Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet, spoken word artist, educator, and multidisciplinary storyteller based in Vancouver. He is a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia, and Lithuania. His films have screened in festivals across Canada, and his debut poetry collection, Divine Animal, was published in 2020.
Brandon will be participating in Speak—poetry in Performance
Interviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Shazia Hafiz Ramji (SHR): Brandon, it’s so lovely to see that the Victoria Festival of Authors’ is hosting you – and that your appearance does not coincide with a new book release! Tell us what you will share and perform at the VFA?
Brandon Wint (BW): Thank you, Shazia. I’m looking forward to sharing with VFA’s audience for the first time, though I have many good memories of performing in Victoria pretty consistently since 2009. It’s true that my performance doesn’t coincide with a book release, but I’ve been working on a manuscript that I’m excited about, so I’ll be reading poems from that manuscript-in-progress. In the time since I last performed in Victoria, I’ve had the good fortune to write and release a few film projects that try their best to blend the attentiveness and vulnerability of poetry with the visual grammars of animation and cinema. I think this work I’ve been doing in film has made me more attentive to creative thematic and conceptual links between poems. The multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary exploration has, in my case, given me a new sensitivity for the ways poetry can make associative leaps that other forms of writing might struggle to make. To be direct about it: what I’m excited to share with you all are these somewhat strange narrative containers I’ve been creating through poetry lately. I’m excited about some of the ways my work has grown to embrace different kinds of formal risk.
SHR: When we spoke at the Vancouver Writers Festival, we both mentioned the importance of ancestry and divinity in our creative processes. How has your writing process changed since Divine Animal was published?
BW: Most of the poems in my debut collection, Divine Animal, were written in Edmonton while I lived there between 2015-2020. Publishing that first book was important for me because it showed me quite clearly what my habits and relative weaknesses were as a poet. Or, perhaps, if I want to be more charitable to myself, I can say that Divine Animal showed me the areas of my craft and my intellect that I had yet to pursue. Partially due to the influence and generosity of my friend and mentor Sarah Burgoyne, my work since Divine Animal is a little more agile, more elastic, in most ways, less linear. I don’t think I would call myself a categorically experimental poet, but I think my more recent poems are less tidy, and less restrained than most of the poems in my first book. Part of the reason for that also emerges from the fact that I’ve started to enjoy the challenge of writing longer poems, or thematically-linked suites of poems. Having to sustain tension and intrigue within the same poem, over the length of ten to fourteen pages, challenges me to approach the fringes of my emotional range more often. It has made my poetry more interesting and surprising, I think.
SHR: Performance and spoken word is much more immediate than written forms and page poetry, and it strikes me that performance requires an attentiveness to the audience, perhaps more so than written work. How do you think of “audience” when you perform and write?
BW: This is an interesting question for me to consider. Thanks for asking this. I think, over time, my relationship to the audience has shifted. When I first started writing spoken word poems in 2008-2009, I would say performance was at the forefront of my creative practice. It was almost a given that everything I wrote to completion would soon make its way to a stage and an audience. Since those early days, my relationship to audience has shifted, mostly because my artistic practice has become more multidisciplinary over time. While the foundation of my creative practice is always the gradual, daily rigour of writing poetry, these days, a poem is as likely to end up in a short film as it is an album, or a book, or a live performance, so there is a way that my notion of audience has expanded beyond spoken word performance. When I am on stage, I am mostly thinking about how to create intimacy and urgency through performance. For me, creating urgency and intimacy goes beyond my efforts to embody what’s written in the poem. More often, my approach to the stage asks: what is the most urgent or honest truth I can offer the audience today? Once I manage to say the true thing, or the thing closest to my heart – whether it has particular relevance to the poems I intend to share or not – I feel like I’ve done my job, at least to some extent.
SHR: What has been the biggest challenge for you as a writer / poet / performer?
BW: I’m grateful that I enjoy every aspect of my job. I enjoy the period of gestation before writing is possible. I enjoy the writing. I enjoy memorization and performance. I enjoy bantering with audiences. I feel fortunate that there isn’t anything inherent to the work of being a writer or performer that I dread. With that said, I find the nebulous, shifting needs of the digital age to be annoying and confounding. I create a lot of different kinds of poetic work, and I’m always challenged by the question of how best to promote my work so that I can share it with the people and communities I value most. When I first started sharing poems publicly and professionally in 2009, social media wasn’t really a dominant cultural mode for the spreading of culture. In those days, it was enough to make a few posts on Facebook and expect that those around me would respond. Now, it feels like everything I create needs an equally artful, intentional digital marketing strategy before it can be embraced. Sometimes I struggle to bear the weight of creating the art and also artfully promoting it. Perhaps all of these concerns are tangential to the actual creative processes associated with being a writer-poet-performer, but they feel relevant because it has become increasingly difficult for me not to think about my artistry through the logic of commerce and consumption — where a poem is not just a poem, but a project, or a cog in a broader “content strategy”. It’s hard to fight the allure of the algorithm, which seems to dictate that communication and artistry are only valuable to the extent that they can be easily and prolifically commodified. That’s the struggle I feel most often right now as a writer.
SHR: What have you been inspired by lately?
BW: So many things. The resilience of spiderwebs. Heartbreak. Watching my family members age. Watching my cousins become parents. The art of difficult conversations. The nuanced differences between aloneness and loneliness. Long hours of summer sunlight. The over-abundance of dogs in Vancouver. The incessant need to love and be loved.