Fred Wah : A Floating Space by Stephen Bett

Poem title: Fred Wah: a Floating Space Poet name: Stephen Bett Poem: nv s ble tr ck five 6 seven nine and ten its a trap.1 Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. —Fred Wah (with nods to Creeley’s numbers) nv s ble naught for the eyes behind any danse’s russe2 a floating space (no axes tr ck trans-ekphrastic,3 no dots to connect, no juiced up berries in this vine-line five 6 seven nine and ten by the numbers then One and one and one / Make a picture two things / one and one4 rolls back into itself (… but its a trap. Trompe l’oeil frame(d) / two things, four things / one and three this dream pops too, rubble freed End of Poem. Footnotes: 1 “Its” [sic] 2 Once again in these glosas, WCW’s renowned & wonderful poem, as a self-portrait; look at all the i’s 3 Bowering notes Wah’s response to these pre-historic cave drawings is “transcreative”—neither translations nor descriptions.” (Intro to Wah’s Selected, p. 15) 4 “One and one… a picture” (from Creeley’s “Enough”); “two things one and one” (from Creeley’s “Song (What do you want, love”) 5 “two and two…one and three” (from Creeley’s “Numbers”); & more loveliness still: “let / me sing, one to / one to one, and let / me follow” (from Creeley’s “One thing done”) Credits: Copyright © Stephen Bett Stephen Bett’s father took him to sit, age 15 and starting out in poetry, at the feet of his father’s friend P.K. Page, the doyenne of Canadian poetry, who later revived the “glosa” in Canada. Bett’s new book, his 25th, in a sense brings it all back home. Broken Glosa takes the “glosa,” a Renaissance Spanish Court form, and breaks it down to its contemporary essentials —fractured forms for fractured times and alternate realities —riffing on postmodernist and post-avant poets in ways that are as surprising and inventive as they are richly textured while remaining fresh and playful. Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 24 books in print. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is stephenbett.com