Kwame Dawes began as a playwright in Jamaica and has gone on to publish in the ballpark of thirty poetry collections, in addition to multiple works of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent collection, Sturge Town (W. W. Norton, 2024), was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He’s also a co-founder and artistic director of Calabash, an international literary festival in Jamaica, where he currently serves as the poet laureate. Dawes teaches writing at the Pacific University MFA program and is professor of literary arts at Brown University. In addition, Dawes has served as a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and has received the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for service to the arts in South Carolina, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, the Musgrave Silver Medal for contribution to the Arts in Jamaica, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, and, in 2009, an Emmy. I had the pleasure of speaking with Dawes in November 2024 when he visited Butler University as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.
Jenny Walton (JW): I’ve heard you’re “The Busiest Man in Literature.” Where does this moniker come from and how do you feel about it?
Kwame Dawes (KD): Yeah, I know exactly where it came from: a young journalist in the UK, Kevin Le Gendre. He interviewed me in ’98 or ’99, and the article was titled “The Busiest Man in Literature.” I don't know if he came up with the title, but they certainly used that. I think it made sense then even though I'm far busier now.
I mean, it's not that I was doing diddly squat, but it’s funny because when I look at that time now, I think I wasn't that busy back then. But it doesn't matter because that title is for other people. I might say I don’t feel busy, and then they say, But Kwame you do this, you do this. You must be busy. So, I say, Well, okay, you're right. I'm busy.
JW: So many writers commit themselves entirely to their writing. What is it that compels you to do so many different things?
KD: There's a combination of things that might explain all of that. I come from a tradition in the Caribbean and in Africa where there's not much luxury in just being a writer. You couldn't do it because you would starve to death if you were to depend only on writing poetry, for example, to make a living wage. I don’t think things are that different here in the United States. But, more importantly, the idea of being a writer was part of a larger project and movement at the time when I was growing up. It was during the period of moving from dependent nations, colonized nations, into independent nations. As part of that movement, the writer was engaged in the formation of a cultural identity—a function that was important and valuable. And, consequently, the privileges of being a writer were overshadowed by the responsibilities of being a writer.
Something that I think people overlook in my trajectory is that my first ten years as a writer were primarily as a playwright; this was between eighteen and twenty-eight. And as a playwright, it's a whole different ball game. I mean, you don't just sit in an attic and write plays, especially in the Caribbean. You became a director, you became a producer, you became a promotor. You formed your own theater company, which is what I did.
When you're in theater, there is a sense that you have to find the money to produce your plays, you have to find the spaces, you have to work with the carpenters to build your set. This idea that you just do one thing, you just sit down as a playwright and write, just wasn’t feasible. And so, with models like Derek Walcott, Dennis Scott, Pat Cumper, and many others…I consider myself to be someone who is part of that kind of pragmatic tradition.
Finally, my father and my mother also helped to shape this intensity and this propensity in me to do multiple things. My father was a writer, and he was a teacher. When we moved to Jamaica, he became the director of the Institute of Jamaica. He started publishing the work of writers, and he started promoting and advancing the cultural importance of folk culture, folk art, reggae music and Jamaican jazz music, and so on. As the director of the Institute of Jamaica, he also oversaw all the museums in the country. He was responsible for giving attention to, advancing, preserving, and understanding the cultural history and present of the country, and that was what he spent a lot of time doing. My mother was a social worker for many years, even as she was a sculptor and painter. She taught craft classes and, of course, gave much of her life to the wellbeing of other people who needed support and care in the country. So these were the examples that I had, and I learned a lot from my parents’ generosity.
The truth is, as much as I wanted to be a successful writer, I learned very early that success out of context from other people's success is not really that powerful. An individual can become really famous. But if we get a movement of writers, then Caribbean writing becomes famous. And I've always felt that it was my part to be involved in the promotion and the elevation and the resistance of erasure and absenting that has happened to many cultures formally colonized by European powers. And if I have the capacity to do something about it, then I will. I don't believe this should be the task of every writer at all. I really don't. But I think every writer should support such work and do their best not to create obstacles for this work to be done.
JW: How much do you sleep?
