Congratulations again on the publication of, well, all three of your books in the last five years, the most recent being IKONS (caps intentional?) launched at the Anglican Annex in Saint Lucia January 30, 2024. It would seem to some that you are writing, or publishing, at a clip right now: faster than ever, more than ever, in the third prime of your life. We’ve had Pierrot (Peepal Tree, 2020), Belmont Portfolio (Peepal Tree, 2023) and IKONS: New & Selected Poems (Folk Research Centre, 2024). You had said to me a few years back that you were going "to try for my poetry again," having retired, perhaps, from other commitments and pursuits. That was personal and understandable: as writers, we know why we write. Who are Pierrot, Belmont Portfolio and IKONS for, though, other than yourself?
I guess since I am retired from public employment (librarian, teacher) I have more time to dedicate to my writing and personal reading. Readings in literature, theology, metaphysics, general history, and culture. And while I write other things like reviews, essays, general articles, the occasional short story, I do write and publish poetry more than anything else. I hardly describe myself as a “poet” but as a “writer,” which encompasses my wider literary interests. I may have said to you before that I write and publish for whoever takes the time and interest to read my books and other writing. I am just starting what seems to be a fascinating study of the later work of Naipaul, Brathwaite and Walcott by Rhonda Cobham-Sander titled I and I: Epitaphs for the Self in the Work of V.S. Naipaul, Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott (UWI Press, 2016). Rhonda is an accomplished, scrupulous scholar, and this book is proving an absorbing read. But it has led me to begin to think about whether I am also writing, more and more now, for future generations, who may find my books when I have moved on and out. Am I writing “epitaphs”? [laughs]. I write for readers anywhere in the world who find my work.
Given the diverse yet related (and relatable) content, from spiritual reverence to the celebration of the indigenous, what would you say the poems are about? The three books, published within half a decade, would almost—almost—suggest a kind of trilogy that represents a simultaneous summing up and further exploration of. Why these particular poems, or this particular arrangement of your poems, now? What are you trying to convey with these books, since we are given the old and the new, the fresh and reworked? What would you say is in your work for today's reader of poems, whoever she may be?
The poems are about many things: practicing and living my faith (Christian) in a largely secular, atheistic, agnostic, but also multifaith world; living that faith as a flesh-and-blood man, with no pharisaic hypocrisy, no religious far-right fundamentalism, in a liberal democracy that respects freedom of choice. As a Caribbean man whose personal history includes indigenous genocide of my Kalinago maternal ancestors; enslavement of my African foremothers and forefathers; as one who grew up under British colonial rule and is committed to the decolonization process and the growth of fresh, independent thinking and shaping of our present societies, the poems look at present-day Caribbean and world society without sentimentality, mourning the prevailing discriminations, prejudices, racisms, political tribalisms, the decline in so many ways of our once peaceful and friendly Caribbean societies. I mourn today the growing crime situation, the violence and pornography reflected even in our popular musical cultures. I write of the climate issues afflicting us, our carelessness in so many ways. But the poems are largely set in the natural beauty of our islands’ fauna and flora, the physical beauty of the people, the energy of the sidewalks. I also applaud our artists in many areas. For many years I have written ekphrastic poems that engage with and respond to the art of our painters and sculptors.
I entered my manhood in the Bob Marley and Rastafari generation (many of those years spent in Barbados, home of my two grandfathers), and the radical ferment of those years have left an indelible mark on me, made me the person I am, and shaped the perspectives that still come through in my poetry. There is no contradiction for me in being that kind of Caribbean thinker and being a practicing Christian (elder, preacher, writer) in a small Baptist church for the past forty-six years.
...I had not thought of these recent three books as a trilogy, though I have described Belmont Portfolio as a companion volume to Pierrot. You have given me something to think about. And you may well have touched on a subconscious stream operating there.
Maybe with these compilations I am trying to record and convey a personal view of our civilization at this particular time, in many ways an apocalyptic season, seeming to be moving rapidly to some tremendous climax. Of course, as a Christian, I have my own eschatological views of what is happening, and these do appear in the poems if they are read carefully. My poems do need careful reading. I am a student of Walcott, Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, Kwame Dawes, T.S. Eliot, among other great teachers, so every line deserves careful attention. [laughs]
I also have always paid great attention to craft, to the shaping of poems on the page, to reading carefully, avoiding the “poetic manner” when I do read publicly. So, the reader should look patiently for the content (avoid prejudgements from my personal beliefs and bio) and for the forms in which I shape what I am writing. I certainly do not anticipate only a Caribbean audience for my poems. If I do, I go suck salt. [laughs] A good time to thank Jeremy Poynting and Peepal Tree Press, who have kept faith with me for four books and already have a fifth in hand. Many Caribbean and black British writers owe a great debt to Jeremy for seeing the value in our work and publishing it. And Peepal Tree’s books have received attention and many awards, like the T.S. Eliot Prize and many Bocas awards.
Where do you look for and what do you see as inspiration for your poetry? I'm curious about how what moves you to write today may be different from what did, say, twenty-five or fifty years ago.
