifying. A raindrop is ordinary. Some painters concentrate on very simple things, like Morandi doing bottles all his life or Cézanne doing another set of apples. The awe of that is in the simplicity.
Barnes & Noble.com: TIEPOLO'S HOUND weaves together so many elements: the life of Pissarro, Tiepolo's work, descriptions of numerous paintings, plus references to colonialism, the Dreyfus affair, the Bible -- and of course, personal history. How did you begin? How does one construct an "epic" poem?
Derek Walcott: I'm not crazy about the word epic, which sounds ambitious. The fact that something seems to be growing is very exciting. It gives your life a sense of purpose. Once you have the rhyme scheme, it's very pleasant. I think it grows out of itself. The constant emblem and the image of the furrow, and the fact that you're writing in couplets -- out of that rhythm, different things come.
The two lines may be suggestive of a river with two banks and two furrows, and that generates the momentum of the poem. Once you have the frame, it's like ventilation, or a window. You can let in anything.
I believe very firmly in the frame. Any subject may change as it progresses, but the building and the carpentry is very exciting. That's very exciting for me -- maybe not for other writers, but for me. The thing that releases me is that I'm not an American or an Englishman. I'm a Caribbean writer.
Barnes & Noble.com: I'm interested in your own paintings, which are reproduced in this book. How long have you been painting? What is the relationship between your work as a painter and as a writer?
Derek Walcott: I've been painting quite a long time -- all my life. My father used to draw, and he was a bit of a watercolorist. I have a friend in St. Lucia who's a professional painter. We did a lot of plein-air painting together. I don't have any great opinion of my painting, I just hope I can do a very good job. It's very hard to paint light. And when it's done right, in Homer or Sargent, it's masterful.
Barnes & Noble.com: There are numerous references to punctuation here, such as the father pausing "in the parentheses of the stairs" and that beautiful line on the first page -- "like commas/in a shop ledger gulls tick the lined waves." Is there a connection between these references to punctuation and the references to paint? Do you view these as the materials of poems, like the stroke of a hound for painting?
Derek Walcott: The idea of the gulls ticking off lines as if they were marks on parallel lines, it's a kind of dimension of the reality of the physical vision of letters. Rimbaud said, "Letters have color."
In terms of the physical thing, a lot of that is contained in the poetry. Two arrows can suggest trees or chimneys. Since I write in longhand, the physical reality of the letters is close to painting. The "parentheses of the stairs" is just the two banisters and the person in the middle.
Barnes & Noble.com: Two passages early in the book caught my attention -- "Everything blurs. Even its painter," followed two pages later by "What should be true of the remembered life is freshness of detail." Is this book an attempt at capturing freshness of detail?
Derek Walcott: A lot of it is memory and autobiography. It's also the same thing. The thing I began to admire most about Pissarro was the excitement of his surfaces and what he did breaking up the strokes as if it were handwriting, almost. In paint, you have to have the exact tint, not just color. It's not only a matter of getting the color right. There's another excitement of getting the texture right, exactly. That's what keeps painting fresh.
Barnes & Noble.com: How would you like readers to read your book?
Derek Walcott: I'd like them to hear it as a very quiet conversation between me and the reader, not disturbed by anything extraneous. Then the intimacy would come across, and the reader would give me the indulgence of listening.
It doesn't have to be read all at once. It would be nice if the book would be put down and then returned to a few days later for another session. Just like in a gallery, when there is the leisure of looking.