“Waiting for Saskatchewan” by Fred Wah

In magazines, books, anthologies, I have been reading the poetry of Fred Wah (initially Fredric Wah) since the early 1960s, with a careless kind of rapture, not expecting too many accomplished poems, but mostly incidental felicities and a certain flair of style. In preparation for this piece I re-read all of his published poems, so as to arrive at a fresher critical perspective of a poet whose work is becoming better known in the 1980s, and more praised. Waiting for Saskatchewan received the 1985 Governor General’s Award for poetry in English, an honour which seems more or less deserved, although the book is quite uneven. However, it follows two substantial earlier volumes: Breathin’ my Name With a Sigh (Talonbooks, 1981) and Selected Poems: Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek (Talonbooks, 1980), this latter well edited and introduced by George Bowering. Since the Selected Poems contains all, I think, that one would want to remember from the writer’s six earlier collections, plus a number of unpublished poems, the three recent books comprise what the general reader and most critics would probably need of Wah’s poetry.

The early poetry, of the 1960s and 19705 (by a writer born in 1939), is contained in the Selected Poems. Its characteristics are very regionalist, the poetry being mainly about landscape, Nature, the home place(s) and its people and other animals, and close attachment to all these. In a 1976 essay about his work, Mr. Wah writes:

Writing has a lot to do with “place”, the spiritual and spatial localities of the writer. I see things from where I am, my view point, and I measure and imagine a world from there. Oaxaca, Vancouver, the Kootenay River a thousand years ago or today, my father’s father’s birthplace, become “local” to me and compound to make up a picture of the world I am native of. Writing is sometimes remembering this image, and sometimes it has to make it up.

Breathin’ my Name With a Sigh and Waiting for Saskatchewan contain middle-period poems, some of them good enough to be considered mature, but many of them hindered by a too egocentric process of memory, the end of which seems not to be information, knowledge, or even self-knowledge, but mere revery, as in this passage from a prose poem in Breathin’:

The diaphragm of the clouds above the ceiling of the sky the moon makes. The night. Sweep sleep. Dreams. I don’t know that any of that matters because it was/is inconsequential (out of time) as far as the colour (white) remains glacial in the mind. There, is a place. The voice soon takes over. Try and try, it makes story out of the memory of an image, a time, colour.

This is quite fine syntactically; it is lyrical, aware of surrealism, sensitive to creating impression and awake to difficulty. But it does not distinguish enough between true-story, fiction, and self-hypnosis by means of a cluster of images.

What strongly emerges in Breathin’ and becomes fullblown in Waiting for Saskatchewan is what may be called the Dead Father theme (the father alive having never been much of a thought in previous writings). I find this theme quite congenial when it is combined with the timely grief and the growth of self-awareness that sorrow often brings, but when it becomes an all-pervasive fixation, it cannot compete—to my mind—with Donald Barthelme’s 1975 comic novel The Dead Father:

And he, she pointed to the Dead Father, must be, I can’t imagine. Maybe a hundred.
Wrong, the Dead Father said gaily. Wrong, but close. Even older than that, but also younger. Having it both ways is a thing I like.

Dead Father time and Dead Father timing are precisely the points that are relevant. “The October Argument,” a poem in Wah’s Lardeau (1965), illustrates that the poet has been long aware of the problem in general: “She says that I cling to the past/trees, places, people and things.” And again:

My love there is no compromise
if you will not wait
while I drag my ass
in the past

To some readers’ enjoyment of Saskatchewan the (deceased) Father theme will be no hindrance. But those, who—like myself—tend to think of it with levity as the Dead Father theme, will have to somehow see around it, since in Saskatchewan, absolutely, “there is no compromise”. Nearly every page is about son’s memory.

Saskatchewan is composed of four long poems. The first of these—”from Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh” (25 pages)—is selected partly from the book whose title is quoted, and partly made up of new texts which are offshoots. The new poem so created directs itself to a broader range of family concerns. This welding seems to be somewhat contrived: why not use just the new texts, with some reference to the earlier Breathin’? Is it because the syntax of the new sections is sometimes too harshly compressed?

