Fred Wah
Fred Wah
Biography
Fred Wah studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960's where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. He was editorially involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line. He has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His book of prose-poems, Waiting For Saskatchewan, received the Governor-General's Award in 1986 and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry in 1992. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian cafe was published in 1996 and won the Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction. Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, was awarded the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Writing on Canadian literature in 2000 and is a door won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2009. Two recent poetry books involving collaborative projects are Sentenced to Light (2008) and, with Rita Wong, beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018). Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations was published in 2020. He lives in Vancouver and on Kootenay Lake.
Poetics Statement
“Writing would have a lot to do with ‘place,’ the spiritual and spatial localities of the writer. I see things from where I am, my view point, and I measure and imagine a world from there. Who I am is where I am. Oaxaca, Vancouver, the Kootenay River a thousand years ago or today, my father’s father’s birthplace, become “local” to me and compound to make up a picture of a world I am native of. Writing sometimes remembers this image, and sometimes it has to make it up. Writers are wonderers and wanderers and what we do. is sometimes useful that way, not so much with news of the world out there but as some measure of an “insidedness” we carry with us and renovate during our lives.
A text is also a place. A place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to know. It isn’t a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible.
But we are not lost. Something that’s strangely familiar, not quite what we expect, but familiar, is present. That quick little gasp in the daydream, a sudden sigh of recognition, a little sock of baby breath.
The measure of these geolinguistic spaces is found in the particularity that writing reveals: correspondences of a world. And then, of course, the surprising and unexpected holes in that world.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Music at the Heart of Thinking 108
Now I know I have a heart because it’s broken
but should I fix it now to keep it strokin’ or should I
hear each piece as it is spoken and stoke heart’s heat
so hot I smell it smokin’ or could this clock made up
of parts be jokin’ that missing spark a mis-read gap
provokin’ and little sock of baby breath not chokin’
the piggy bank of words much more than tokens not
just the gossip love is always cloaked in nor all the
meaning text is usually soaked in but roast potatoes
for a tender button so much depends upon the things
unspoken and if the heart is just this clock around
which clusters all that’s not and if the of and to an in
that it is I for be was as can set these el em en t’s far
apart so long as the creek is full please hasten slowly
old tin man I’ll stop right now and have an egg
because I know its yolks inside and what I have to do
is crack it open.
Race, to go
What's yr race
and she said
what's yr hurry
how 'bout it cock
asian man
I'm just going for curry.
You ever been to ethni-city?
How 'bout multi-culti?
You ever lay out skin
for the white gaze?
What are you, banana
or egg? Coconut
maybe?
Something wrong Charlie
Chim-chong-say-wong-lung-chung?
You got a slant to yr marginal eyes?
You want a little rice with that garlic?
Is this too hot for you?
Or slimy or bitter or smelly or tangy or raw or sour
—a little too dirty
on the edge
between the fingernails?
Is that a black hair in yr soup?
Well how you wanna handle this?
You wanna maintain a bit of differ-énce?
Keep our mother's other?
Use the father for the fodder?
What side of John A. MacDonald's tracks you on anyway?
How fast you think this train is going
to go?
Sheet Music
Why did they say eliminate the negative
transparency, don't mess with Mr. In-Between
or pandemony? Sit tight and close low
right down to the maximum, some
latch for an onto, maintaining
a plus from a pulse. Well then
illustrate:
latch onto the nexus while claiming the crux
of the squall. The positive also equals
the page. Ok, I'll take the floor, a
blendable family, double-U-Ay-Aych
aching. Positively, adverb or not
could be more than the accent outside
immigration – who
cares if it does? Doing weather except
why apply for the job if
the hinge isn’t broken? I have
stolen the report and now can't find
a door, just when I need one. Even
a sliding door. Side-to-side cloud
thought Noah the dark thought
Jonah what did they do
except wait away and never let
go? My joy's spread, my maximum's
lost interest. Otherwise you'll be other
you know, you'll be background,
and that makes the word
the door with difference:
doored.