KD: (Laughs.) I sleep. I sleep. I mean, I do seven hours of sleep a night. Yeah. You know, I do. And I'm increasing. Most of my time, though, is spent watching Netflix, Hulu, Acorn TV, Paramount, Sundance. You name it, I have it.
JW: What are you watching right now?
KD: I’m watching Shrinking. It’s a great little show on Apple TV. And Abbott Elementary is, I think, brilliant. I just watch everything, you know. And then I watch a lot of sports. Like, a lot of sports. I watch soccer a lot. I watch basketball. I follow the NBA. My car radio, it's NBA today. I follow football. It's not a sport I grew up with, but I think it's quite engaging and, at times, beautiful…It's a violent American game, but it's beautiful. It really is. I watch volleyball. I watch a lot of sports.
JW: Do you have particular teams you follow?
KD: In American sports, I follow players primarily. I'm fickle about my loyalties, but I've always been a supporter of the NBA because that was my introduction. Never, never liked Boston for no good reason, but, you know, there it is. So, as much as I admire the Celtics, I would never declare myself a fan for quite petty reasons. And with cricket, which is the game I played, my loyalties are to the West Indies. And then international soccer, since Jamaica doesn't make it to the World Cup Finals often, it's Brazil, or, more recently, France because frankly, France is an African team. I don't know why people are pretending otherwise. I just watched the game last night. It was a French team playing. Thank you, Africa. That's what they should be doing in France, thanking Africa.
But obviously I watch a lot of sports. I watch cooking shows, house hunting shows, and so on. And I can do all of that while I'm working on letters or marking papers. And I consume fifty audiobooks a year.
JW: Stop it. (Laughs.) As you’re saying this, I’m thinking about how, in two separate interviews, I've heard you talk about selecting the poems for Sturge Town. To paraphrase, your editor mentions that you haven’t done a “Jamaica book” in a while. And you're like, okay, let me dig through poems. And then you talk about how you found hundreds to work with, but you don’t talk about how all those poems are organized. I get the sense we’re talking a serious quantity of work to explore. So, tell me, how do you write and file your work?
KD: I like that as a question because I don't think the answer is a mystery, but it's one that nobody thinks about. My writing has coincided with technological changes over the last half century when it comes to how people write and read literature. And as a writer, one of the key moments was getting access to a word processor—I had access to my first Apple computer in 1989 while I was editor of the student newspaper at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. This changed a great deal for me. Now, when I'm writing poetry, I often begin to write longhand. Of course, I tend to write prose on a word processor, as this is greatly efficient for me. But to be quite honest, I work with what is convenient and what is available to me at a given time. And I try to not become wholly dependent on one mechanism. Typically, when I begin in longhand, I quickly move to have the work transcribed into digital format, making it more transportable and much easier to edit and revise. In this format, I file the work either for further edits or to start thinking about publication.
So that's one. That's the organizing mechanism. The key is to transfer it through different programs and different generations of programs and so on. And every time I moved to another university, there was that whole process of transferring stuff. So that's one part of it. But I do have a folder on my desktop that says “Poetry.” If I do a draft of a poem and so on, so forth, it goes in there.
I don't tag things. I just do it.
But there's another big organizing mechanism that has happened for the last, I would say, fifteen to twenty years. I started to do a lot of work in response to art, and that began organically responding to certain artists. I started doing work in response to the paintings of Tom Feelings, who did beautiful work on the Middle Passage. And then I began to purchase these postcards. They came in a box set called the “Art Box.”
It's a series that Phaidon does, and it has any kind of art. It's like maybe two hundred postcards in a box, right? And what I would do as a practice is just pick out a piece of art and then start writing in response to that art. It’s a way to just have it as a system for me to write. I'll be sitting on my desk working on something else, maybe marking papers, and I get tired of it. I'll go to the art box and pull out a picture and go, Okay, let me write. Let me start a poem. And I'll write a poem, and then I'll keep it in a folder called “Art Box” with all kinds of poems, right?