Relation speaks. Tree talks hierarchy loop subject returns. Knowledge a bag of things to be changed later to knowledge. Statement of instructions horoscope Wah [ … ]

If knowledge in a poem is a bag of things to be re-packed as knowledge, there is no point in interpretation, unless one wishes to spend all one’s time re-indexing. Mr. Wah’s own Prefatory Note to the book emphasizes points of form rather than content; and since the content is already of a private nature and further privatized by a self-regarding memory process, one may as well not chase meaning down rhetorical alleys. One might well settle for some generalized meaning, as, say, the tension between the poet’s humanist ego (Freud) and his writing’s poststructuralist strategies—something about the poetics of desire? Frye? Lacan?

The second text (26 pages), “Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (a poetic diary)”, is characterized as an “utaniki, a poetic diary of mixed prose and poetry”, about the author’s trip a few years ago to China and Japan. As an English-language example of the form, it is decidedly less adventurous than the famous Auden and MacNeice Letters from Iceland (1937) which does away with diary altogether, or the more staid Auden and Isherwood Journey to a War (1939) which —all about their trip to China—combines diary, poetry, and travel report. However, the two Auden collaborations are also much longer, being full-length books. Mr. Wah’s piece benefits from being short and unambitious, impressionistic about China and Japan, reflecting on writing, producing poetical sketches, thinking about his Eurasian father, ‘seeing’ him in Chinese men repeatedly, even through Mao’s poetry and by visiting the poet/leader’s mausoleum. Thus the thinking about Father becomes a little externalized.

The last two works in Saskatchewan are best, “Elite” (pronounced ee-light and 13 pages long) and “this Dendrite Map: Father/Mother Haibun” (22 pages). I believe they have some lasting interest, because their use of the prose poem form is often quite distinguished, and because of their delicately expressed filial love, in sensuous images of filial desire. To and of his mother (of Swedish ancestry), the poet writes with gallant wit:

Speedy dancing and the leaves of Germany meet me at the elevator, words mean everything, I try to phone you on mother’s day, everyone does, more Swedish than Chinese, you didn’t want me to be a boy scout all my life, did you (the leaves cling to this writing) [ … ]

[ … ] did Pindar catch us dead in our tracks?
-Haibun #21

The phrases have an especial poignancy, because the elder Mr. Wah died at age fifty-four, on a dance-floor, dancing with his wife.

“Father/Mother Haibun” consists of 21 prose poem texts, each concluded with a haiku in different typeface. Some of these haiku are also memorable, as the one to “Haibun # 6”: “I’ll stain the fence red, a dim border in the snow, might last thirty years.”

“Elite” consists of ten prose poems, and it is notable, among other things, for not using words like “race” and “class” about circumstances which are too often discussed in such slang. Also, it finds a complex correlation for the poet’s early memories; and it faces, at least, the problem of written memories that have no real biographical impulse: “I know all these ‘facts’ existed once, and I could check some of them out, but somehow I don’t want it or need it.” Perhaps, the reader wouldn’t either want or need them, if some of the writing were more disciplined. Unfortunately, it is not infrequently hokey, as in the following about, I suppose, multiculturalism on the Prairies:

The ethnicity here feels so direct. I mean the Chinese are still connected to China, the Ukrainians so Ukrainian, in the bar the Icelanders tell stories about Iceland, the Swede still has an accent, the French speak French. Here you’re either a Wiebe or a Friesen, or not. What is a Métis, anyway?

I don’t understand what readers of poetry are expected to derive from such stereotypical writing. Fortunately, passages such as this are rare in “Elite”. For the most part it is an accomplished work, and I look forward to Mr. Wah’s next book. ■

Steve Buri has lived in Winnipeg most of his life. He was born in Budapest, 1938. His father died at age fifty-seven in 1972.