I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
Derek WalcottRead
I don't believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it. There is a tremendous audience for it on any given day or night. You just have to know where to look.
Interpretation
Poetry still holds value and has an audience; it's just about finding them.
Derek Walcott's quote emphasizes that despite the perception that poetry is losing its appeal, it actually continues to thrive with a significant audience waiting to engage with it. The onus is on the poet and the readers to seek out spaces where poetry is celebrated, indicating that the art form is not in danger, but rather needs to be rediscovered by those who may overlook it.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of the arts, quoting Walcott can highlight the ongoing relevance of poetry.
I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.
My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.
When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.
I try to help people realize their dreams by using magic to tell stories that educate, move, and inspire.
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, there are 31 books on my list.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.
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