WAH, Fred(erick James)

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Swift Current, Saskatchewan, 23 January 1939. Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1958–63, B.A. 1963; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1963–64; State University of New York, Buffalo, 1964–67, M.A.1967. Family: Married Pauline Butling in 1962; two daughters. Career: Instructor, English, 1967–78, 1984–85, professional writing program, 1985–88, and chairman, Arts I, 1967–78, Selkirk College, Castlegar, British Columbia; coordinator and instructor, writing program, David Thompson University Centre, Nelson, British Columbia, 1978–84; coordinator and teacher of writing workshops, Kootenay School of Writing, Nelson and Vancouver, British Columbia, 1984–88. Since 1989 professor, English, University of Calgary. Associate editor, Tish, 1961–63; editor, Sum, 1963–66; associate editor, Magazine of Further Studies, 1966–70; editor, Scree, 1972–74; since 1970 associate editor, Open Letter, and since 1992 editorial board, Ariel.Awards: MacMillan prize for poetry, University of British Columbia, 1963; Canada Council fellowship, 1967, Research Travel grant, 1969, Arts grant I, 1977–78, and Senior Arts award, 1986; Governor-General's award, 1986, for Waiting for Saskatchewan; Department of External Affairs grant, 1990, 1992; Stephan G. Stephanson award, 1991, for So Far.Address: 2702 Chalice Road Northwest, Calgary, Alberta T2L 1C7, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Lardeau. Toronto, Island Press, 1965.

Mountain. Buffalo, Audit Press, 1967.

Among. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1972.

Tree. Vancouver, Vancouver Community Press, 1972.

Earth. Canton, New York, Institute of Further Studies, 1974.

Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1975.

Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poetry. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1980.

Owners Manual. Lantzville, Island Writing Series, 1981.

Breathin' My Name With a Sigh. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1981.

Grasp the Sparrow's Tail. Kyoto, n.p., 1982.

Waiting for Saskatchewan. Winnipeg, Turnstone Press, 1985.

Rooftops. N.p., Blackberry Books, 1987.

Music at the Heart of Thinking. Red Deer, Red Deer College Press, 1987.

Limestone Lakes Utaniki. Red Deer, Red Deer College Press, 1989.

So Far. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1991.

Alley Alley Home Free. Red Deer, Red Deer College Press, 1992.

Diamond Grill. Edmonton, NeWest Publishers, 1996.

Other

Faking It: Poetics & Hybridity, Critical Writing 1984–1999. Edmonton, NeWest Publishers, 2000.

Editor, Place, Anyplace. Castlegar, Cotinneh Books, 1973.

Editor, Net Work, Selected Writings of Daphne Marlatt. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1980.

Editor, with Frank Davey, Swift Current. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1986.

Editor, with Roy Miki, Beyond the Orchard: Essays on The Martyrology. Vancouver, West Coast Line, 1997.

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Manuscript Collection: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.

Critical Studies: In From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960 by Frank Davey, Vancouver, Press Porcepic, 1974; "Fred Wah: A Poetry of Dialogue" by Smaro Kamboureli, in Line 4, 1984; "The Undersigned: Ethnicity and Signature-Effects in Fred Wah's Poetry," in West Coast Line (Vancouver), 2, fall 1990, and Translation Poetics: Composing the Body Canadian (dissertation), both by Pamela Banting, University of Alberta, 1991; "'Mother/Father Things I Am Also': Fred Wah, Breathin' His Name with a Sigh" by Susan Rudy Dorscht, in Inside the Poem: Essays and Poems in Honour of Donald Stephens, edited by W.H. New, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1992; "Making Race Opaque: Fred Wah's Poetics of Opposition and Differentiation" by Jeff Derksen, in West Coast Line (Vancouver), 29(3), winter 1995–96.

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Fred Wah began his writing career as a member of the Tish group on the campus of the University of British Columbia in the early 1960s. He was influenced by the Black Mountain poets of the day and then joined the editorial board of the journal Open Letter. In the 1970s and 1980s he held creative writing positions at the David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, British Columbia, a lively center for new writers, especially those associated with western Canada. In 1984 Wah teamed up with Frank Davey to launch a computer network called SwiftCurrent, described as "the world's first on-line electronic literary magazine." Writers in Canadian cities had a home page long before the Internet made the term a household word. Despite the interest in computers and communication, it is the prairie experience that has been Wah's mainstay, as is the case with his fellow Saskatchewan poet Andrew Suknaski.

In his early work Wah wrote with great simplicity. For instance, the poetic epigram of Tree (1972) reads as follows: "Go to the forest, Tree / please wait for me there." In later works he moved from simplicity to complexity, from lucidity to density, and from defining things to finding things. Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980) bears an introduction by George Bowering that quotes Davey on Wah: "The concept which dominates Wah's writing is that the geographic and human particulars which immediately surround a man not only contain all place and all history but together form a place that is for that man the true centre of the cosmos." The poem "What to Do When You Get There" certainly conveys a sense of being somewhere, although it is not clear exactly where:

get into a corner or something
take the 90 degree horizon
and with what you still carry from your trip
put it together privately
...
laugh a little bit at the perspective
its large
and when things rise in you like this
come to the surface with a force of their own
then let them
sit in the warmth
be in the middle of the large

Wah received the Governor-General's award for poetry for his book Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985). Many readers regard the book as Wah's crowning achievement. This is only fitting because the prose and poetry of the book celebrate the poet's native province, its present and particularly its past. At the same time the poet reaches out in the book to embrace his own past. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the son of a Chinese immigrant, he explored and innovated until he had a sense of who he was and where he stood. The book is structured in the sense that sections are called "Haibun" and "Elite." In the former a passage of prose is followed by a haikulike line of poetry. Nostalgia for the everyday life of the 1960s is characteristic: "Someday I'll grow them, prairie hollyhocks again, / on a stucco wall." In the latter section, which is perhaps more powerful, there are prose impressions of everyday life in Swift Current. The lines of the poems move toward free association and are quite often difficult to follow, though one senses the hectic eloquence of the person in the act of uttering the words and making the right connections:

and the origins grandparents countries places converged
europe asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators
...
I want it back, wait in this snowblown winter night
for that latitude of itself its own largeness
my body to get complete
it still owes me, it does

"Out of Wah's synaptic leaps a wonderful new music springs, a source, primary materials every reader needs," noted bpNichol of the poems found in Wah's book Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987). Will the synapses continue to leap? It seems that the meaning of the poems is growing elusive. "No. 42" includes such lines as these:

Is that the flesh made word
or is that the flesh-made word?
 
Le mot juste or just tomatoes?
 
Telling you, you telling me, field waiting.

Art as play? There are signs that Wah's later poems (now texts) are more theoretically based than are the earlier ones, which are derived from experience as well as theory. In "One Makes (the) Difference" in Alley Alley Home Free (1992), Wah writes as follows: "A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we know." What is worthwhile about Wah's work is the sense of someone who is straining to know more about himself and his portion of the earth.

—John Robert Colombo