Wayde Compton is an internationally recognized writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Compton lives in Victoria and teaches in the Department of Writing at UVic.
Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics is a skillful weaving of poetry, the realm in which the poet exists, and the poet themselves. This is a book of importance and depth, offering any writer a window through which to see themselves more honestly and to understand the impact of their writing on the world beyond their pages.
Interviewed by Anna Cavouras
Anna Cavouras (AC): Your book, Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics, was born from a lecture presented as part of the Centre for Literatures in Canada (CLC) Kreisel Lecture Series. The subject is timely and deep, carrying wide-reaching implications for writers. For those who might be engaging with these ideas for the first time, would you explain anti-racist poetics?
Wayde Compton (WC): For the purposes of the lecture on which my book is based, I regard anti-racist poetics as a gesture toward an inclusive critical culture of poetry. I try to demonstrate how I think there are somewhat hidden, or not even always hidden, biases favouring white and western literary traditions that can frame poetry by people of colour as deficient, or as tributary, or as uncategorizable. The thesis of the book is that we can and should open up the field to think of multiple poetic lineages rather than the two western contesting schools of thought, the lyric and the avant-garde.
AC: One of the things you talk about that really stood out was ‘racism without racists’. Would you elaborate on this concept within poetry and the broader literary community?
WC: Racism without racists is the condition where you don’t really notice the effect of racial bias in one-on-one situations, where an individual is not overtly biased but defers to instincts that are themselves possibly racially hierarchized. One can be a perfectly anti-racist person in life, but then ignore or devalue art practices by writers of colour, or overly evaluate those from white lineages, without quite realizing it. I think this is where the aggregate helps. On a case by case basis, it’s hard to see. But when you notice that time after time a certain pattern emerges, then there is the racism, in the results, if not noticeable in any individual interaction.
AC: For me one of the core messages in the text is about forgoing the idea of a universal aesthetic in poetry, and for each writer to embrace their own unique cultural position. This feels like it could apply to all aspects of the writing industry. What are some steps individual writers can take to begin this work? What role do you see for editors and publishers?
WC: I think the biggest personal step to make is to acknowledge that you probably have a specific cultural training that informs what you value as “good” or “bad” writing — that this valuation is cultural and not transcendently proven. My argument is partly that value in work is based in communities of readers. So it makes sense to accept that if you are outside the community from which a piece of art emerges, perhaps you are not well-positioned to evaluate it. The answer then would be to learn something about that community, or defer to those who understand it more, rather than to leap to the assumption that what you don’t understand is bad. This applies to editors and publishers as well as juries and all aspects of the literary field.
AC: You wrote this originally for the CLC lectures, but I’m curious whether when you began this project you had a sense of where it was going, or did it evolve as you worked through it?
WC: When I first started thinking of these ideas, the first form, I didn’t include my own writing or biography. That came later, when I realized it was probably helpful to use the example of a poet facing these issues who I knew best: myself.
AC: In the second section, Trails, you weave in some of your own life story. As a poet, some level of vulnerability is always present, so can you tell me about your decision to include some of yourself on the page and how it feels to share those experiences with a broader audience.
WC: I felt reluctant to include some of the more personal aspects in the essay, but decided that, since I am essentially asking readers to position themselves so that they can be less biased, it made sense to do that myself. The essay is, in a sense, a defense of subjectivity, so I hope the subjective quality of my theory makes sense in context of that.
AC: Your writing spans genres – from anthologies, to graphic novels, to poetry. What does your writing process look like? Is it different for each project? What guidance would you offer writers who want to experiment in other genres?
WC: When it comes to writing, for me an idea comes first and like a hermit crab it wanders the beach looking for the right kind of formal shell. I have had ideas that started in one form and needed to be switched to another. That’s mostly the case, actually. The idea seeks a form, and I follow it there.
AC: After reading some of your other books, Toward An Anti-Racist Poetics feels like it stands on the shoulders of some of that work. Where do you see your work going next? Are you working on anything new at the moment?
WC: I’m trying my hardest to finish a long poem based on the Argonautika by Apollonius of Rhodes, but using figures echoing a traditional slave narrative, a story of self-emancipation in the 18th century. It’s narrative poetry, and a contemporary stab at the epic.