Little Time for Poetry at the Top : Prizes: How does winning the Nobel change your life? For low-key West Indian poet Derek Walcott, it’s meant being thrust into the world of sound bites and strangers.

BROOKLINE, Mass. —  He’d just won the most prestigious literary award in the world, but poet Derek Walcott was finding it hard to communicate. Like a man from another planet. Someone who doesn’t speak the language.

The day began with a 6 a.m. phone call telling him that he was the 1992 Nobel Prize winner for literature. Less than three hours later, the West Indian writer welcomed a horde of American journalists into his apartment. They all talked at once, and one TV reporter gave him fits.

“Really, Mr. Walcott, can’t you read just 10 seconds of poetry for our camera?” she pleaded. “Just 10 seconds. Four lines. You know, bang, something quick. It won’t take you any time at all.”

Walcott looked like he’d been asked to eat his young. For the third and final time, he told the reporter no and tried to explain.

“I can’t do that,” he said firmly. “I can’t tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?”

For more than 40 years, Derek Walcott has written luminous and hypnotic verse that captures the Caribbean’s sensuous beauty. A low-key, sometimes reclusive man, he typically gets up before sunrise to work and wrestles with a word, a metaphor or a line for many hours before getting it right.

He’s not in a hurry. But now an impatient world is beating down his door, and the deliberate pace he’s spent a lifetime perfecting is under siege. When Walcott won the coveted $1.2-million award, he became Mr. Film at 11.

In less than a week, his picture has been on television screens and front pages around the world. There’s more to come, and the 62-year-old poet complains that it will be hard for him to get back to work. But it’s not just because of reporters or the well-wishers who are calling him constantly. Groping for the right words, Walcott leans back on his sofa, puffs on a cigarette and looks like he’s in pain. Then he finds the image he wants.

“I want to get back to writing as soon as possible, even though my life has changed rather dramatically,” he says. “Yet there’s a shadow over me now. It hangs over the page. It’s the feeling that, hey, I just won the Nobel Prize. So the next words I write better be worthy. Damn worthy, you know?”

Judging by the acclaim that greeted Walcott’s award, his talent is not in doubt. Last week’s announcement by the Swedish Academy marked the first time that a West Indian won the prize, and it continued a trend in recent years of honoring artists from developing nations, some of whom are not widely known.

Walcott, who is also a playwright and painter, was born on the island of St. Lucia and later moved to Trinidad, where he lived for more than 20 years. He divides his time between the Caribbean and the United States, where he has taught at Boston University for nearly 10 years. The winner of numerous awards, he has written nearly two dozen books of poetry, including “Omeros,” his most recent, a 64-chapter retelling of the Odyssey against a Caribbean backdrop.

Praised by the Nobel board as one of the greatest poets alive, Walcott insists that the award won’t go to his head. But his friends say that winning such an honor bestows a halo on someone--a level of expectation that can create headaches. And they should know, because they’ve gone through the experience.

“I had dinner in New York this weekend with Joseph Brodsky (the 1987 Nobel literary laureate) and he told me that next year is going to be hell,” says Walcott, puffing on a cigarette. “He told me to brace myself, that I’m going to have trouble staying within my own rhythm as a writer.”

More practical advice came from South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, who won the award in 1991. She told Walcott to hire a personal secretary, because his telephone will never stop ringing and he can’t answer all the calls. Either that, she said, or tear it off the wall.

Both writers told him that the award can mean increased visibility, or continued appreciation in limited circles. Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was not well-known in the West when he won the prize in 1988, but today his novels are sold in chain stores throughout America. By contrast, the 1986 winner, Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, is hardly a household name.

“I told Joseph and Nadine that I’m going to continue my work as before,” says Walcott. “And do I mean that very seriously. Life must go on.”

For much of his career, Walcott has painted a brooding and bittersweet picture of life in the West Indies, grappling with an ethnic heritage that is African, Caribbean and European. Fiercely proud of his people, he has also been drawn to the United States, and the ambiguity of exile runs heavily through his work. In one poem, “Midsummer 81,” he reflected those shifting moods:

Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat’s yawn.

Trees with dust on their lips, cars melting down

in its furnace. Heat staggers the drifting mongrels.

The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails

round Woodford Square the colour of rusting blood. . . .

The oven alleys stifle, and one waits for midsummer lightning

as the armed sentry in boredom waits for the crack of a rifle.”

