Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem

Fred Wah and the Radical Long Poem

Fred Wah and the Radical Long Poem CHARLENE DIEHL-JONES ONE DAY, 1sat in a coffee shop in Winnipeg, wondering mywaytoward what it means to travel from one place to another. Iwas in my old city, and I belonged in this place: it was utterly familiar. Only a few hours earlier, I had been in another place, mynewer home, also utterly familiar and comfortable. "Home" has been added to my ever-expanding list of floating signifiers, though "floating"misses that profound groundedness that I feel in a moment of recognition. Rooting, connection, the self in contact with its surrounds: this is the territory Fred Wah marks out repeatedly in his oeuvre, and nowhere more resolutely than in Breathin' My Name with a Sigh. Coming out of the American tradition of the Black Mountain poets—Olson, Creeley, Duncan , and others—Wah has embraced and enacted a respect for the complexity of lived experience, for the subtleties of the present and of presence, of language and self and world. The body in place, in time, grounded in lived experience; Olson designated \tproprioception.1 Charles O. Hartman speaks of a poem as "the language of an act of attention" (12); Wah's poems attend to the life they issue from, but they also shape that life. Life and writing are rooted in one another. This has inescapable implications for the poem as a working unit. Wah's aesthetic demands the structural flexibilityof the long poem at least partly because of his insistence on the interrelatedness of textual moments. As he puts it, "For me the advantage of the long poem is the continuing biotext it affords—long poem, long life" (Thesen 373). 140 Wah is more determined than most other Canadian writers of the long poem2 to assert that all the moments of his writing encounter one another , connected by a complex system of subterranean rhizomes. Radical: from the Latin, pertaining to the root. The radical long poem as an elaborate system of roots. Wah's works quite literallyresist the clear demarcation of even book covers: Alley Alley, Home Free pursues the project of Music at the Heart of Thinking; Waitingfor Saskatchewan recollects and reconfigureswork from Breathin' My Name with a Sigh, placing it in contact with Grasp the Sparrow 's Tail (also published separately) and two unpublished segments, "Elite" and "This Dendrite Map." Breathin' My Name itself came out in more than one edition, each called a "draft" to announce its tentative and shifting contours. In the Preface to Breathin'My Name, Wah writes: Somehow a selection of the information of a life is made and placed in such a wayas to not only make note of it but also to allow it to generate a truth otherwise impossible to locate. But the book is a "draft," since each incision (the beachwood, bookwood, and so runes, etc.)changes the whole thing it is a part of. To select out a pattern of things having to do with any of it has to do with all of it. Wah, more than many of his compatriots, has chosen to write from his life, to write with his life; he strenuously resists the distinction we have learned to make between art and life. He charts a proprioceptive engagement with his world, both exterior and interior, and leaves, for his readers to decipher, complex maps of glimpses of knowing. He selects "the information of a life" in his texts, but at the same time declares hiscomplicity, insisting that every "incision"—he draws out the latent violence of our habit of making marks, cutting lives widi language, and language with lives—alters the context in which it participates. In Wah's textual landscape , nothing is disconnected, discrete. Apparently disparate elements finally register only the complexityof shared root systems. This is not to posit an essentialist position, though: the radical connectedness Wah inscribes does not engage the fixed origin or source that the word's etymology allows. Wah presses the suggestive flux/flex of animate systems: a living root is always moving, however imperceptibly, marking an ever-shifting spatial and temporal locus. The present, so highly valued in Wah's work, is marked as the always already escaping experience of a body in time and place. I like the purity of all things seen through the accumulation of thrust forward especially the vehicle 141 container maybe/or "thing" called body because time seems to be (Breathin...