By Klara du Plessis
On 3 February 1972 at 8pm, Fred Wah was recorded on ¼ inch magnetic tape reading at Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo, B.C. The event was sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts and formed part of a two-month series that included other poets such as Stan Persky and Robert Kroetsch. The reel-to-reel is part of the Fred Wah fonds in the SoundBox Collection at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan), donated by Wah himself, and has been digitized for purposes of preservation and access. This recording is available to be streamed below.
When we listen to this recording, we hear Wah’s speaking and reading voice from 1972, but we also hear his poetry framed by the host, Morris Donaldson, within the broad category of an early career. While Wah is now celebrated as one of Canada’s most preeminent poets, this reading precedes his celebrity status, which arguably began with his reception of the Governor General’s Award for poetry for his collection Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985). Tellingly, the biographical note circulated at the event focuses less on awards and his major literary contributions—as it might do were one to introduce Wah to an audience today—and more on his affiliation with the west coast of Canada. It mentions UBC as his alma mater, his involvement with TISH, and his appointment at Selkirk College in the Kootenays. It describes his literary output as “map[ping], in poems, the geography of the land which has played such a prominent part in his life.” On the recording itself, the unnamed host emphasizes the regional in his work, insisting that “Fred’s poetry concerns a very specific place, the Kootenays” (00:02:33).
This biographical centering of place is apt in relation to the curation of Wah’s reading list. He reads almost exclusively from his first three poetry collections, Lardeau (1965), Mountain (1967), and Among (1972), the latter still forthcoming at the time of the event. (Open access PDFs of these collections are available courtesy of Fred Wah through the Fred Wah Digital Archive). Lardeau alludes to LardeauValley and the Lardeau River in B.C. In the poem “Lardeau / Summer 1964,” Wah writes and reads, “About the Lardeau? / There is little to say. / It is green, it rains / often, the mountains / are very beautiful[…] the rivers and creeks / flow south to the lakes” (Lardeau no pag. or 00:14:03). The lines are misleadingly simple, indicative of a clarity related to familiarity. He knows the place he describes and can celebrate its presence without reverting to lyrical excess.
Wah’s closeness and commitment to place, to the Canadian west coast and B.C. interior, in particular, align with Pauline Butling’s theorization of a collective sensibility in the 1960s to write “place, landscape, the local, the city, the region, and the nation” (Writing In Our Time 89). As she elaborates, “‘here’ extends beyond geographic location; it includes the ‘linguistic landscape’ of the place and of the poem.” This perspective resonates throughout Wah’s work and throughout this recording as poems address mountains, valleys, waters, trees, and other forms of natural and geographic situatedness.
Shifting from Lardeau to Among, Wah introduces the latter collection in relation to place and interconnection, suggesting that it foregrounds
a concern with being on the earth and the concern can be described or has been described as something physical. Yet that’s perhaps a little too easy since the demand that, as far as the activity of writing the poems is concerned, the demand of writing that metaphysics, the demand of being, say, a tree, has been a very serious one. (00:19:26)
His engagement with his physical surroundings is one that he understands to be reciprocal. He is not only writing about the natural habitat but becoming one with it, through his body in communion with place, but also through his writing into being of that place. When introducing his reading of the poem “Hermes in the Trees” he questions, “How to be a tree [? How] to take very literally the act of giving the tree your value?” (00:25:21). By producing a poem on the subject of a tree, he writes the world into its own vitality through language. To cite the opening line of the poem, “World word alive” (Among 10 or 00:25:44)—three consecutive words or a world as alive as words.
We can hear how coherently Wah has structured the curation of his reading around a thematic and conceptual concern with place. Then, towards the end of the recording, when the reading comes to an unexpected halt, Wah expands this consistent framing to embrace the more close-knit connectivity of interpersonal fellowship too. He states, “My writing is mostly in a world of, or is related immediately to a world of fellow writers, of fellows, companions, who share my concerns” (00:27:45). Here the “World word alive” is one interwoven with human presence in the shape of his writerly community. It is this community that is audible in the recording’s larger soundscape: the host’s initial commentary welcoming and situating Wah, the audience’s background voices and presence, the concentration and attention that formulates itself around the poetry reading itself, the sound of an unidentified technician recording the event…
Citation: 41. Wah Malaspina_Side 1_1-4_(MA) from Fred Wah fonds 1972.02.03. The SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C.
Listening to Wah read more than fifty years after the fact, interconnectedness, presence, and community reverberates through time and space. Each of us listeners forms part of that community, even as we listen from very different historical moments and geographical locations, even as we are mediated by this very digitized audio file. The vitality of Wah’s voice in poetry lives on.
Bibliography
Butling, Pauline and Susan Rudy. Writing In Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003). Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005.
Fred Wah Digital Archive: https://fredwah.ca/
The SoundBox Collection. 2022.003.071. 41. Wah Malaspina_Side 1_1-4_(MA) from Fred Wah fonds, nd. 2019.002.002, SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C.
Wah, Fred. Lardeau. Island Press, 1965.
—. Mountain. Audit / East West, 1967.
—. Among. Coach House Press, 1972.
Bio
Klara du Plessis is currently the SpokenWeb postdoctoral fellow at UBCO’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, affiliated with Karis Shearer’s AMP Lab. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Concordia University and her research extends across sound, curatorial and archival studies, and research-creation. Klara’s research interests include curatorial structures in the event-formation, performance, and archiving of twentieth century and contemporary literature, and listening as critical method, and she is working on a monograph manuscript, provisionally titled Curatorial Listening. Reading the Relational Literary Event in Canadian Poetry, under contract with Wilfrid Laurier UP. Klara is also a published poet. Post-Mortem of the Event (Palimpsest Press, 2024) is one of her most recent titles.
