is a door

By Fred Wah

Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of the poem’s ability for “suddenness” to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening—writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation and documentary—in short, poetry as practice.
Part one, “Isadora Blue,” is grounded in the author’s encounter with the smashed and broken doors along the hurricane-devastated waterfront of Telchac Puerto, a small village on the north coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. It resonates throughout the other three sections of the book, with its attention to hybridity and “between-ness”—a poetic investigation of racialized otherness—and the composition of “citizen” and “foreigner” through history and language.

Part two of this series of poems, “Ethnogy Journal,” written during a trip to Thailand and Laos in 1999, hinges around aspects of “tourist” and “native.” Here the poems play in the interstices of spectacle, food and social sightseeing.

Much of this poetry is framed by Wah’s acute sense of the marginalized non-urban local “place” and coloured by his attempt to articulate senses of otherness and resistance, or writing the “public self,” particularly in the book’s third section, “Discount Me In”—a series of sixteen poems from his discursive poetic essay “Count Me In.”

The fourth section, “Hinges,” is tinted with portraits of the social subject mired in a diasporic mix, a metanarrative trope in Fred Wah’s work that began with Breathin’ My Name With a Sigh.

Characteristically playful and compositionally musical, this is poetry that watches both sides of the doorway: unsettled, unpredictable, closed and open. Sometimes the door swings and can be kicked. Sometimes it’s simply missing. Sometimes it’s a sliding door.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781772015799

Fred Wah

Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1939, and he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. Studying at UBC in the early 1960s, he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work with Robert Creeley at the University of New Mexico and with Charles Olson at SUNY, Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s, founding the writing program at DTUC before moving on to teach at the University of Calgary. A pioneer of online publishing, he has mentored a generation of some of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the BC Book Prize, Waiting For Saskatchewan received the Governor-General’s Award and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize. Wah was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013.

Book preview

ISADORA BLUE

Isadora Blew

Isadora blew and blew the sea the sand the blue boards sky high waves smashed broke and splintered shutters white walled water over roof (it’s true!)and filled the floor with beach roar blues but you’d be too to start the day as blue sky-blue could fool you too now look at the misery you can see right through poor sad and lonely one she knows you’ll spend your nights alone and never know how much nobody’s missed somebody’s blue yeh! ain’t this storm come through my door tellin’ you

Forwords

Five Peelings Waiting

for Richard Baillargeon & Salvador Alanis

1.

After I kicked the wall so hard my leg recovered its kitchen.

A hinge then a horizontal expression.

Morning just finished what’s missing from the white cafe.

First the agua caliente and then pay up.

2.

He had a touch of Winnipeg.

But just across the park strolled Tinisima’s ghost.

And then she longed for the island of untouchable logging.

Later we’d all get lost.

3.

First fix the word to the thing.

Only the coffee is cold (dictamen condensare).

When the plaza is the last still place.

We’ll get back the map of printing.

4.

Next to Gaia’s the repair shop.

So we had cervezas and watched the walls talk to the city.

The shadows fell behind the shutter.

Between you something’s missing —

5.

Lost processes of reconnaissance.

Last imagenes.

Lost sentences.

Last objects the lost scene seen.

Ordinary Itching Poem in Trans

Just like white gauze

Forget the world

White-headed crows

Only dew,

Therefore grass

Moon meticulous,

The sound of ten thousand branches,

Therefore rivers, pines

The radical

Plums,

In heaven’s refrigerator

Late spring, early autumn

Diving or pissing so late at night

A watchman

And bowl of wine

Silence clear as music

Ratio to remember

Axe to handle

Too far off

Walking Poem

for Don Gill

Look into the magic ground before each step and feel the grounding cord trailing behind as a tail anchored to earth then shift the gaze to see those parts of the world you were prevented from glimpsing by the laws of sitting still in thought circling cinematically in motion these virtual plains of the eyes and cellular history there on the pavement or gravel in front of you the dry grass without water and the way it flows in comfort not regret only the