It’s been a while since we’ve been able to chant “Fight! Fight!” in proper dumb-ass mob style. So it’s nice to see literary heavyweights Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul at it like a couple of kids in the schoolyard. And in poetry no less (curse the Guardian for stealing the best headline for this). It’s like Walcott got up in his grill and threw down some sick freestyle. Bread and circuses, all around! Huzzah!

Walcott’s new poem, The Mongoose, is a fast-paced, savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul’s work and personality that begins with the opening salvo: ‘I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.’ It was premiered at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica.

Telling the audience, ‘I think you’ll recognise Mr Naipaul … I’m going to be nasty’, Walcott launched into The Mongoose amid a hubbub of surprised gasps and nervous laughter from the crowd.

By way of some vicious rhyming couplets, the poem criticises Naipaul’s writing technique (’each stabbing phrase is poison’), specifically in his later novels Half a Life and Magic Seeds: ‘The plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly/The anti-hero is a prick named Willie.’