Then I started to do this with books. I have, oh, maybe thirty or forty books of art, not just photographs of art. The key, the only thing they have to have, is a lot of white space. They can't have a lot of text. And then I write the poems right beside the art. Almost eighty percent of the poems that I've written, including some of them that are in this book, are ekphrastic in the sense that I'm responding to art. I'm not trying to write a poem that reflects or even analyzes it, but I use that as both a trigger, as a generative distraction from the tyranny of linear narrative, and as a way to think about shapes and all kinds of things.
When I finish filling all the pages in a book, then I transcribe that work into the word processor. In my poetry folder, you'll find those books, Cuban television photos, and all kinds of things. And there's a whole set of poems that follow that. It keeps me writing.
Finally, about seven years ago, I struck up a friendship by email with John Kinsella, this amazing poet from Australia. We became quick friends and started to do these exchanges, and now we're publishing our sixth book of poems together, Mortality (Peepal Tree Press), an ongoing back and forth with each other. And again, those exchanges, some of them we published as books, but some of them we just had for our own projects and for our edification. That has become another beautiful and affirming source of generating work. Kinsella is a brilliant poet, a remarkable thinker, and a very principled man. We are around the same age, and though we come from different parts of the world, we have found so many points of common ground and have, at the same time, learned a great deal from each other through the beauty of empathetic friendship and a love for poetry.
So, there's no shortage of opportunity. Writing for me has always been a kind of shelter, a place to understand myself, a place to understand the world as I see it and what I'm going through, and a place to have conversations with the literary histories that have shaped me, the social and political histories that have shaped me, my understanding of family. All of these things.
That's what writing represents for me. You know, I think all writers have different relationships to writing. I don't think it affects the work that they do. It just affects their life relative to it. For me, I'm always waiting to get back to it because I can go in and do twenty minutes and then go back to doing other things, and I'm fine.
JW: It sounds like you’re comfortable with toggling back and forth. I understand that much of your work has been published in the UK. I’m wondering what that's like for you. Is it strange?
KD: It is true that much of my work is published in the UK. I can’t say it is strange, but you know, my first four or five books of poetry were published in the UK, and it isn’t like I wasn't trying to get published in the US. I mean, it was tough breaking into publishing. I was winning major awards in the UK in the 90s and 2000s, and American publishers were just not interested. And then finally I won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was published by Ohio University Press, which was of course judged by Eavan Boland, an Irish poet, and I thought, Go figure, right? I think that started to change things. But it was tough, it was tough, and it seemed really strange because I knew my work was strong, but it was a hard space to get into.
Since then, I've published elsewhere, and I have published quite significantly in the United States, but I remain committed to the fact that my ability to keep writing and publishing and to generate work and to do so with confidence is because I had a publisher, a committed publisher with Peepal Tree Press in the UK, and an editor who remains my editor. Jeremy Poynting has been that editor, and he's brilliant, an exceptionally well-read and remarkable editor. I have somebody who I respect highly, who affirms me, and that has made a massive difference for me. He knows the full body of my work quite intimately, and that is a rare thing to have as a poet. While I might have wanted my work published in the US since I was living in the US, it has been far more important to my growth as a writer to have a publisher who has given me the space and care to develop my art and to be part of a publishing enterprise committed to the Caribbean and the work of people of color.
In fact, all the work that I've been doing, setting up publishing enterprises—like the African Poetry Book Fund, we're just starting a Caribbean poetry series, and so on—all of it is predicated on an idea that I really believe: One of the challenges that these poets face is finding a place where they can try things, where they can make mistakes and still know they have a committed home. They have a publisher. We've published about 150 African poets in ten years, and many of them have gone on to publish with other presses, and that's fine. We encourage that. But what we're saying is you always have a home. If you want to try something different, bring it here.
I think many poets struggle to be generative and so have struggled to publish because every year they’ve had to enter another contest to find a new publisher, or, you know, they have written a new book, but they don't know where it's going to be published. And I think for writers of color, that has been one of the really big, big problems. I hope we are changing that.
JW: Do you get the sense that the publishing industry at large is offering these places where a person can come and sort of find their home? It sounds like you’ve found a home, but is that normal?
