A Million More Reasons to Love Paul Simon

"I don't think I would have worked with anybody but Paul Simon," Walcott says. "Before I met him, I always thought he was a very fine poet. I mean, the first line of 'Graceland' is a great line of verse: 'The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar/ I am following the river down a highway through the cradle of the Civil War.' That's Whitmanesque, or even Hart Crane. What I also like very much is how Jewish his writing is: it's ethnically very provincial, deliberate. In other words, here's someone who has never lost his identity totally. He can go to South Africa, or to the Caribbean, and he remains a Jewish singer." - via