Fred Wah : Bundling Barry

folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)

 

 

 

As my poetry friends die off I usually bundle their publications from my bookshelves so I can spend some time collating their textual life in memory, surveying the times and the poetics thereof. Barry McKinnon’s bundle is a wonderfully lush map of about 50 years of poetic innovation, exploration, and involvement in a large literary community. And it’s not just a neat bundle of “poetry” books; its gestural activity is initiated through the chapbooks and broadsides of his own Caledonia Writing Series and Gorse Press. These smaller publications were very much Barry’s working ground, part of a compositional process of modelling and discovery.

I met Barry in the 70’s after first reading him in the magazine NMFG (No Money from the Government). I was teaching at Selkirk College in Castlegar and he was teaching at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, very much mirroring our jobs and the smell of the pulp mills. I did a reading at his college (and met his wonderful wife Joy), and he came to the Selkirk  and read there. Our discourse was grounded at the time in a kind of west coast-Coach House-Canada Council environment. We overlapped often at readings in Vancouver and at the annual provincial college creative writing “articulation” meetings where we shared a lot of friendships with other Community College writers. One of the most memorable of these meetings was the one Barry organized in Prince George (late 70’s early 80’s?) to which he had invited Robert Creeley. These were always party events with readings and launches. I think he printed his broadside “the organizer” for the event:

I am Jack the organizer. I wear elevator shoes and
am responsible for everything – the trophies, the paper plates
must choose those who win. assume all else is
lost. I drink alone

poetry won’t allow all to be told.   this is a fact.   stew
is stuck to my pants.   60 cents a drink.   it’s hard
to be humble when you’re great.   in my own way, I love
you all.

He was a great listener and had an attentive ear for contemporary voices. Eg. he introduced me to Cecil Giscombe’s wonderful Giscombe Road, a poet and a text he honed in on for an extensive dialogue about poetry, history, and place in his project “in the millennium”. A lot of his writing responds to the work of local writers in his community such as Sharon Thesen, George Stanley, Ken Belford, John Harris, and many others.

I’ve engaged with all of Barry’s writing as a true testament to the poetry writing process. The range of his attention, from biotext to travelogue to the poetics of place, is always incisive and serious. What strikes me most is that his stance seems consistently interrogative, always in the context of curiosity, searching the light found between words. His 1994 inquisition into his own health, Arrhythmia, is a very personal and powerful use of the poem as a place to explore for answers.

to feel alive.  to be alive.  tired.  know odds – a silent gap between diagnosis and advice.  what should I do?  yr heart she sd, beats in couplets and triplets.  glandular prosody, I joked, - but I’m glad to know, but afraid to ask for a printout, a xerox. afraid I’ve wasted my time.  life’s a worry, a life boat – an exaggeration of what’s imagined – the lost child returned  from hiding. it was to show something happening   as speculation worth a cure.

it’s still.   it’s there.

Barry’s generosity to the poem and to his community  -  it’s still there.

                                                                                                

 

 

 

 

 

Fred Wah is a B.C. poet who been writing and publishing since the early 1960’s. His early work is collected in Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991. More recently is a collaboration with Rita Wong, beholden: a poem as long as the river and a series of improvisations, Music at the Heart of Thinking.

 

Primitive Information Episode 6 : David Hadbawnik interviews Fred Wah

The sixth episode of David Hadbawnik's Primitive Information podcast is now online!

Fred Wah is a Chinese-Canadian poet who was born in Saskatchewan and currently lives in Vancouver. He was one of the founders of the legendary journal TISH and later studied with Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and other legends of the New American Poetry. Wah is the author of 17 chapbooks and full-length collections, and he is a former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

This interview was recorded on March 1, 2021.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fred-wah

talonbooks.com/authors/fred-wah

dhad · Primitive Information Episode 6

Fred Wah : Ken Belford

folio : Ken Belford (1946-2020)

I was aware of Ken Belford’s two books, Fireweed and The Post Electric Caveman in the late 60’s. I think he’d been peripherally involved with the early Talonbooks scene (Jim Brown and Very Stone House). I was interested in him as a BC poet and, in the context of eco- and “place” poetry, his attention to the north, forest, river, mountain etc. First time I met him was when I invited him to Selkirk College in Castlegar to do a reading in the 70’s. This was in the Arts 1 programme and, fittingly, he read in the log cabin the class had built. Those were back-to-the-land days so he fit in pretty well. He was very down to earth, a little wild, anarchist, not anti-intellectual but definitely non-institutional. During the 80’s and 90’s he focused on running a guiding and hunting business up in the Nass.

In the years after 2000 he was back in Prince George and very much into writing poetry. He published a number of collections, including a self-published limited edition series of what he called “c” books. I always enjoyed these chapbooks for their immediacy. He usually included a note when he sent them to me. Here’s part of one from 2006 that situates his attentions:

Got some snow here, 6 inches of skanky, dark, wet stuff, water on the streets. Sending these two little c books, replete w places I’d probably not choose for a book but think to include in this as something to do with where I am at, and what I’m doing. We were planning to come down for a few days but it’s too expensive for us right now. After all those years working so hard in the bush, when I sold my half, the Feds jumped on me an muscled a capital gains tax. Oweeeee. Something wrong with this.

A couple of the “c” books in this series he titled “lan(d)guage,” collected in a book of that name in 2008. I talked with Ken off and on about what I call a poetics of place and this collection he called “a sequence of poetics.” He was focussed on articulating a poetry that felt truthful to his palpable sense of the earth as he tried to negotiate that in the face of neo globalism, always conscious of his own biotext.

B.C. poet Fred Wah’s most recent project is a collaboration with Rita Wong about the Columbia River, beholden: a poem as long as the river. Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991 was published in 2015. High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem, is available online (http://highmuckamuck.ca/). Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations 1-170 will be published by Talon in 2020. He lives in Vancouver and on Kootenay Lake.

Photo by Charles Earl, Ottawa, 2009.