One Question Interview: Derek Webster

Derek Webster’s Mockingbird (2015) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. He received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Carl Philips, and was the founding editor of Maisonneuve magazine. His new book of poems from Signal Editions is called National Animal.

I thought these superb poems had an eye on a timeless, universal quality right from a first poem in the book involving your father. Later a stunned bird is a “wonder of ivory / hooks,” and finishing a puzzle “didn’t make you whole.” There’s a study of a dying tree and a particular apartment block. It doesn’t feel like you’re afraid of specific cultural references, but they can be quite general. Is poetry about the right kind of details, in the sense that you have an eye on a timeless quality? What are you conscious of when writing a poem? 

Thanks for this question, Alex. 

Observation from real life is important. The ivory hooks — if you look up close at a vireo’s undercoat, that’s what you will see. But that word, “vireo,” the specific bird I was observing, did not make it into “Birdstrike,” so I take your point. Many of my lines take on a burnished quality through successive drafts, and many of my favourite poets speak this way, balancing specific references with somewhat restrained emotional turns. Poets like Henri Cole, Elizabeth Bishop, Eliot, Heaney, Frost, Cavafy, Larkin, Plath, Seuss. I used to over-revise — take out so much that what remained had lost whatever presence it once had. Hopefully I’m not removing the essential details anymore. But a lot of what I’ve learned still comes down to limiting what a poem is doing, removing extraneous things that it cannot achieve to allow more psychic room to experience what it is doing.

I suppose the attraction in trying to speak universally is that one person’s experience may translate better to others. The first times I read James Joyce, Louise Glück and Raymond Carver, I was awestruck by the symbolism, the stark, mythic emotion, the minimalist style. F.R. Scott’s stripped-down modernist lyrics like “Laurentian Shield,” or “The Lonely Land” by A.J.M. Smith, also made an impression on me as an undergrad at McGill. I admired pithy, stripped-down modernist styles that could distill landscapes and human feeling to some perceived or performed essence that was equal parts beautiful and true. All writing simplifies reality, but modernist ways of doing so were certainly attractive to me as a young writer. 

Thirty years on, it’s easier to see the limits of that style. Modernism is not The One True Way to Write. There’s a strong push in contemporary poetics away from this style and toward looser, messier forms, often in prose, that have a capacity to express layers of experience that modernist style doesn’t capture well. Here I think of writers like Dionne Brand, Lisa Robertson, Kaie Kellough and others. I also think Cree-Métis poet Marilyn Dumont has put the lie to Canadian nationalist poetics, in poems that are equal parts true and heartbreaking, showing them to be more blithe, sentimental, and harmful than most people could have imagined. In my new work (poems in progress), I’m moving towards writing that preserves more of the grain of its own creation, including recognition of emptiness and impermanence. I have to push against my own tendencies as an artist, but there’s excitement and growth in this.

For me, a poet like Karen Solie has managed to create a magnificent stylistic balance in her work, keeping the best of modernist simplicity (which, if you follow David Hinton, comes from Pound’s translation and crosshatching of classical Chinese aesthetics onto the English tradition) while also making room for rougher truths, longer lines, and more unresolved subjects. Solie’s book The Caplie Caves has both sorts of poems: compact, perfect pieces like “White Strangers” and “A Trawlerman” alongside several long meditations that read almost like astral projections.

My attraction to modernist style was also connected, in my own mind, with growing up in a suburb of Toronto, unaffiliated to any church or ethnic community, ignorant of the indigenous history of the land I lived on, without a strong sense of my own family history, a child of transplants to Ontario (my mother from Virginia, my father an anglophone from Quebec). I had a pretty amazing childhood, but I experienced a certain uncommitted anonymity growing up this way. The Canadian English we spoke felt invisible to me, without shape, identity, or edge.

Around the same time in the 1980s there was a rising cosmopolitanism which turned specific places into stand-ins for many other places. In films, Toronto became New York — or Cleveland. Flowers sketched on a windowsill in Berlin looked the same as sketched flowers in Brooklyn. Poets stopped attaching the date and place of composition to the bottom of their works, the way Allen Ginsburg and others used to do in the Sixties and Seventies; if the poem no longer expressed one thought, one time, one place, it no longer made sense to do so. This aesthetic “globalism” probably had a lot of causes but one may have been an unconscious response to a more multicultural North American society.

To get back to the last part of your question, I have no idea what I am conscious of in first drafts as I often sort of black out, living fully in individual words as they emerge. But I welcome this unresolved openness in part because I am patient and understand it now, in ways that panicked me when I was younger. Uncertainty is one of the few ways one gains access to higher states of being. There are small windows in partial thoughts and vague sentences that can lead you to something you could not have shared if you consciously set out to express it. Nothing in this requires a lack of specificity, but open-ended writing does bend in that direction, so it may become important to keep the real name of a bar or a mountain pass or a street in a poem. Poetry drifts away from reality pretty easily. Details provide ballast to keep the poetry balloon from rising to deathly heights.

I should also say that my writing process isn’t always this pretentious — sometimes I just write something, show it to a trusted reader, make one or two small revisions and there the poem is, a thought-fox alive in its den. And I’m happy with the compact, mis-en-scène style I’ve achieved in the numerous sonnet-like pieces in National Animal, as well as the rangier, more researched pieces like “Blanche Dubois at Mercy Asylum” and “The Thinker.” Getting to a place where I could achieve any of these took years of intense reading and hard work. And I’m still learning how to get the best out of my naturally aloof writerly self while understanding the pitfalls of high-mindedness. These qualities play out differently across different tones and hues and subjects. It’s an exciting time to be a poet.