Amanda’s interview with Dalton Derkson at the ClockTower Pub
before his featured reading at the In/Words Reading Series on Wednesday, November 30, 2016

With pub & In/Words noise in the background, & Aaron busy setting up for the reading, Dalton and I talk about Guinness, the Worst Case Ontario Tour, JC Bouchard, the theme of the outsider within Dalton’s poems, the role of geography, Andrew Suknaski, the co-opting of punk by corporate culture, burning the Sex Pistols memorabilia, Dalton as grindcore poet, the sources of Dalton’s performance style and cadences, including hardcore metal, professional wrestlers, persona, gaining & keeping the audience’s attention. Poets into wrestling: Spencer Gordon, Nathaniel G. Moore, Broken Pencil’s Death Match, the Puritan, Will Kemp. We discuss Lorca’s idea of duende, the internal driving force of creativity, with the knowledge that death is present. Jessica Bebenek’s interview in the Town Crier about Poets and Place. Dalton’s poems as representing placelessness. How Toronto has affected his writing. The surreal turn. Robert Kroetsch and the role of voice in the Hornbooks of Rita K: trying to write in a different voice. Dalton has written in the voice of Ed Mirvish. The final Worst Case Ontario reading at Black Squirrel Books, the poem “Juiced” about a wrestler blading himself, drawing blood. We also speak of William Henry Drummond and making poetry that replicates speech: Cormac McCarthy, bill bissett. We talk about Dalton’s boyhood dream of reading with bill bissett, which he did at VERSeFest, Daniel Jones as an influence. His new chapbook with Phafours Press.