Mountain (nd)

Fred Wah reads the full text of “Mountain.” This digitized version of the tape, however, captures everything but the first 4.5 lines of the book because the tape’s lead was badly damaged. The first words we hear are “white ridges humps of granite.” The tape has no introduction but it’s likely Wah reads from the recently published book (1967) rather than a manuscript because his reading is true, word-for-word, to the published version.

As Jeff Derksen puts it, referring 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 that sweep from ‘my mountains’ of British Columbia to ‘your [Wah’s father] China youth and the images of place for you before you were twenty are imbued with the green around Canton rice fields, humid Hong Kong masses’ (‘Elite 8’ Waiting for Saskatchewan 67-68)” (4).