From C to C: a prepositional poetics

Authors

  • Fred Wah University of Calgary

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2009n56p51

Abstract

 

"From Sea to Sea" is an imago mundi that has defined Canada's national consciousness from "the last spike" to the present. It has served to hegemonically override a range of prepositional possibilities that poetry and poetics in our time has used to relocate a citizen imagination. This talk is a critical and poetical reading of some of the most dynamic prepositions in this cultural lexicon that might help locate a more situational discourse of public selves and relationships.

Author Biography

Fred Wah, University of Calgary

Fred Wah studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960's where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics in the U.S., he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960's and taught at Selkirk College and David Thompson University Centre, and then at the University of Calgary during the 90's. He has been editorially involved with a number of literary magazines and has published numerous books of poetry. Two prose books are Diamond Grill, a biofiction about growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian cafe (1996) and Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, a collection of essays (2000). Recent collections of poetry, Sentenced to Light and is a door have been published by Talonbooks and a compact selected, The False Laws of Narrative, edited by Louis Cabri, has been released by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. He lives in Vancouver.

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Published

2009-01-01

Issue

No. 56 (2009)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2009 Fred Wah

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.