"Draw Deep from Your Palette": Lorna Goodison's Poetics of Pigment

© 2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System t has become something of a critical commonplace to evoke painting and its media when talking about Caribbean writers. For example, when Michael Gilkes writes about LeRoy Clarke from Trinidad and Tobago, he theorizes painting as a metaphor for Clarke’s use of language: “Using language as if working with tubes of paint, [Clarke] has shaped an idiosyncratic, imaginative, metaphorical, poetic discourse . . . of a rooted Caribbean sensibility” (qtd. in Robinson-Walcott 602). Gilkes’s metaphor is more felicitous than we might realize at first, in that a surprising number of Caribbean writers, especially poets, are also skilled painters, and many painter-poets showcase original paintings on their book covers. Born in Kingston in 1947, Lorna Goodison is one such poet―a major figure in West Indian and global poetry who was appointed Jamaica’s poet laureate in 2017. Earlier in her career, she was trained as an artist at the Jamaica School of Art, eventually intensifying her study of painting at the Art Students League of New York. Critics have been keenly interested in the significance of painting as a meta phor in her work but have largely neglected in-depth studies of how the concrete practice of painting might inform her literary texts as uniquely cross-artistic crafted works. I once had the chance to ask Goodison directly about the significance of color in her work―her books and her paintings. Without a moment of hesitation, she replied, “I’m a colorist!” In this essay, I follow Goodison’s colors, including her in-depth studies of color’s conspicuous absence in shades of black. At the root of all color is the science of pigment, and I suggest that pigment―painting’s A M Y E. E L K I N S