On My Way to Get a Pail of Water by Fred Wah (2020)
48 pp, 4 ½ x 7 inches ISBN 978-1-928172-30-7
Wah’s lecture explores the ways in which water has operated as a basic unit of composition in my writing and as a primary element in poetic processing. Water is such a natural and available reflection of its own meaning— particularly its improvisational possibilities—that it can function as a palimpsest for language. The book explores the Columbia River as it is wrestled to the page in Beholden: a poem as long as a river, a co-authored book and art installation with Rita Wong that engages the confounding dynamics of border, nation, and treaty, the socio-political dimensions of place and names, colonization, dams, and salmon. His presentation is a statement on geopoetics and the creative undercurrent that surfaces in our liminal encounters with the landscape of creeks, ponds, lakes, and oceans.
“I use the term ‘poetics’ here not as the study of, or theory about, literature, but in its practical and applied sense referring to the tools designed, or located, by writers and artists to initiate movement and change. American poet Charles Bernstein usefully describes compositional poetics ‘…as a sort of applied poetic, in the sense that engineering is a form of applied mathematics.’ In beholden, I’ve tried to work with, and into, a poetic language that comes not only from the river itself, but that uses the compositional possibilities of the long poem form.
The long poem has a somewhat singular history in Canadian literature. It proliferated among my generation of poets in the 70s and 80s, and Michael Ondaatje’s and Sharon Thesen’s anthologies of the Canadian long poem attest to its abundance….There are several formal aspects of the long poem that have informed much of my own work. A major facet of its aesthetic is its resistance to closure, its desire not to end—the poem as a river. It also resists closure in the syntactic unity of the sentence, thus affording a variety of constructions we can also locate in another hybrid form, the prose poem. These elements have been a major attraction for me, particularly informed by the improvisational possibilities of making poetry like making jazz.”
Fred Wah is an Asian-Canadian writer of Swedish and Chinese ancestry who lives in Vancouver and BC’s Kootenay region, both places where he connected with Frank Davey, George Bowering, and Daphne Marlatt, and others to co-found the influential literary magazine, Tish (1961-69). Wah has won the Governor-General’s Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet and was appointed to the Order of Canada.
His poetry includes Music at the Heart of Thinking, Scree, Permissions, is a door, Sentenced to Light, Articulations, Isadora Blue, Alley Alley Home Free, So Far, Limestone Lakes Utaniki, Rooftops, Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail, Waiting for Saskatchewan, Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh, Owner’s Manual, Pictograms from the Interior of BC, Earth, Tree, Among, Mountain, and Lardeau. He has also co-authored beholden: a poem as long as the river and High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem is available online. He is adapted his bio-fiction Diamond Grill into a radio play and his critical writing is gathered in Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity.
Read an interview with Fred Wah in Portal 2018