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" Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory. "

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" My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty. "

" Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral. "

" There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. "

" 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. "

" Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it. "

" The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts. "

" A culture, we all know, is made by its cities. "

" There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame. "

" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

" Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in. "

" There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise. "

" Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. "

" I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event. "

" The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things. "

Material Things

" I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads. "

" I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre. "

" I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand? "

" I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.' "

" Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. "

" Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole. "

" I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures. It is not inhibited by flourish. It is a rhetorical society. It is a society of physical performance. It is a society of style. "

" Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?' "

" As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body. "

" The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it. "

" I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English. "

" There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature. "

" The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world. "

" Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god. "

" I feel blessed that I was gifted. "

" If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. "