Fred Wah talks to Brian Fawcett and reads poetry on Mountain Pass Radio
Citation: Wah, Fred. “Mountain Pass: Fred Wah.” 2022.003.065, Fred Wah Fonds. SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C.Citation: Wah, Fred. “Mountain Pass: Fred Wah.” 2022.003.065, Fred Wah Fonds. SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C.
On 22 December 1976, Fred Wah was featured on Mountain Pass Radio, “a 12-part series recorded for CFRO FM radio in Vancouver during the late 1970s, featuring BC poets, ‘their poetry, their poetics, their places'” (Schwartz, “How in the hell do you get home?” no pag.). During this recording session, he reads three poems, namely “Mountain,” “Hamill’s Last Stand,” and “Tree of Colour Textured Rain,” and enters into conversation with the hosts, Brian Fawcett and Philip Shaddock, on the subject of his composition and practice.
Discussing “Mountain,” Fawcett describes the long poem as indicating “the central importance that the geographical local has on Wah’s work.” Wah himself describes his composition of this poem in terms of great inspiration, stating that “the beginning of the poem to me is just a lyric outburst. It was the first time in my whole sense of writing in which I felt… It was written in about 10 minutes. It was so fast and so much of an outburst, of pent up whatever, language, feeling, sense of place.” Later he continues, describing that “the poem starts as a dream, without any body. It’s all mountain […] I come into the poem obviously as mountain also, as that silly equivocation of myself, not so much identifying as literally becoming everything that I’m looking at, am able to imagine.”
In contrast to this insistence on Wah’s significant interest in place, Wah also tells an anecdote about “a friend said to me the other day, this TISH volume, this TISH book has just come out from TalonBooks, TISH 1-19, and he said he’d been reading through, thinking of reviewing the book, and he noticed that all… he was interested in my poems, he noticed that my poetry was predominantly about women. And he said, that’s not my sense of your poetry. He said, that was a total shock to him that these early poems of mine had been these kind of love, Cavalcanti, platonic love poems.” The poems that he does read are also early poems,illustrating a counterargument to his friend’s observation.
Finally, Wah summarizes his practice with the goofy descriptor of “horsing around with language.” He says, “what I was really into was letting the language move in interesting and new possibilities of language. I wasn’t interested in the day to day language. I wasn’t interested in the way in which I talked. I was interested in fabricating, in making a nice, pretty, horsing around with language thing.”
This broadcast is interspersed with country musical interludes and functions as a brief but poignant introduction to Wah’s writing from a point of both poetics and public performance.
Citation: Wah, Fred. “Mountain reading” nd. 2022.003.102. Fred Wah fonds. SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/fred-wah-fonds/
Listen to an excerpt of Fred Wah’s full reading of the long poem, “Mountain,” first published as a pamphlet by Audit East/West in 1967. Due to the tape’s lead being badly damaged, this otherwise complete, digitized version of the tape misses the opening 4.5 lines of the poem. The first audible words are “white ridges humps of granite.” The tape has no introduction, but it is likely that Wah reads from the then newly released book rather than a manuscript because his reading is true, word-for-word, to the published version.
Wah’s reading is representative of his larger oeuvre that grounds itself in the local B.C. while simultaneously expanding to encompass much larger geographies and histories, for example, his Chinese heritage with images of Canton rice fields and Hong Kong masses. As Jeff Derksen refers to Wah’s early poetry, “the great subtlety […] is its expansiveness: a movement from grounded localness that carries a weight in its details of place and in its precision of language to syntactically compressed narratives” (‘Elite 8’ Waiting for Saskatchewan 67-68)” (4).
In the following exchange, UBC (Okanagan) SpokenWeb affiliates Karis Shearer and Paige Hohmann turn their attention to a clip from the SoundBox Collection and consider its connection to the B.C. Interior andthe B.C. Regional Digitized History archive. This is part one of a series called “Archival Bonds” where researcher and archivist think together about the ways digitized collections can speak to each other.
Karis Shearer: I have always thought about the SoundBox Collection as representing Vancouver literary communities of the 1960s to 80s. However, as we process the collection as part of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb project, I’ve been surprised to see how many connections there are to the BC Interior. For example, in 1969, Frank Davey recorded interviews with writer and UBC English professor Earle Birney (one of the founders of UBC’s Creative Writing Department), for Davey’s 1971 book titled Earle Birney. In this short clip Birney tells Davey about “an elaborate trip” through the BC Southern Interior and the precarity of his employment after finishing high school. It is also a literary trip insofar as it provides Birney the occasion to write his very first poems. His time in Vernon, in contrast, is decidedly uninspiring; while he attends social events and regular Sunday sermons at the Presbyterian church (Cameron 31-34), the struggle to make ends meet is very real.
