Poet Derek Webster is QWF’s latest featured member. Derek’s new collection of poems, National Animal, is published by Signal Editions, Véhicule Press’s poetry imprint. Mockingbird (2015) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poems in Canada. He received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Carl Phillips, and was the founding editor of Maisonneuve magazine. He lives in Montreal and Toronto.
QWF Communications Officer John Wickham spoke to Derek about his new book, including its themes, its politics, and how it compares to his first collection. Here are Five Questions (and one bonus question) for Derek Webster:
1) Congratulations on the new book! What can readers expect from it?
Thanks! Free-verse lyrics and sonnets, animals trying to survive in a human world, landscapes carrying the weight of history, a nostalgic hometown piece or two. And some humour in poems like “Homemade Blueberry Wine.”
2) How does this collection compare to your previous one, Mockingbird? Are there any differences in subject matter or themes, or in how these poems came to be?
This book is more of a national reckoning than the personal one of Mockingbird. I’m looking at what it means to be a moral human being. I think the act of speaking publicly is more complicated today than, say, in the 1970s when Dennis Lee penned Civil Elegies. But it remains the poet’s difficult task: to sing in ways that alert readers to what’s important and to unite people in shared experience. That’s how the light gets in.
3) According to the book’s blurb, the speaker in these poems “watches history being erased in favour of more socially palatable ideas and comforting self-portraits.” Without giving away too much, can you explain how the book explores this erasure of the past?
A lot of poems in National Animal present a gap of some kind (spatial, temporal, mental) between wishful thinking and what is actually going on, as in “The Writing on the Wall,” which shows a graffiti cleaner whose job is to remove signs of ethnic bigotry, homophobia and hate from walls and alleys around the city. Poems like this come from the truth-teller in me. At some point over the last century, our culture’s Depression-era impulse not to complain about one’s own troubles started to become a hindrance to identifying a mounting array of past and present injustices. But if we ever hope to build better, more inclusive communities, we have to acknowledge what is broken. Poetry is one way to do that. The entire country is undergoing a kind of truth and reconciliation commission in real time, every day. We live it in our own minds and among friends, socially and alone, every time new individual and national failures come to light. It’s been painful but beneath all the pessimism about “woke” politics, I see a long-delayed sea change in social values.
4) What kinds of rituals or habits do you develop when working on your poetry?
I read widely online and in print to learn from other poets—how did they make this line, this notion, this voice work?—and occasionally I write imitations to find my own versions of things. I try to keep myself in a state where my “poetry brain” is never off. The Notes app on my phone really helps me to write down or dictate fleeting ideas and quirky found phrases as they pass. This random material doesn’t have to make sense. I don’t work on these fragments—I just write them down, forget about them, and go back to whatever I was doing. But when I look at my notes later, the strangeness in a phrase may jump out at me and find its way into a poem, or an innocuous description can become a powerful way of saying something completely unrelated.
5. In an interview with Carmine Starmino, you called iambic pentameter the “cabernet sauvignon” of poetic metre. What’s the pinot noir?
Terza rima! A fragile, fickle form. Only one piece in my book (“Naught”) uses it.
Bonus: What are you currently reading?
Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss, shima by sho yamagushiku, The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright, and the Renaissance mock-epic Orlando Furioso by Ariosto (trans. David Slavitt).
Thank you, Derek!
National Animal is available for purchase online, at bookstores, and directly from publisher Véhicule Press. Derek will be holding a book launch on Wednesday, April 18 at De Stiil Booksellers (351 Duluth Ave. E., Montreal). Read more about the book launch here.