SENTINEL POETRY MOVEMENT - Key Persons

Stephen Vincent, currently working on a book about the special collections at the Bancroft Library, University of California is the director of Book Studio. He has previously served as Director of Bedford Arts--an art books house (1986--1991) and as Publisher, Momo's press (1974--1985). A former Poetry Review Editor, San Francisco review of Books (1976--1982), Director of Poetry in the schools, California (1970--1972) and Lecturer in Creative Writing, San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University (1968--1970), Vincent has also worked as Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, the United States Peace Corps, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The following is Part I of "My e-Conversation With Stephen Vincent"--an interview conducted by e-mail by Nnorom Azuonye.

A.E.: In The Fortunate Traveller (FSG, 1981) Derek Walcott humorously alludes to Naipaul as V.S. Nightfall - due again to Naipaul's ideological self-positioning, do you think Walcott was justified? K.D.: To make a pun on Naipaul's name? Why would he need justification for that? It is funny. It is a fourth form joke. We nicknamed boys at school and the nicknames stuck because they capture something about the person we are nicknaming. Walcott is a notorious teaser and he nicknamed Naipaul because Naipaul is rather gloomy in his view of the West Indies. This is not a startling attack. It is a joke, and a good one. A.E.: Caribbean literature has come of age, with writer like Jean Rhys, Wilson Harris, Samuel Selvon, Walcott, Naipaul, Lovelace and many more. What has been the impact of this tradition on your own writing, both poetry and prose. K.D.: I suppose it may be fair that the fifties and early sixties saw the "coming of age" of Caribbean (or West Indian) literature, but the tradition does go back a bit longer and with a longer list of names. Any good writer from the region or who has any interest in writing about the region would do well to pay attention to some of the writers you mentioned, not so much to imitate (although there have been worse sins), but to place in context the development of the Caribbean imagination in the twentieth century-a process that will help to locate one's own poetics and sensibilities. I came to West Indian Literature primarily out of curiosity. My father had a good collection of West Indian books on his shelves, and as a teenager, I used to scour his shelves for books with salacious writing between the covers. Put simply, I was look for smut. His library was impressive because he also had American novels and British novels, along with an impressive array of writing from Africa and Asia. My search for smut led me to some quite lofty literature including Mongo Beti's The Poor Christ of Bomba, and virtually all of Edgar Mittleholtzer. But it also led me skim books that, while not generating the bounty I had hoped for, still hooked my interest in narrative. Soon I was not skimming, I was reading. I was drawn by the familiarity of the landscape, by the language, and by the sense that these writers were telling stories about people with whom I was familiar. We read West Indian writers in high school and by this time in West Indian history, it was possible to think of great writers as West Indian writers. By the time I began to think of writing, I was aware that I would need to see what other writers had done before me. I started as a playwright, so reading the plays by West Indian writers was an important process for me. That I pilfered freely from these works was inevitable and necessary. But most important to me was the fact that I could read the works of writers who had actually performed these plays on the very stage I was working on. Yes, the sense of tradition was critical to me. But I also had a troubled relationship with tradition in that since my father was, himself, a novelist and poet, I wanted to find a way to not feel the pressure of his legacy on my own work. I felt comfortable as a playwright because of this. And yet, when, later, I began to write poetry seriously, I came to rely on his voice, his poetic voice, as a tutor, a kind of guide through my own quest for a voice. Above anything else, these writers taught me possibility - the sense that if they could do it, so could I. They gave precedence. They set a high standard, but their work also reminded me that the world I was seeing in front of me at the time was desperate for a chronicler - someone to bring fresh insight and literary intelligence to the realities. I found this an exciting challenge. Walcott and Brathwaite, along with so many of the poets and novelists, had worked through the headaches of colonialism - they had, in the process, managed to start or to set in place a literary discourse that was not as heavily overshadowed by an anxious relationship with the European masters. It was a refreshing thing to have my own ‘masters', in other words. A.E.: It is interesting to discover, in the course of this chat, that your literary gifts might be genetically coded and transferred! Is it possible to lay hands on any of your father's work; any titles?