Local poet and author Winifred “Oyoko” Loving reads her free verse poetry with a voice sweet as honey and filled with emotions, as her descriptions transport listeners to places she knows emotionally or physically.
Every situation has a poem in it, Loving says. She feels a kinship with a place and writes it down. She calls herself a performance poetry reader.
One finds while talking and listening to the charming woman, that her birth name Loving, that she kept, fits her.
“Who wouldn’t want the last name Loving,” she says laughing.
Her father, Rev. James L. Loving Sr., was a pastor in Boston, her birth place. While visiting Ghana West Africa she took the pen name “Oyoko,” meaning member of a royal clan.
Reading, writing and literacy are important to Loving, with her respect for words instilled by her mother. She says she learned to read “the Good Book” at her mother Wauneta Loving’s knee.
“The first thing I read was Genesis,” Loving says. “Every family had a Bible and there is a lot to read in it.”
She said, as a youngster, she went to the Boston Public Library after school every day for story time.
She has a masters of science degree in early childhood development, and wrote her thesis on children’s literature and the need for more black authors.
In 1972, Loving ventured to St. Croix for spring break in search of sunshine and warm weather and fell in love with the island and its people.
“I got off the plane and knew this was home,” Loving says. “Generations to follow me will consider this home too.”
While on break she interviewed at the Department of Education and she was hired as a teacher, making $9,740 a year. She spent most of her teaching career at Pearl B. Larsen, retiring after 30 years teaching preschool and kindergarten. In retirement she occasionally substitutes, does readings and judges poetry at local schools.
Loving has a reputation as a serious poet, gospel singer, dramatic reader, and columnist for two local papers.
Her first book of poems was “Remember When,” published in 1974. Her latest is “Spontaneous: Redefining Poetry,” published in 2009 .
The 42 poems in “Spontaneous” are a fictionalized piece of her life sprinkled throughout with love and sorrow, humor and desire, passion and longing, joy and pride.
She says her extensive travels and years of teaching have provided her with an arsenal of colorful language.
“Smell the raw blood coating thick the dungeon floors Where spirited warriors were kept” are lines from “Slave Castles” a graphic heart wrenching poem. And there is “Pinch Me,” a joyous poem about election night and seeing the Obamas on stage and running around the room praising God and saying “Pinch me! Pinch me!”
She has published “My Name is Freedom” a book written for every child who has a unique, strangely spelled, difficult to pronounce, weird, ethnic, or unusual name. She has been published in the “Caribbean Writer.” She says her next book will be published in 2011.
This summer Loving, a young 63, will head to the Berkshire Mountains to study Kripalu Yoga, at the Kripalu Yoga Institute in Stockbridge, Mass. Yoga helped her and she wants to show people how it can help them.
“It’s my calling in the healing arts,” she says. “I want to spread out.”
She has had honors bestowed on her, such as the 2009 Ms. Senior U.S. Virgin Islands title.
Her greatest honor was having afternoon tea with a real princess, Princess Diana.
In 1985, while in London as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher, she was chosen to sit at the same table as Princess Diana at a tea party. She says they started to chat about perfume and the conversation went to children, travel, and sailing. She said the princess had been to Buck Island.
Loving is married to Inglore Westerman, a native of Nevis. Westerman is a sailor and builder of large wooden model ships. One can imagine that her poem “Buck Island Beautiful” is about a sail with her husband.
She has two adult children, both on St. Croix, and she has two granddaughters she adores and has written poems about, as in “Just Plain Lovely.” She said she is blessed to be on the best place on God’s green earth.”
“Words repeat long after you are gone,” Loving says. “It’s a legacy.”
Her books are available at the Whim Plantation Museum, Freudian Slip in the Sunshine Mall, and on Amazon.