Much of the infrastructure to which Birney refers either no longer exists or looks very different today and so turning to the British Columbia Regional Digitized History repository can enhance our understanding of the geography and transportation technologies that figure so prominently in this interview clip. Paige, how might we understand the relationship between BCRDH and the SoundBox Collection?
Paige Hohmann: To understand the interrelation between BCRDH and the Soundbox Collection, we have to start at the beginning. It’s rare that a single artifact reveals much by itself. An old photograph, letter, or sound recording taken alone is a pleasant decoration. A group of these same records, contextualized in certain ways, can be called an archive.
Departing from a tradition of administrative record keeping, archival theory supposes that evidence of activity is necessarily fragmented across many documents. When we reassemble the fragments, we can reconstruct an action, and gain a view into it. The relationships that allow the reconstruction is what Dr. Luciana Duranti has called the “archival bond” (1997).
While the functional details of this bond don’t always translate perfectly to non-business records, the notion of adjacent documentary traces shedding light on one another still seems to hold. These contexts and relationships and bonds abide, but digitization and its orderly continuation into online spaces lets us see – and hear – archives speak to one another.
***
Creston C.P.R. Station. n.d. Dow Family fonds.
Earle Birney: …But at any rate, I worked that summer [1920], and then the local Imperial Bank in Creston, the manager asked me if I’d like a job as a junior clerk. It was damn little money, but winter was coming on. There was no farm work in the winter. And I thought, “oh, I’ll take it to see what the hell it’s like.” He made [inaudible], and you know, reckless advancement. And what I got was fifteen dollars a week. [EB chuckles.] That’s what I started with, was fifteen dollars worth. I thought, “Jesus, that’s damn little!” After all, a suit of clothes would cost fifty dollars or something, and so on. Fifteen a week. And you had to have a suit of clothes and you had to have a… I couldn’t afford a regular white shirt because I couldn’t wash it myself.
[00:53:30] Frank Davey: You couldn’t wash it…
[00:53:31] Earle Birney: And so I wore a celluloid collar. I must be the last Canadian that wears celluloid collars! [EB laughs.] And I worked in this bank for about two months and then they suddenly moved me. They transported me to Vernon [in 1921] and this was kind of exciting in a way. Up to this time, you know I took the bank job… Well, I was going back home weekends.
[00:54:09] Frank Davey: You were still pretty close to home?
Train, cars and sternwheeler S.S. Sicamous at the Okanagan Landing dock. ca. 1915.
And I had to spend the weekend in Penticton. It was a great adventure for me. And as a matter of fact, the first poems I ever remember writing I wrote on that train going by seeing the Kootenay falls and what’s it called, [Blind?] Falls. [Blind Falls?] was long before they put a dam in. Beautiful falls. And the lake was marvelous. So [I] got up to Vernon and worked there, still for fifteen dollars a week! [EB chuckles.] I’d got a move but no promotion. [FD chuckles.] And there it began to be tough because I could not get board and room for under fifty-five.
[00:55:56] Frank Davey: Fifty-five dollars…?
[00:55:58] Earle Birney: A month. And I was getting fifteen a week, so I was only five bucks over for everything else–for clothes and so on. And so what I did was I managed to get board for forty-five without a room, and there was an empty room over the bank they let me have just to scrounge some blankets. And I saved that ten bucks by sleeping on the floor in there. And there was a wash basin place and a lavatory in the back of [the] bank. And I used that and that was how I solved the sleeping problem. And [I] ate around this boarding house. But it was still no good because I was getting old enough and I wanted to go to dances and you couldn’t afford to take a girl out to dance, you know? I wanted to dress better and all that. And so what little I saved from the cucumber picking I used up just trying to stay alive and properly clothed in Vernon! And after I’d used the money up I thought, “jeez, I better get out of here while I still can!” I had just enough left to get back home. And so I quit the bank. I wasn’t particularly good at it anyway, and there was no reason for promoting me. And I got back home and found my parents had sold the place and were going to go back to Banff. And so I decided that I would go back to the Rockies too because I was getting in a kind of sense kind of homesick, I guess. There were the other kids I went to school with there and stuff. And I thought maybe I could pick up a job there. So I went back to Banff and I did pick up a job on survey party. And we left Banff and went down to Waterton Lakes. You know that part?
Permissions
“Earle Birney Interview 1969” appears courtesy of Frank Davey.
