Fred Wah, A Life in Writing

INTRODUCTION

By Susan Rudy

Fred Wah is one of the most innovative, engaged, and politically astute writers and critics to have emerged from western Canada in the second half of the twentieth century. In December 2011, he was named Canada's fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate, a position he will hold for two years.

Since 1965, Wah has published twenty-four books of poetry, the first entitled Lardeau (1965), the most recent, is a door (2009). Waiting For Saskatchewan (1985) won him a Governor-General's Literary Award in 1986 and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry in 1992. Diamond Grill (1996), his “biotext” about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café, was published in 1996 and won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction. His most recent work involves image-text collaborations with visual artists. His book of essays, published under the title Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity (2000) in the Writer as Critic Series by Edmonton’s NeWest Press, was awarded the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Criticism in 2001. He has also been an influential teacher and editor, having influenced several generations of young writers in Nelson, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver. After retiring in 2003 from a forty-year teaching career, he and his wife, the scholar and critic Pauline Butling, moved to Vancouver, where they currently live.

Born in 1939 in Swift Current, Saskatchewan to a Swedish-born Canadian mother (Corrine Marie Erickson) and a Canadian-born Chinese-Scots-Irish father (Frederick Clarence Wah) who grew up in China, Fred Wah spent most of his childhood in Nelson, British Columbia (1948–1958). Wah completed a BA in Music and English at the University of British Columbia (UBC; 1958–1962) and was one of the founding editors of TISH: A Poetry Newsletter, Vancouver (1961–1963). While at UBC, he studied literature with Warren Tallman, Creative Writing with Robert Creeley, and attended Charles Olson’s seminar at the 1963 UBC Summer poetry Workshop.

In 1963–1964, Wah studied with Robert Creeley at the University of New Mexico where he did graduate work and founded Sum magazine. In 1964, he moved to Buffalo where he studied poetics with Charles Olson (1964–65) and linguistics with Henry Lee Smith Jr. (1965–67) at the State University of New York (MA 1967). In Buffalo, Wah became a contributing editor to the Niagara Frontier Review and The Magazine of Further Studies and a contributing editor to Open Letter magazine, founded by Frank Davey in Canada in 1964.

In 1967, Wah returned to the Nelson area of British Columbia to teach at the Castlegar campus of Selkirk College (1967–78; 1985–1989) and at the David Thomson University Centre (DTUC; 1978–1984) where he was the founder (1978) and Director (1978–1982) of the DTUC Writing program. While living in the Nelson area, Wah’s editing work continued with Scree magazine, Open Letter (1964 – present), Net Work: Selected Writing by Daphne Marlatt (ed. Wah 1980), and as contributing editor (with Frank Davey) of Swift Current, Canada’s first electronic newsletter. Wah was also one of the founders of the Kootenay School of Writing in Nelson, following the closure of DTUC in 1984.

Wah has served as writer-in-residence at the Universities of Manitoba (1982–1983) and Alberta (1988–1989), has taught numerous writing workshops across Canada, has served on the Racial Minorities and Social Justice Committees of The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) and served as its President in 2001–2002. In 1989 he took up a position in the English Department at the University of Calgary, which he held until his retirement in 2003.

With Wah’s first book of poetry, Lardeau (1965), which collects poems written between the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1965, he began a life-long exploration of an improvisational, disjunctive poetics based partially on his early interests in jazz. The following poem, entitled “When,” exemplifies this poetics, which works at the level of the word and the line. Observe, for example, the movement of the word “When” from the title to the first, second, and fifth lines and then down to the bottom of the poem where it appears in two of the last three lines of the poem. This movement has the effect of drawing your eye both across and down the line:

When it is hot
when in the afternoon
tomorrow
last night
today when
to expect
the way
to take
(of
the mind is meadows
yes)

I'll drive
to meet you thirty miles
of gravely dust
greet you with smiles of
I love
and miss you Love
is a kiss
of dusty lips
spill out my heart
to you on this
o yes
I will when it is hot
when in the afternoon
the mind expects (n.pag)

Wah’s early poetry requires that readers attend as much to the white space around the words as to the words themselves. One has the sense that Wah is locating his words in space just as his poetry locates the self in a specific geography and history. This location of the poet in a particular place and time is crucial for Wah, whose first books are entitled Mountain (1967), Among (1972), Tree (1972), Earth (1974), and Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975). This phase of Wah’s poetics culminated in 1980 with Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems (1980).

