Wayde Compton
Wayde Compton
Biography
Wayde Compton has written five books and has edited two literary anthologies. His collection of short stories, The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2015 and he won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2011. His work has been a finalist for two other City of Vancouver Book Awards as well as the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2006 Compton co-founded Commodore Books, western Canada’s first Black Canadian literary press. Compton has been writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, Green College at the University of British Columbia, and the Vancouver Public Library. From 2012-18, he administrated the Creative Writing Program in Continuing Studies at SFU, including the award-winning Writer’s Studio. His latest book, The Blue Road, a fantasy graphic novel for young adults, illustrated by April dela Noche Milne, was called a “touching allegory of the unexpected and burdensome trials of migration” in a starred Kirkus review. Compton is currently the chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC.
Poetics Statement
“My poetry since the 1990s has primarily addressed black and mixed-race identity and, in particular, black history in British Columbia, variously at the formal meeting points of oral tradition, hip hop turntablism, visual poetry, prose poetry, the long poem, history-in-verse, photo-poetics, and retro-speculative inquiry. My poetic influences include Kamau Brathwaite, George Bowering, Dionne Brand, George Elliott Clarke, and DJ Spooky.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Loxodromic
a voice is a box of reeping, a dream
a dicotyledon of speaking.
unlocking makes purchase by re-revealing
submarine cables. coloured, keening, sung
krakens, reeling,
role and role out a whole cracking Occident.
from the moon’s floor to the bight of thinking,
from the seeding descent to the shell of telegraphy,
of Valentia Island to Trinity Bay,
of a breathless expression,
a last westless east, a leached hereless list
for this low slow
perch of hiss
as though through the throats
of a dole of punctuating rock doves ⎯
[Paul Reuter flew pigeons released stock threw air
from Brussels to Aachen for a falling
of figures on wings of flushing vestige
through solid moulting into air threw
temporal ink the invisible digits
went where a whistle opts not to centre]
I stand in the penumbra of myself, my eyes
Neruda was tired of his shadow, I’m
of the response and call numb
the lung undone come mumbling up off
the floor of the ocean for no
holy corona of from.
Valentia Island to Trinity Bay
Brussels to Aachen
[Alex Haley tracked the word across the written in
saline keel quill stole to Juffere away
from Spotsylvania and back to where the occult griot
opened up in him an ink sea of pages in confidence
evidence on the plage the word The
African cowry game traces the helix flown long
the god that owns the word is always a huckster
a river a banjo a name a season a word is a skinless drum]
west I go as the crazed crows commute
east, singing at one hundred and ten km per hour “I’m
Looking Through You” twice through confused
as to whether I’m lead or backing,
Saul as the storytelling actually seems to fall
out of the sun, as I break apart from
Coquitlam, the paved name of native slaves of natives
set free too far from home to go
again, a twister of tricksters I see against
this con of a sun. they descend against
sequence and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”
on Boundary Road northbound until the streets
drive the history back to an accident of contact.
[shotgun to Manhatten from Montreal I read the road map as she drove
and all I could see was lyrical time in the boxed lines flying]
Church of Invocation
The life expectancy of mulatto males born in Canada in the nineteen-seventies
The German international student’s transhumeral amputation makes him know what it’s like to be black, he says
One poem for every document identifying me by race during the course of my life
Seeing ships in the Strait of Georgia wears a groove in your cerebral cortex
A camera dollying through a video for a black metal cover of a Smokey Robinson composition
When the tsunami comes, downtown Vancouver will become an island, a secession, a micronation, a spacecraft
Anti-racist carbon offset
In the nineteen-nineties, Khurshid Cobain made melodic punk, but when he killed himself, no frisson, just burdened embarrassment
The blaze of one hundred thousand search lights looking for drowning migrants in the Strait of Juan de Fuca
Everything I do, I do it for El Hedi ben Salem m’Barek Mohammed Mustafa
The tour guide’s reference to her secret society as we eat the national scenery
A tunnel runs beneath the sidewalk, beneath the periwinkle glass bricks, beneath a where are you from
The USSR of my dreams and an ICBM of mixed DNA
My eyes change colour when I see paper boats made out of plastic actually
The gold crowns on my molars; the yellow sunset; transcendent particulates