It takes years of discipline to craft consistently good poetry, and many writers cultivate an anonymity that permits them to eavesdrop on other people’s lives. So it has been with Walcott, but the notoriety of the Nobel could crimp his style. Especially when he’s no longer the man on the edge of a crowd.

Several days after the big news, for example, he held a party at home for his creative writing and drama students from Boston University. His intention was to schedule seminars, hand out assignments and get down to the business of teaching, as if nothing had changed. Yet it didn’t quite work out that way.

“I’m a little overwhelmed just looking at him,” said Tom McClellan, a stage manager at the student theater that Walcott helps operate. “And I think a lot of people are going to have that feeling now. I mean, this is the most prestigious literary award in the world. He won it. And there he is.”

As McClellan pointed across the room, Walcott was holding court on his sofa, quietly accepting congratulations from a crush of students. One by one, they shook his hand, asked about his work and talked shyly about their own.

Gifts of flowers filled the room, and a telephone in the kitchen kept ringing. As visitors gathered around a buffet table, Walcott made some quick announcements, shook more hands and finally surrendered to his own party.

“There are people eating food in my own apartment whom I don’t know,” he said in mock outrage. “Is this my new life?”

For the next few months, at least. Walcott has been invited to Stockholm this month to kick off a new Swedish program of portraying Nobel winners on postage stamps. Then he flies back to Boston to give a few readings and continue his classes. He’ll fly next to England for a reading, then attend a poetry festival in the Caribbean. Sometime--between newspaper interviews, cocktail receptions, lectures and TV appearances--he’ll write a 45-page essay and speech as part of the Dec. 10 award ceremony in Stockholm. Meanwhile, his New York publisher is putting out two new volumes of his work.

It’s something of a shock for an artist who, along with many of his colleagues, is not accustomed to mass-media attention. Poets have been marginalized in the late 20th Century, Walcott says, and the breakneck pace of an age that values rapid-fire information over reflection and nuance has passed them by.

Other writers have voiced the same concern: In a recent interview, author Norman Mailer lamented the declining value of the written word in America and speculated that novelists will eventually play a role in U.S. culture similar to that played now by poets. Walcott agrees with Mailer’s grim prognosis.

Yet it isn’t because Americans hate poetry. The problem, Walcott insists, is that American poets are often their own worst enemies.

Today, most of them are writing for each other, safely behind the walls of academe, he says. It’s a incestuous world that has cut itself off from the language, experience and music that drives great poetry.

“I don’t believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it,” Walcott insists. “There is a tremendous audience for it, on any given day or night. You just have to know where to look.”

In 1990, for example, singer Paul Simon gave a free concert in New York’s Central Park for more than 750,000 people. Although many fans came for the music, a large number savored the lyrics, notes Walcott:

“I think Simon is very gifted. . . . He writes poetry that has to be taken seriously. And the key is that he understands the relationship between music and poetry. So did thousands of other people in Central Park that night. It’s a lesson that many poets in this country seem to have forgotten.”

Throughout history, Walcott suggests, music has been an integral part of poetry, most notably with the Greeks and the culture of Elizabethan England. Great poets may not overtly combine music and writing, but there is an inner music driving them, a rhythmic sense that colors their verse, he says.

“Look at Allen Ginsberg,” Walcott continues. “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.”

Other cultures are more in tune with music and verse, especially from an ethnic standpoint, he says. As a Caribbean man, Walcott suggests that he functions easily in the worlds of poetry, painting, drama and music.

Consider his current activities: This month, he’s working on a stage translation of the Odyssey for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. He’s developing plays in America that will incorporate Trinidadian steel bands. He has screenplays in the works, plus new poetry. He wants to upgrade a thriving student theater in Boston and renovate an older theater in St. Lucia.

Meanwhile, Walcott wants to help his three children from three previous marriages and he also hopes to endow several scholarships in the Boston area. With $1.2 million in his pocket, Walcott has the chance to complete much of this work.

But some things never change.

“When the phone call came that I had won the prize, I was struggling with a quatrain and not having much success,” he says.

“So there I was, the big prize winner. My first instinct after the call was to go back to that poem. And you know, I still couldn’t get it right.”

Walcott takes a drag on his cigarette and laughs at the thought that he has reached a pinnacle in his creative life.

“If all this means that I can’t get a line right, who needs it?” he says. “If that’s true, mister, you can have your pinnacle back.”