Performance Bond

by Wayde Compton

In Performance Bond , Wayde Compton, among the most progressive and experimental poets in Canada, defiantly and eloquently confronts the globalization and commodification of black culture. With poetry inspired by the insistent cadences of hip-hop and jazz, Compton fuses language, history, and contemporary black politics. He deals with black diaspora at the outer rim of geography and culture, concerned with the legacy of the slave trade, the memory and origins of hip-hop, and the ramifications of urban renewal on North America’s inner cities. Performance Bond is supplemented with a CD that is a recording of Compton’s musical performance of one of the book’s sections, “The Reinventing Wheel,” featuring the turntable mixing of his reading of the poem, pre-recorded on vinyl, with musical beats, breaks, and samples. From “To Poitier”: You, Sidney, dark, nappy, and representative,
fluent and fine,
were all of us at once;
his, hers, theirs, and mine.
You were cool and stoical enough
not to throttle Tony Curtis
after being chained to him for ninety minutes. You colonized England in reverse, teaching
a classroom full of Cockney racists
how to speak BBC English. You came to dinner and ate your Veni, vidi, vici
:you came, they saw, and we got to move to the suburbs. Wayde Compton is a poet, turntablist, and Black historian born and raised in Vancouver. He is the author of the poetry collection 49th Parallel Psalm and the editor of the anthology Black British Columbian Literature and Orature .

Genres: Poetry, School

176 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2005

About the author

Wayde Compton has written six 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 three other City of Vancouver Book Awards as well as the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Compton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria.

Reviews

[df parizeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm ashamed to admit that this is my first real foray into Wayde's poetry. I've been familiar with his fiction and been lucky enough to hear him talk about the intricacies of Writer's craft, but am just now scratching the surface of his lyrical work.

Wayde is a wonderful storyteller and this is what I feel forms the bones of Performance Bond. I am marvelled by how adventurous these poems are in terms of style, meter, and form, while also maintaining a strong cohesion.

This book is part history text, part cypher, part scat; a brash collection of poems that I look forward to re-reading many times.

[Cosmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

seriously fucking incredible