Morning, Paramin Derek Walcott, Peter Doig, and an Ekphrasis of Relation

In Morning, Paramin (2016), 51 new poems by Derek Walcott are in dialogue with 51 paintings by Peter Doig. Walcott, also an accomplished painter, has often engaged with the visual arts, but this is the first volume in which every poem “cor-responds” to a painting, offering unique opportunities to examine Walcott’s ekphrastic practices and the way in which they might offer alternatives to current paradigms. Rejecting the paradigm of a paragonal struggle for dominance, I will argue that Morning, Paramin is shaped by an ekphrasis of Relation (resonating with Glissant’s poetics of Relation) in which the verbal and the visual interact in complex ways, exercising mutual reclaimings of agency and transformative dialogues that engender new composite works of art governed by a noncompetitive, nonexploitative approach; as otherness is reconfigured, the right to “opacity” is upheld, and each image and word contribute to a whole bigger than the sum of its parts.