KD: Publishers have always done it, but not for necessarily writers of color. Louise Glück always had a home. Then there are writers of color like Kevin Young. I mean, one of the things about Kevin Young is that he was able to very early on do a lot of things experimentally because he had a secure publisher. But that's not available to many, many writers of color.
Then there’s somebody like Nikky Finney, who is probably one of the greatest poets writing in America today. Her first book was published by an established publisher, but then she couldn't get her work published after that. She got her next book, Rice, an incredible book, published by a small press in Canada. Since then, she has had to move from house to house, both out of her loyalty to small houses, but also, I think, out of the lack of support. Finally, she was with Northwestern relatively recently, which is probably the first “established” house that has taken her work since she published her first collection with Morrow. Given who Finney is, and given the importance of her work, this strikes me as interesting and informative.
I was recently listening to the audio version of Sturge Town, and it was the first time since the editing process that I really consumed the whole book. That experience was affirming, but most of what I felt leaving that experience was gratitude for the brilliance and care of my editor, Jeremy Poynting. His hand on the detailed architecture of the book was clear to me as I listened to the movement from section to action, and the way that he created echoes and resonances across the large body of poems that I could not have conceived because of my proximity to the work. It is a beautifully shaped book and it has a coherence that clearly emerges out of this partnership we have had for so many years. Having the same editor for over three decades, and a “home” for that same time, has helped me grow as a poet. I feel extremely grateful for this.
JW: I think I speak for all poets when I say we appreciate what you’re doing. I’d love to hear more about your experience with publishing Sturge Town. Am I correct that Sturge Town came out in the UK about a year before it was released in the US? What has it been like to be touring on the same book for so long?
KD: I never really had the “touring” thing happen to me for new books. For the most part, I don't tour the way I imagine fiction and non-fiction writers do. When I get a gig, I talk about and read from my current book. That's the way it makes sense. But to be honest, I tend to curate my readings as a performance for an occasion, and I draw from new work and old work as the idea and shape of the reading occurs to me.
I published Sturge Town in the UK with Peepal Tree, and then Norton approached me, which I wasn't expecting. They approached me and asked if I had any new work.I said, Well, there's a book that I did with Peepal Tree, and we could look at that. And they agreed to it. So, now it's out and it's in hardcover in the US with Norton. This is exciting and, in many ways, gratifying.
So far, it's been fantastic. And, you know, there is, whether we like it or not, a certain kind of cachet that comes with certain imprints, with reviewers and awards and things like that. I'm not saying everything changes, but I know that I can see the difference.
JW: That’s amazing. I want to get into this book a bit more with you. Let’s start with “How I Pray in the Plague.” I listened to you read this on the podcast Arji’s Poetry Pickle Jar, and there are these lines: “So what kind of father is this? Do you want answers? / You have come to the wrong place. / I am selfish with answers. I'm hoarding them.” Do these lines represent the reality for the speaker in the poem? Or does it feel true for you?
KD: I am the speaker, as it happens. I have been able to separate myself from the I unless the I is not the I. In the poem, I am speaking about arriving at the great answers to life’s meaning and, as it happens, to the political complications and horrors of the world. I am trying to carve out a place for the poet, which is to somehow capture the sentiment of the time, to, by a kind of honesty, chronicle it in all the flawed possibilities of language. Maybe I want to downplay the poet as guru, but I should say that I am really talking about me, my willingness to recognize that I, too, am struggling for meaning.
JW: I appreciate that. There's another passage in “Condolence” that brings up a question in a similar vein: “So when I write my condolences, / I scour the poets I trust—I know at once the inadequacy / of my own poems—how clotted they are with the details / of pedestrian news, with private names and anxieties.”
The sense of self-awareness strikes me here. Many of your poems include names and things that feel very specific to you. I'm curious, what does a poem mean as sort of a private artifact for the person who creates it? And then once it's put into the world, how does a reader absorb it and personalize it for themselves? When it's a more universal conversation, that feels like an easier handoff, but when it's so personal…I'm curious how it works. But I don't even know exactly what question to ask here.
KD: I think I know what you're asking. And I think this is for twentieth century and twenty-first century poetry. It begs the question of the private metaphors that we create, the private symbols, the things that are myths that we create, that are based on our own existence and our own life.
