Fred Wah Reads from “Mountain”

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