A Poetic Diversion

Perhaps the old man just needed a change of pace. Perhaps the attraction of mystery novels was beginning to abate after keeping me entertained endlessly for years. Or maybe it was just the recent re-immersion in the Mennonite story of the village theocracy of my youth that made me seek slightly more challenging reading material recently.

My weekly issue of the Economist is an almost endless source of book reviews on a great variety of subjects. Most I requested and was able to get through my public library were rewarding, though some new fiction I have found disagreeable. Most writing, most art in fact, is created, I feel, as a singular, personal and often autobiographical conceit. Whether it be history, painting, fiction, current politics or the drawings done by cave dwellers, the work came from the energy, drive, imagination, experience and personality of the individual who created it. I have said before that there seems to be nothing new to be said about almost any subject and yet uncounted numbers of individuals keep saying it as they have since human understanding and expression began.

Although I have experimented with verse since my mid-teens and enjoyed the music and rhythm of many of the poems covered in early school English classes, I have rarely turned to the works of the great poets and playwrights for absorbing reading. Memorization assigned for class was always difficult for me, and once memorized only scraps stay with me until the next reading. Some people, including my wife, can still recite some of the favourite verses memorized as a child, a feat I always envy.

Back in the sixties we acquired among other works, an English translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey attributed to Homer, the ancient Greek blind poet, who was perhaps a composite of many story tellers over many centuries. Many years ago I tried to work my way through both books, even making notes of some of the characters. They are the English translation by Samuel Butler and although the way the written version ended up was fairly orderly in its linear chronology, I found the multitude of gods and the variations in their names totally confusing. Zeus, known as Jupiter by the Romans, is apparently referred to as Jove. Furthermore, the interaction of the gods with humans, as the goddess Calypso wanting to marry Ulysses, and the idea of the various gods opposing each other and taking opposing sides in human confrontations, made it difficult for me find any order in the chaos of the tales.

The old man has not been one to focus his attention on old literary works or historical events that may be real or mythical; nor could I make a life’s work out of studying such things as the existence or nature of angels or the works of one author or deceased king, as is the case with certain learned Egyptologists. For myself, I have experimented mostly with short verse, read other poets for diversion and generally avoided long poems of epic proportions.

Recently, however, The Economist reviewed a book length poem by Derek Walcott just published. It was praised by the reviewer as once again up to the standard of Walcott’s greatest work, the poem Omeros, published in 1990 that led to Walcott receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Though my library did not have the new book listed yet, I was able to get Omeros and have now reached Book 5 of the story on page 189 of a total of 325 pages.

Although poetic license allows Walcott to hop around at will among four or five different story threads, the central theme always comes back to the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. One of the story threads covers Walcott himself and he can suddenly be in conversation with his dead father, who seems to be of mixed African slave and European slave owner origin and do so either in the Caribbean home town or perhaps in Boston. Equally he can tell the story of Achille, one of his black fisherman with a name from Greek mythology, as his canoe is taken right across the Atlantic to his native village in Africa to chat with his father and his village and relive their capture for the slave trade 300 years earlier, all in one night before returning to the island. The name Omeros is rarely used in the poem itself and I resorted to a Google search to look for its meaning, but the only thing I came up with was that it could be an alternative pronunciation for the name “Homer”, perhaps as a reference to the author himself.

The plot, if it can be called one, the images, the ideas, and the rhythm of Walcott’s language makes the book a page turner for me and I have renewed my loan so I will not fail to complete the read. In some ways I was able to identify with the author in the descriptions he uses in his verse. I have referred a number of times in previous issues to “My early morning dreamscape, that strange mittelgeist period approaching wakefulness when this old man is never sure what unique creatures or sensations may populate his unconsciousness and leave a stream of its unreality with him when fully awake.” Walcott must have experienced similar phenomena, if such they be, for early in the story about Achille and Hector vying for the love of Helen, Walcott comes up with these lines describing a similar experience:

And now I would wake up, troubled and inexact,

from that shallow sleep in which dreams precede sunrise,

as the vague mind cautiously acknowledges the fact

of another’s outline, ….

So far, so good I say, for Walcott’s “near epic” poetry. It is timely for my generation and therefore less confusing than Homer and his characters. I still find the story confusing as it jumps from one thread to another because I tend to be very linear in my thinking. Yet I am much taken with the language of the poem, Omeros, and its indication of the author’s world view about the history of conquest, slavery and the failures of our kind.

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