Poetry Thursday - excerpt from How to Clean Up in Spring and Fall by Fred Wah

How to Clean Up in Spring and Fall

I. IN THE SPRING

point to everything lying around
try to remember
kind of frown and shake your head
all of a sudden
there's more than their used to be
keep track of it
organise it all by counting
do a dance
a real funny dance.


Fred Wah (b.1939) grew up in the interior of British Columbia and now lives in Vancouver; he continues to practise poetry.

"How to Clean Up in Spring and Fall" is from Owners Manual (1981), his eighth book; he has published 15 more.

Selected Poems: Loki is buried at Smoky Creek (1980) has a 13-page introduction by George Bowering, another eminent poet of the time, who talks about "the heady experiences of life among the famous poets in the sixties", a time when Wah was founding, publishing, and editing poetry magazines. At that time Wah was also a jazz musician, playing trumpet.

In the early '60s he was studying music composition and went along to his girlfriend's English class: "all of sudden writing poetry became more appealing than writing music. The Black Mountain poets opened it up for me. What jibed for me in this new mix was continuing to work with improvisation. Suddenly, for me, language became music, and that’s pretty much remained." [from the 2017 interview here]

His father's side of the family was Chinese, and his mother's side was Scandinavian. He talks about this "hybridity" in this video, entitled "the hyphen in Chinese-Canadian poetry".

Then ... (via)

... and now (via)