SARGASSO


 POETRY FOR ALL



 I believe that all poetry, like all good creative
writing, whatever its nationality, whatever its place
and time, must walk a tightrope between the local (as
Wm Carlos Williams called it) and the universal. In some
writing the local may predominate, in others the universal,
but the best poems will render the moment and place
sensually vivified while striking deep at some part of
the nature of the human condition--its thought, its
feeling, its spirit. On the one hand, Caribbean poetry
must reveal the smell of its sea, the taste of its fruit,
the tone of its own voice; it must sway like palm trees,
flutter like bamboo, or vibrate like Reuben Blades. In
other words, something must mark it as belonging to these
places we call the Caribbean. Yet the humanity of its
very mind and feeling must be exactly that--of and for
the humanity in all of us, male and female, European,
Asian, North or South American, Australian, or Caribbean.
As such, the poetry of the Caribbean in the 1980s and
1990s must reorient us to ourselves. It must continue
to tell us something special about the places where we
live and the events which are or will be special to us,
but it must show us how we are connected to other islands
and continents. Whatever events--political, religious,
social, technological--may lie just over our regional
horizons, we must not be carried away by the arrogance
of the explorer when we discover them, claiming them
only for ourselves or only for our own country. Poetry
belongs to all the earth and all its peoples.


Anthony Hunt