But I'll put it to you this way: The wrestling that I always have−and the extent to which I succeed−is very limited. By that I mean this is probably my thirtieth book of poetry. And there's a sense in which I know the subjects I've dealt with…I've dealt with them already. I know that if somebody has read all my books of poetry, then a lot of this feels familiar. Familiar in the sense that the context makes sense. They get it. But I can't assume that when I'm publishing the book.
When I organize a collection, the hope is that it's read in order as a collection. When it's read as a collection, there's a way in which things become more clarified further on. This is a very organized book, organized in terms of how information is shared, how it's explored, how themes and ideas develop.
If somebody reads individual poems, they may have some stumbling. But I code it. If I'm writing about my children, I quote it by an epigraph. I quote it by a reference that says, Okay, this is this and this is that. There are times when my code is not obvious. But that's okay because I think I'm aware that I'm leaving it fairly loose in terms of the facts rather than the emotions. The emotions are never questioned in my poetry. The facts may be, but the sentiment is never a question in my poetry. Like, I don't know who he's talking about, but I know he doesn't like this person. But “Condolences” is an attempt to express gratitude to the work of other poets, and in this case, to thank Aracelis Girmay for her poem, her elegiac poem that has offered me some language with which to express condolences. I think that if we follow the finger pointing to her work, things might be even clearer, or at least a layer of meaning—another layer of meaning—will reveal itself.
JW: Speaking to the highly intentional organization of this collection, at what point in putting it together did you decide it needed to be in sections? Was that the plan from the beginning, or did it come about more organically?
KD: Yeah. A few of my books were organized, whether it's Wheels or City of Bones to some extent. And some of the early books, Progeny of Air, are organized that way, Impossible Flying, they are organized around a gathering. I stated earlier that truly engaged in this process in a very significant way, in a partnership, if you will, is Jeremy Poynting. And I have always appreciated his desire to look at the individual poems in great detail as well as the larger architecture of the collection. The books I have listed are organized in that sense, and their organization is quite an involved part of the editing process.
With Nebraska, I sat down, and I said, Okay, how does the book Nebraska come about? The university was going to have some kind of celebration. This is pre-COVID, and they were going to do a celebration for me. And I said, Yeah, that would be really nice, and we should do a little giveaway, maybe a little booklet with a few poems because I think I've written a few poems about Nebraska.
The university liked the idea and the University of Nebraska Press said they’d love to do it. So, then I got some help to go and do this work of searching through all my poems. We used some key search terms: Nebraska, snow, geese, you know, winter, Lincoln. And then by the time we were done, I had 120 or more poems. I didn't realize I'd written so much about Nebraska. I had no idea. And I realized this was going to be a big volume. I said to the University of Nebraska Press, I think it's going to be a book. Would you still be interested? They said, Yes, we're interested. And so that is when I started to organize it. And even though this book was not published by Peepal Tree Press, Poynting worked with me to shape this collection. With Nebraska, we organized it by seasons. That's the structure. I don't announce it, but each of the poems moves through the seasons, and it ends with winter. It's the classic story: life, death, blah, blah. So that's how that was organized—at least at the most obvious level. There are other more used ways in which the work is organized, ways that have to do with tone, texture, mood, rhythm, and so on.
Similarly, with Sturge Town, I began to look at all these poems that are sort of Jamaica-flecked, and I began to notice home as a kind of recurring theme. But I also noticed light. Light is an obsession of mine. I have vision issues, so having light is massively important. And I realized these poems were really engaged by light. This is a framework that then allowed us to pull together a fairly large collection in manageable ways.
As I started to think about these poems, I started to create piles of related things, themes, and ideas. And we began to think of things like family, faith. Subjects that seem to connect and coalesce. And that’s what I was working on with Jeremy. Then I took all of that and started to create these sections and create these epigraphs and construct it to create this book, which might feel like I wrote it at one time. But that's not what happened.
Most of the poems, of course, are very contemporary, and they're freshly written. But there are poems in Sturge Town that were written in 1992, older poems, which I've never published, and that just fit in perfectly at that moment. It gave me pause to think, I can look at it two ways: I was really good then, or, I've not grown at all since then because the poem seemed very comfortable in the same book. Having an editor who knows all that work, including the unpublished manuscript, is a massive help, as well.
