Biography
Wayde Compton is the author of six books and the editor of 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 three 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. He has been writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, Green College at the University of British Columbia, and the Vancouver Public Library. Compton currently teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. His latest book is Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics (U of Alberta P, 2024).
Micro-interview
I read all sorts of writing when I was a teenager, including poetry. I have less of a memory of one particular poem from then as I do a memory of exploring all sorts of poems. It was then that I discovered literary journals, and became a regular reader of them. That was important because they are a gateway to current writing, rather than the older poetry one finds in school. In my opinion, young people should most urgently be exposed to poetry written now.
I evolved from thinking of myself as a writer of song lyrics to a writer of poems. When I understood that these were indeed different things, I started to realize that what I most wanted to do was write for the page.
A poet's job is to think through the material of language.
I wrote “Illegalese: Floodgate Dub” as a way of offering some humanizing truth to the dehumanizing rhetoric of anti-immigration. That was in 2004, and I think it remains as relevant as ever today.
You can never go wrong with the sound of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.