Beginning in the 1980s, with Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981) and Waiting For Saskatchewan (1985), Wah began overtly to incorporate prose into his poetry and to work with the form of the long poem. As this passage from “Elite,” the third section of Waiting For Saskatchewan, demonstrates, the white space is now occupied with text:

Elite 9

When you returned from China via Victoria on Hong Kong Island and they put you in jail in Victoria on Vancouver Island because your birth certificate had been lost in the Medicine Hat City Hall fire and your parents couldn’t prove you were born in Canada until they found your baptism records in the church or in the spring of 1948 when we moved to Nelson from Trail during the floods while Mao chased Chiang Kai-shek from the main- land to offshore Taiwan and the Generalissimo’s picture hung in our house and on a wall above some plants and goldfish in the Chinese nationalist League house down on Lake Street or when you arrived in China in 1916 only four years old unable to speak Chinese and later in the roaring twenties when each time Grampa gambled away your boat passage so you didn’t get back to Canada until 1930 languageless again with anger locked up in the immigration cells on Juan de Fuca Strait or when your heart crashed so young at 54 as you fell from mom’s arms to the dance floor did you see islands? (69)

Here, Wah’s mixing of the genres of poetry and prose begins to be used for the purposes of understanding his mixed race identity.

Another strong example from this period is Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982). Privately published in Kyoto, Japan in 1982, it appears as the second section of Waiting For Saskatchewan and is written in the form of a “utaniki, a poetic diary of mixed prose and poetry” (Wah “A Prefatory Note” Waiting n.pag):

Aug 8
In Canton (Guangzhou) now after train ride out from Hong Kong. I see my father everywhere. I realize he was only five years old when he arrived in China.

You would have had to learn Cantonese
Just as you acquired Canadian prairie world view age 5.
Must have hurt to have to find new boyhood lingo
(so silence)
then at 19 to relearn English Swift Current
Elite Cafe sufficiency. What tax on your life
Left you with all that angry language world inside
And from China too (silent)
(Wah Waiting 41)

With the publication of Diamond Grill (1996), his “verse biotext about racial anger,” and Faking It (2000), his book of essays on poetics and hybridity, Wah has emerged as a central figure in the articulation of a racialized poetics in North America.

In the 1990s, Wah completed several collaborative projects with visual artists, which gave him the opportunity to engage with images as well as text. The work from this period is increasingly politically engaged and locates issues of race within the context of broad concerns about the impact of globalization.

All Americans (2001), for example, was prepared as a series of installations called “Storybook Story” curated by Luanne Martineau for the Art Gallery of Calgary and intended to be serialized between September 14 and November 11, 2001. The first installment was intended to respond to representations of the Minnesota Massacre of 1862 in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum’s permanent collection. But because it was due on September 11, 2001, it responded as well to that unforgettable moment in American history:

We are all americans.
We met on the prairie. We hunt.
The point is, we must send a clear and unambiguous message to the world.
[…]
First we said to everybody to remain calm.
Afterwards, these are acts that we as a species have always been capable of and we as a species have carried
out.
Little did we think how soon we should pass through the terrible ordeal that awaited us, this calling card of a global culture.
(n.pag)

As this poem demonstrates, Wah’s work continues to be linguistically adventurous, formally innovative, and conceptually challenging. Work by Fred Wah has now been anthologized in The New Long Poem Anthology (Thesen 1991, 2001), Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (Lew 1995), Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (Kamboureli 1996), Uncommon Wealth: An Anthology of Poetry in English (Besner et al. 1997), 15 Canadian Poets X 3 (Geddes 4th edition 2001), and A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (Bennett and Brown 2002).

Critical attention has been steadily increasing since Jeff Derksen’s “Making Race Opaque: Fred Wah’s Poetics of Opposition and Differentiation” (1995) appeared. See Saul, “Displacement and self-representation: theorizing contemporary Canadian biotexts” (2001); Sugars “`The negative capability of camouflage’: fleeing diaspora in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill” (2001); McGonegal, “Hyphenating the Hybrid ‘I’: (Re)Visions of Racial Mixedness in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill” (2002); Budde, “After postcolonialism: migrant lines and the politics of form in Fred Wah, M. Nourbese Philip, and Roy Miki” (2003); Rudy, “Fred Wah—Among” (2005), and Saul “`Auto-hyphen-ethno-hyphen-graphy’: Fred Wah’s Creative-Critical Writing” (2008).

