It is a startling, poetic thing, to encounter in a transcript of an interview between an academic and journalist, yet there it is, the poet’s pathos in as prosaic a topic as we can encounter. 'It’s hard to talk… that is the source of my current state, the hurricanes.” Who do people really turn to? We had the recent experiences of hurricanes.”

I know the value of mainstream media through its relationship with audiences when crises occur. Mainstream media has professional standards and ethics guiding it, generally. “People are discerning,” says Gibbings, “and if they know that the source is not transparent they will know that the writer cannot be held to account. These presumably bifurcating paths, the two poles of the schizophrenia, are often in fact complementary, the pathos of the poetry informing, infecting the prose, the objectivity required of journalism tempering the at-times too passionate nature of poesis.įor example, let me read from a Q&A between Gibbings and young Trinidadian academic Amilcar Sanatan, where Gibbings addresses the continued “legitimacy,” as it were, of mainstream journalism: If poetry affords us a microscopic view of the essential human condition, journalism offers the often-necessary macroscopic perspective. There may be many descriptions for the work Wesley has done in his 40 years as a journalist – “hack’s hired prose” is not one of them.ĭespite Walcott’s cynicism, for the person who is a poet at heart, journalism is perhaps the best possible exile, certainly better than the often arid, barren wasteland that is government policy. Today, he is one of the Caribbean’s most recognised and most decorated journalists, and an unparalleled leader when it comes to press rights and freedom of expression. It has been, obviously, not an unrewarding path. Where Walcott had a decade or so earlier chosen the primary path of poetry, Gibbings in the early 1980s chose the primary path of prose. It is one that a young Wesley Gibbings would face in the late 1970s, his first collection of poetry already under his belt and with the “new world, naked” of independent, post-independence Trinidadian journalism open before him. For those of us stricken with that most horrific of conditions, cacaothes scribendi, this schizophrenia is one that is easily recognisable. That was the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s meditation upon his time spent as a journalist in TT in one of his better-known poems, Codicil.

The humming bird tree by ian mcdonald