Model Disciple, Late Victorians, Montreal Launch

Vincent Colistro

Lydia Perović

Michael Prior

Neil Smith, translator of The Goddess of Fireflies

Geneviève Pettersen

Michael Prior

Vincent Colistro, Carmine Starnino, Michael Prior

Talya Rubin, Derek Webster

Gala Poetry Launch, October 17, 2015, Drawn & Quarterly

Joshua Trotter reading from Mission Creep (Coach House)

David Solway reading from Installations (Signal Editions)

Derek Webster reading from Mockingbird (Signal Editions)

(From left) Talya Rubin, Derek Webster and Pat Webster

Saleema Nawaz Webster and Jennifer Varkonyi

(From bottom left:) Jennifer Varkonyi, Carmine Starnino, Simon Dardick, Derek Webster and Saleema Nawaz Webster 

Sunday Poem

MOCKINGBIRD 

I don’t need you to tell me why I’m here
or solve the mystery of how I slipped so far
and came to, lost in a snickering wood,
your trill my sole directive.

No bewigged guardian of the law
will ever compliment my patience, or sense
of beauty, or your eloquence.
Like you I’m playing with a kingless deck,
bound to songs that others made,
and with my life I sing out the pale result,
my reputation like the heavy coat
of a Victorian postman.
Kindness makes me angry. It’s rough justice.

Now we’ve reached the final, spoofing call
when you parrot the morning bell—
melody dug in, song-fuse set,
then that spine-deep tingle
that bursts in your abrupt last line,
enlightening darkness, slowing time.

By Derek Webster, from Mockingbird (Signal Editions, 2015)

Flash Interview #9—Derek Webster

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Derek Webster grew up in Beijing, Toronto and London. He received an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Carl Phillips, Erin Belieu and Yusef Komunyakaa. His poetry and prose have appeared in Boston Review, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review. The founding editor of Maisonneuve magazine, he lives in Montreal. His first book, Mockingbird, is being launched this Saturday at Drawn & Quarterly bookstore.

Carmine Starnino: The presiding spirits of your book include Americans like Frost and Stevens, as well British poets like Auden and Larkin, and, of course, that transatlantic enigma Eliot. What draws you to their work?

Derek Webster: Frost’s Virgilian dialogue “Home Burial” was important for me as I put together my long poem “Intervention.” The knife-twisting and sardonic rhymes of Auden and Larkin and the traumatized psyche of Eliot’s The Wasteland helped me make sense of many other things as I went along. All these writers use iambic pentameter as their starting point. I found that using it as a default meter helped me in the early stages of creation. It’s the cabernet sauvignon of meters—a robust, full line that, the more you absorb it, the more it pulls unexpected things from you as you strive to complete a line. Thinking about meter also helps distract from some of the more charged aspects of writing—too much emotion can overwhelm. Of course, rely on it too much, put too much weight on it, you can end up with lines that feel like guide rails. Much Victorian poetry feels that way to me.

CS: It's interesting how your poems often measure things in relation to the past—you’re always looking back at the bigger, bygone, picture.

DW: Well, the past is where ideals go to die, so it’s a rich, complex place for poetry. I like art that captures an unsentimental feeling of history, a connection with people who once stepped spritely where we tromp today. We exist on a very limited scale—modern science tells us we’re barely here at all, that there are other scales unimaginably larger and unobservably smaller than ours. These things make me look for what’s most human in us as a kind of answer, and for me that means love, history and family. I’m not sure if these qualities come across in my own writing, but I think of them when I write, and take pleasure and solace in playing out different results in different poems. There’s a brilliant contemporary poet, James Pollock, who has written a long poem called “Quarry Park” that captures exactly this sense of things.

CS: Has your experience as a magazine editor helped you as a poet?

DW: It’s helped me to discern what’s valuable and alive in my own poems and to leave out things that aren’t. About half of the poems in Mockingbird have been around in some form or another for twenty years. Before I edited Maisonneuve magazine, I was rarely sure of what I had written or why and I had no idea how to make them better. I ran my poems through a gauntlet of drafts and forms that ended up fracturing my confidence because the results weren’t an improvement (the poems got worse, usually). That and some other events pretty much stopped me in my tracks for eight years or more. But when a need compelled me to return to poetry, desperate and a little terrified, I slowly realized something had changed; I knew what to do with my own words now, both the rough scribblings of raw experience and the labouriously reworked “finished” pieces of earlier years. Things started to fall into place then.

Losers

Derek Webster on the myth of "power" in the poetry world:

Here are things that deserve the word “power”: armies, missiles, accelerating cars, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, hydroelectric dams, prime ministers, rocket launches, black holes, and gamma rays. In the poetry world, much of what we call “power” is just rung envy in authors looking up the ladder. To the unpublished poet, magazine-poets have “power.” To the magazine-poet, those with books have “power.” Have you been asked to judge a contest? Then you must have “power.” Canadian poets will point south to their more celebrated American counterparts: they wield it. But even poets with multiple books will tell you it's the publishers who wield “real power.” Or is that the tastemakers at big-circulation newspapers, websites and magazines? Or the Canada Council, without whose support none of this vast nefarious apparatus of “power” could exist? It’s hard to keep track of all the power-lunching people with a finger in the pie. But for the word “power” to be meaningful, it helps if there’s something to lose, some counterbalancing, non-power position that shows a demonstrable drop-off or significant opportunity that someone has lost by not having, or not being favoured, by “power.” And yet for every contest winner or hired professor, there are dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of losers; and for every annual new winner, thousands of losers remain the same. Suddenly it’s very hard to tell who is winning from who is losing, because everyone is losing. Among writers, powerlessness is the general state of being. All of us are losing, almost all of the time. Back when Jon Stewart was an up-and-coming comedian in the early 1990s, half a dozen years before the success of The Daily Show, he got invited to do his comedy routine on The David Letterman Show. He was ecstatic: this was his big break! On the fast track to success! After the show, when the adrenaline wore off, back in his hole-in-the-wall illegal sublet, he realized nothing had changed. Same person, same problems, powerless as before. If Letterman didn’t change Jon Stewart, imagine how powerless a Canadian poet remains, post-publication. We are Pluto, orbiting a distant, shining sun. We aren’t even a planet anymore.

(Illustration by Guy Billout)