JW: How much editing did you do? And when you're editing, do you find yourself focusing more just on the mechanics of the poem, or will you sort of revisit the heart of the content and rework that also?
KD: Quite a bit. I always do a lot of editing with individual poems. I have a checklist. I have a functional checklist that I keep in my head. A lot of it is focused on how the lines are working on a technical level. But I'm also asking questions about my use of metaphor and image. And that's a whole area of how I use sound. I go through it for sound. I go through it for metaphor. My first thing is not just meaning, there's also that quest for clarity of meaning.
I can look at a poem, and I can tell that it hasn't gone through my system. I can look at it quickly and know because I don't put pressure on myself while I'm drafting. I really try to be as free as possible unless I'm writing in form.
I have multiple ways of approaching a poem. And then when I'm revising that poem, I'm either staying faithful to a formal thing that I've decided to use, or I'm leaving it wide open. Sometimes I move things from beginning to end. I think of how a poem starts, how it ends, titling, echoings, all kinds of editing.
And that is just my work. But having an editor like Poynting who comes with another gaze and a familiarity helps me to think through some of what I have done. Again, the partnership is critical. I mean, that's the exciting part of writing for me. Like, truly exciting.
JW: Why?
KD: Because I think that's really where you start making the poem. You draft something and, for me, a draft is pretty quick, and it tells me I have a poem. Then I can go back to see what’s the point of the poem that I’m discovering through this draft. Then, once I’ve got the point of the poem, I can go back and fix it because now I understand what this poem is trying to do.
JW: Okay, so this question is a little out there. Where do you think the poems come from? Do you have a theory that poems are floating around in the aether or something like that?
KD: No, no. I think we all are consuming things, information, feelings, the things we see in life, the things we notice. There's a filtering that comes from our disciplines and our relationships. We filter information for use, and we develop the skill. As a writer, you develop the skill of identifying what is interesting from all the stuff that comes through. And that skill of being able to identify what is interesting, and then letting that carry the path…that strikes me as the interesting thing. While philosophically I can enjoy considering the Platonic idea that there's a kind of “isness” of the poem, in practical terms, I can’t believe that the poem I write has always existed. It is a lovely idea, but I can’t align that fantasy with the poems I discard—I usually know why I discard poems, and it has nothing to do with the search for something, as distinct from the making of something. I have read and consumed so much poetry in life that I have an understanding of the mechanics of the thing, and it's what has moved me in making the poem. I don't find creating a poem magical, though I find it comfortably inexplicable in some ways. But I do think that there's a psychology to it. There's a psychology. There's a psychological process, which may be a spiritual process, but I don't have any handle on that. All I say to people is, I know this much.
My wisdom has continued to improve with age. My capacity as a poet. My skill as a poet, my craft has had to keep up. So, craft is technical. You know, craft is the ability to know how to use language, to know how to work language, and how to use form and things like that. And you can learn that. And I've built my life around practicing and practicing how to be a good craftsman so that when all this stuff comes in, then it has the gift of my craft to filter it into being the poem. The better I am at the craft, the better that works. For me, it's fairly uncomplicated that I get better at craft. That's how I'm different from an amateur. Somebody who's not a poet may have the same story or idea or impulse, but they wouldn't know what to do with it.
JW: You've written in several genres, and I'm curious what your experience is with those different genres.
KD: When I was in my late teens, like eighteen or nineteen, there was a lot of pressure people put on me, saying, Well, what are you going to do? Or, Are you going to be this? Are you going to be that? And so on and so forth. And I came to this understanding that I couldn't say what I was going to be because I didn’t know whether I was good at it or not. My view was and is always to respect the genre, to value the genre.
Before I decided to work in theater, I was kind of duped into writing a play. I had sort of attempted a few things, but I didn't know, in retrospect, exactly what I was doing. What was consistently there was the impulse to make something close to the thing that had moved me, consumed me, and engaged me. And then some friends of mine said they wanted a play. They told me that they had asked a number of people, and I would be just one of many that they were going to look at. But they didn't ask anybody else. They had only asked me. I didn't know this. I wrote this play over a weekend, and then they staged the play, and it did well. So I said, Okay, well, maybe I can do plays.