Duranti, Luciana. “The Archival Bond.” Archives and Museum Informatics 11, no. 3 (1997): 213-218.
“Okanagan landing railway met with lake boats.” Photograph. Peachland Museum. BCRDH Link: https://bcrdh.ca/islandora/object/peach%3A1394?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=d9f62c6da173402d5a76&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=7
Train, cars and sternwheeler S.S. Sicamous at the Okanagan Landing dock. ca. 1915. Item control no. 302. Greater Vernon Museum and Archives Historical Photograph Collection. Greater Vernon Museum and Archives, Vernon, B.C., Canada. https://vernonmuseum.ca/ 30 March 2021. https://bcrdh.ca/islandora/object/gvma:321.
“Train crossing wooden trestle on the K.V.R. route.” Photograph. Kettle River Museum. BCRDH Link: https://bcrdh.ca/islandora/object/kettleriver%3A51?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=dd59ea91f46b292d008c&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=8
Gladys Hindmarch reads from the manuscript of a short story to an audience at Fred Wah and Pauline Butling’s home in South Slocan, British Columbia, May 1969. “The Boat Stories,” as she referred to them, would eventually be published as a linked story collection called The Watery Part of the World by Douglas & McIntyre in 1988. The story Hindmarch reads on this occasion becomes the sixth story called “Nothing is Simple,” but in 1969 it remains unnamed. Hindmarch will read it again on 21 November, 1969 at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, where she tells the audience “it’s still in the first day on the trip but it’s the seventh story. I call it ‘The Salad Story’ in my head but I’ll have to find a title for it.”
In South Slocan, the listeners, including Fred Wah, Pauline Butling, and at least two unidentified male listeners discuss and offer commentary on the story. Wah and Butling’s young daughter can be heard in the room as well — a reminder this reading takes place in more intimate domestic setting amongst friends in the B.C. interior, in contrast to the large public reading of the same story Hindmarch would give just 6 months later in Montreal.
—Karis Shearer
Citation: Hindmarch, Gladys. “Track 1: Gladys [Hindmarch] Reading at South Slocan’” (clip), Fred Wah fonds, May 1969. 2022.003.033, SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/gladys-hindmarch/
Hindmarch, Gladys. “The Watery Part of the World” in Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch. Eds Deanna Fong & Karis Shearer. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2020. 79-177
—. “Gladys Hindmarch reading from The Watery Part of the World Chapter 1: The Hall.” AMP Lab, YouTube. 7 January, 2022. https://youtu.be/NWDPxFtlCM4
—. “Gladys Hindmarch reading from The Watery Part of the World Chapter 2: The Nootka.” AMP Lab, YouTube. 20 June, 2022. https://youtu.be/ejS_UqPl_MY
—. “Gladys Hindmarch reading from The Watery Part of the World Chapter 3: Call Back.” AMP Lab, YouTube. 14 March, 2022. https://youtu.be/LZW25CW7d7Y
—. “Gladys Hindmarch reading from The Watery Part of the World Chapter 4: Faraway Places.” AMP Lab, YouTube. 14 March, 2022. https://youtu.be/IFBDSqFqR4o
—. “Gladys Hindmarch reading from The Watery Part of the World Chapter 5: Some Trip.” AMP Lab, YouTube. 20 June, 2022. https://youtu.be/Z9C-YBRCTXM
—. “Nothing is Simple.” The Watery Part of the World. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988. 45-51.
Gladys Hindmarch reads from “A Birth Account Manuscript” in South Slocan, March 1973
Part 1
Gladys Hindmarch reads from “A Birth Account” manuscript in South Slocan, March 1973. She was recorded by Fred Wah at the home of Wah and Pauline Butling. The volume A Birth Account would be published in 1976 by New Star Books. (Part 1)
Citation: Hindmarch, Gladys. “Gladys (Maria) Hindmarch, [A] Birth [Account]_Side 1_1-4.,” March 1973. Clip. 2022.003.033. Fred Wah fonds. SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/gladys-hindmarch/
Part 2
Gladys Hindmarch reads from “A Birth Account” manuscript in South Slocan, March 1973. She was recorded by Fred Wah at the home of Wah and Pauline Butling. The volume A Birth Account would be published in 1976 by New Star Books. (Part 2)
—Karis Shearer
Citation: Hindmarch, Gladys. “Gladys (Maria) Hindmarch, [A] Birth [Account]_Side 2_1-4.,” March 1973. Clip. 2022.003.033. Fred Wah fonds. SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/gladys-hindmarch/
| Bibliography
Hindmarch, Gladys. A Birth Account. New Star Books, 1976. Print.