See also Davey et al, Fred Wah: Alley Alley Home Free, two special issues of Open Letter (2004) featuring contributions from the Poetry Conference and Festival for Pauline Butling and Fred Wah held at the University of Calgary, May 15–18, 2003 on the occasion of their retirement.

Wah continues to write, publish, deliver papers, and perform public readings of his poetry. In 2004, he delivered a keynote address (later published in Mosaic) entitled “Is a Door a Word?” to an international interdisciplinary conference on “The Photograph” at the University of Manitoba. In 2006-07, he was the Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, British Columbia. Both he and Pauline Butling are active members of Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing Collective. They both continue to write, travel extensively, and deliver talks and seminars all over the world.

Works Cited

Bennett, Donna and Russell Brown, eds. A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
Besner, Neil et al, eds. Uncommon Wealth: An Anthology of Poetry in English. Toronto: Oxford UP Canada, 1997.
Budde, Robert. “After Postcolonialism: Migrant Lines and the Politics of Form in Fred Wah, M. Nourbese Philip, and Roy Miki.” In Laura Moss, ed. Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2003. 282-296.
Davey, Frank, Nicole Markotic, Susan Rudy, eds. “Alley Alley Home Free: Selected Contributions from the Poetry Conference and Festival for Pauline Butling & Fred Wah, University of Calgary, May 15-18, 2003.” Open Letter 12.2 (2004): 1-131.
---. “Alley Alley Home Free Part 2: Contributions from and subsequent to the Poetry Conference and Festival for Pauline Butling & Fred Wah.” Open Letter 12.3 (2004): 1-134.
Derksen, Jeff. “Making Race Opaque: Fred Wah’s Poetics of Opposition and Differentiation.” West Coast Line 18 (29:3) (Winter 1995-1996): 63-76
Geddes, Gary, ed. 15 Canadian Poets X 3. 4th Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.
Kamboureli, Smaro, ed. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.
Lew, Walter, ed. Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. New York: Kaya Productions, 1995.
Marlatt, Daphne. Ed. Fred Wah. Net Work: Selected Writing by Daphne Marlatt. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1980.
McGonegal, Julie “Hyphenating the Hybrid “I”: (Re)Visions of Racial Mixedness in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill.” Essays on Canadian Writing 70 (Winter 2002): 177-195.
Rudy, Susan. “Fred Wah--Among.” In Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003). By Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005. 103-113.
Saul, Joanne. “`Auto-hyphen-ethno-hyphen-graphy’: Fred Wah’s Creative-Critical Writing.” In Asian Canadian Writing: Beyond Autoethnography. Eds. Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008. 133-149.
Sugars, Cynthia “ ‘The negative capability of camouflage’: fleeing diaspora in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill.” Studies in Canadian Literature 26.1 (2001): 27-45.
Thesen, Sharon, ed. The New Long Poem Anthology. Toronto: Coach House P, 1991.
---. The New Long Poem Anthology. 2nd Ed. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001.
Wah, Fred. Alley Alley Home Free. Red Deer: Red Deer College P, 1992.
---. Among. Toronto: Coach House P, 1972.
---. Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1981.
---. Diamond Grill. Edmonton: NeWest P, 1996.
---. Earth. Buffalo: Institute of Further Studies, 1974.
---. Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity. Edmonton: NeWest P, 2000.
---. “Is a Door a Word?” Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 37.4 (2004): 39-71.
---. Lardeau. Toronto: Island P, 1965.
---. Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems. Ed. George Bowering. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1980.
---. “Lullabye and Sea.” In Bancroft, Marian Penner. By Land and Sea (Prospect and Refuge). North Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2000.
---. Mountain. Buffalo: Audit P, 1967.
---. Music at the Heart of Thinking. Red Deer: Red Deer College P, 1987.
---. Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975.
---. So Far. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991.
---. Tree. Vancouver: Vancouver Community P, 1972.
---. Waiting For Saskatchewan. Winnipeg: Turnstone P, 1985.