Bill Lattanzi

Writer and video producer/editor

We might have heard about the passions of poets, of Yeats and Pound and Robert Graves and Eliot, but we did not expect someone in our presence to be living in that sacred space.

I honestly felt as if he had lifted me up by the scruff of the neck and pulled me up through a rip in the sky to another place. 'Here,' he seemed to be saying, 'here’s where we work, the poets, the playwrights.'

Up In The Rare Air: Class With Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, shown here at a news conference in Mexico City, April 1, 2014. Walcott, known for capturing the essence of his native Caribbean, died early Friday, March 17, 2017, on the island of St. Lucia. (Berenice Bautista/AP)