Looking back, this was not an auspicious beginning because I didn't enter it with great ambition. I entered it with this accidental success. But then I said, I need to learn how to do this. And I learned it by writing. Still, to pretend that I came at this out of the blue is a lie. They came to me because they knew I read plays and watched plays. They knew that my major was literature. I had the idea to make the play because I had read so many plays and watched plays, and I wanted to create that experience. Blessedly, the play’s limitations could have been helped greatly by a discriminating director and good actors. There were many lessons in this for me.
When I was about thirteen years old, I lost my geography book, and I could not admit it to my family because it would mean buying another book. And I really started to panic. I said, What am I going to do? What I would do is every day I would borrow one of my schoolmates' geography books and I would write all the chapter pages out as much as I could, and I would learn geography that way.
I was very successful at geography. I learned the book by heart because I wrote it longhand. And it occurred to me that when I learned that way, I was ahead of the rest of the class. I could teach myself. It was a powerful kind of revelation.
When I started working in theater, I said, Well, I have to write plays. I was at the university then and there was a theater school in Kingston. I befriended some of the people in theater school and I asked them for the syllabus for the courses they were taking and the books they were reading. And I went to the library and got all the books. I read Jerzy Grotowski, I read Augusto Boal, I read Stanislavski, I read Peter Brook. I read all of these books on plays, on playwriting, on theater and theater lighting. I taught myself theater because I didn't want to be embarrassed when I was in theater and sort of telling people what to do. At the Creative Arts center (now the Phillip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) the director of the center was Noel Vaz, a brilliant director. He had a reputation as a curmudgeon, but he took interest in me and he allowed me to quiz him about theater—about playwrights like Brecht and Derek Walcott, who he had worked with. He allowed me to borrow books on modern theater, on staging, and so on, and allowed me to use the theater for my own work. It was generous of him. He allowed me to sneak in to watch rehearsals by professionals who came through the theater. I took it all in.
What I'm saying is that I gained this confidence to write plays by reading plays and by learning about theater. Similarly, as I started writing short stories, it was by reading them and learning how short stories work. And the same thing with poetry. There were no classes to be taken. There was no workshop to be taken. I had to create my own curriculum, my own thing. I didn't do it from knowledge or anything. I just knew that some place has the information, and I need this information, and I'm just going to find all this information.
Those were the early days. The test of my skill in this genre or in this field is not whether I make the decision to do it but how well I do it. If I write a play and my playwriting sucks, then maybe that's not what I'm supposed to do. But if it's good enough to keep going, then that's the test. And if somebody says, But you're a poet, I say, Well, yeah. Am I a good poet? Yeah. Am I a good playwright? Yeah. Am I a good fiction writer? Yeah.
Then if I can do all of them, fine. If I can't, then I won't. That has always guided me, and that's what I tell people. Writing, for me, really amounts to: If I'm writing a poem, I want to write a poem. The impulse is to make a poem. The impulse is not to make a poem about something, right? The impulse is to make a poem. The impulse is to write a story, and then I work out what it's about. The impulse is to write a play. Then I work out what the play is about. Right? And I think that has been consistently the way that my approach has been, and it's worked out just fine.
JW: What questions do you think that we as writers and readers should be asking ourselves right now in this current world?
KD: I've always said, and I've said it in many places, and I continue to say it: I think that writers and poets are the chroniclers of the sentiment of our time. And this is great for our time. Our time is messed up. It’s very complicated, and I think times will always be messed up. I’ve lived through very messy times in my life, and I was always grateful for the poets who were there during those times, that they would be able to capture this sentiment of time.
And where there’s a threat of erasure, the threat of silencing, the threat of absenting for future generations, it’s good that poets continue to write in the moment and to leave this legacy of the feelings, the thoughts, the experiences, the daily living, the persistence of that, in the face of all of these things that are happening. To me, that is the gift and responsibility that writers should have, and I really believe that is massively important.