Category: Recording

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.

—Klara du Plessis

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).

Compare this reading from “Mountain” with Wah’s 1972 reading at Malaspina College, also including sections from the same work.

—Karis Shearer & Klara du Plessis