I think the answer is covered in the earlier responses: my life in this part of the world, with its particular and present history, culture, its physical beauty, its challenges, its politics; our place in the wider world, predominantly the West, which for all its achievements can also be contradictory and complicit and unchanging in its imperial ambitions. My own personal experiences, the personal, confessional, biographical, the questionings, the practice of faith, which is not something simplistic or predictable. The differences today from when I first started are probably in a recording of the experiences gained though the territory of self and place, which for all their societal changes are an unshifting foundation. Literature, arts, the spiritual life, honest self-examination are still the motivating engines.
So when did these collections come together for you as collections, and under what influence or circumstances? The poems across all three volumes cover how many years? Can you detect periods/phases/movements in your own work, the times when you may have been more preoccupied with a particular subject or theme? You don't strike me as a monolithic, one-general-theme kind of writer. Your spirit feels more all-embracing, more free-ranging, which may be a challenge for certain readers.
I am writing all the time. A new collection begins to come together even when I am sending off a book to my publisher and editor. The genesis of a new collection would be those new poems that have not gone into the submitted work. In recent years I have noted that about three years separate my recent publications. While I published fairly regularly in earlier years, there were longer gaps between publications. Influences or circumstances are poems in hand [which can be turned into] manuscripts that can be submitted. The most recent, IKONS, made up of new and selected works, came out to celebrate my seventy-fifth birthday and to contribute from its sales to needy artists in Saint Lucia. So there is a particular influence and circumstance. I would say the poems in these volumes span about eight years.
You set me some homework when you ask about periods/phases/movements in my work. I would have to look and think about it. This is where we need good critics/reviewers who should do that kind of analytical work for us. I certainly range across themes, and am free-ranging in terms of what I write about. I am working on a new book now titled Diary: seventy-five twelve-line poems in which I am allowing the poems to come as they please, with no particular predetermined thematic trajectories as with my recent books. I find and use correspondences, connections, from wherever they come. The twelve lines vary in their permutations and correspondences. Some of the poems are longer than twelve lines but are in multiples of, for example, twenty-four or thirty-six lines. The idea was inspired by Dionne Brand’s long poem in Nomenclature (Duke University Press, 2022), which is written in twelve-line stanzas. Brand is presently my favourite major poet. Another major favourite is Kwame Dawes. They both are writing huge works with our contemporary world in their sights. I have never had a problem with learning from accomplished poets like Walcott, Brathwaite, Carter, Goodison, the younger Canisia Lubrin and Vladimir Lucien, as well as the best of past and present from all over. I am Catholic in my tastes if not in religion. [laughs]
How do you hope readers will respond, apart from favourably? So many of us seem stuck in our own tight silos these days. Is it still possible to illuminate and convey universal truths that link us all? If that's a goal, how do these truths connect to, or simply connect, our wider world of great beauty and terrible tutelage, of creative conflict and devastating unreason...a world that, these days in particular, appears grimmer and most at war with itself? What can poetry still do for people that few or no other forms of writing can?
I do not know who reads my work. Not even in Saint Lucia. With the decline of bookshops, we writers are stranded in many ways. You and I know also that the number of reviewers of local or any literature (or theatre or art or film) has declined terribly. Awards and prizes are few, the circuit of winners seems narrow. This is not even a complaint, just a recognition of the situation. But for those who read, I hope they see and hear what I am doing, how I am charting our shared lives and experiences. Even though they may not share my religious or political ideologies, will they still be able to say, “This is good poetry”? That is the highest accolade.
It is still possible through writing and other art and poetry to convey universal human truths that link us all. If readers are willing to patiently receive the words of writers.
It is difficult to say how the truths or experiences we relate can connect to others. One can use different forms of communication: dramatization, film, music, ekphrastic art, even dance. The popularity of performance poetry/spoken word today is one way used by many younger poets to great effect. I would not want to prescribe to anyone how to present their poetry. I have often thought that in societies like ours, public media like radio and TV and now social media should be more open to poets for presentation of their work. Poetry, by its form, its images, sound, its particular, unique shape and shaping, the music with which it bears many similarities, can reach many in a unique way. Word, sound, power!
What's the most accurate description of your work to date, and who said it or wrote it?
I like what Vladimir Lucien, my younger Saint Lucian contemporary, a fine poet and critic, said of Belmont Portfolio. I think he summed up what I have always been trying to do:
“In Belmont Portfolio, John Robert Lee has managed to refine a poetic voice as unassuming and plain-speaking as the places he chronicles, a voice that knows that as much as the universe spirals away from us into impressive, widening gyres of increasing abstraction, taking with it the people and places we felt we knew, it also coils towards us, sometimes lovingly, sometimes in wrath, but ultimately always bringing redemption. Yet it is also about an in-built and triumphant resistance to total fragmentation which we see in the poet’s frustrations, hurt, disappointment, joy, hope and celebration— all part of a yearning for connection which he shares with the universe herself. The poet, like the universe, assumes his poetic duty to keep things close even as they must (also) recede. This is the message that he, the chronicler of the infinite in small places and in honest, quotidian experience comes to bring us...no big 'project' just: 'maybe epiphany, maybe:/not what was or will be/ but what is/ right there in your eye.'”
This sums up the aims of my poetic oeuvre.
Anything else you'd care to add to that?
Not much else. You have plumbed me here. [laughs] Thanks for the chat and the continual encouragement over many years. And best to ArtsEtc and the work you do.
