Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt

By Daphne Marlatt

“Litter. wreckage. salvage” is one of the first poems to signal Marlatt’s lifelong commitment to witnessing the stories of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian fishing community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. The poem also registers the young poet’s growing engagement with issues of gender and exploitation. These themes, as well as the theme of government-legislated dispossession in the wartime internment of Japanese-Canadians, continues through the Steveston poems “Ghost” and “Slave of the canneries.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781771120401

Daphne Marlatt

Daphne Marlatt is the author of the novels Ana Historic and Taken. She has published numerous collections of poetry, including Steveston and The Given, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2006, she was appointed to the Order of Canada. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Vancouver.

Introduction: Daphne Marlatt’s Embodied Language Poetics

In 1968, communities across this planet were in turmoil, and everywhere the arts were engaged and transformed.¹ In Vancouver, where radical poetics were ascendant, Daphne Marlatt filled in a questionnaire for her entry in Contemporary Poets of the English Language:

Q: Periodicals to which you regularly or frequently contribute poetry?

A: Tish (Vancouver), Open Letter (Victoria), Odda Tala (San Francisco), Origin (Kyoto)

Q: Do you consider yourself primarily a poet? Other?

A: Yes.

Q: Do you recognize yourself as belonging to a particular school of poetry?

A: No, though I do acknowledge a strong influence from the Black Mountain poets, & from Cid Corman/Louis Zukofsky, & frm Robert Duncan.

Marlatt also acknowledged Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley and the Poetry Conference of 1963 in Vancouver, where Charles Olson was present.² Then, in bold and telegraphic style, the young poet outlined the language poetics that would carry her through the next four decades of engagement with the world through and as language:

first concern is with language, locus for event. That whatever themes exist are arrived at through language – recognized in that sense. Since whatever is known (expressible) is known in language, the poem becomes a way of recognizing or realizing the world, both inner & outer. What kind of ground we walk on, whose air we breathe. That the ecological principle in words forming one or many phrases runs whatever lies outside & forms also what we see – to say.... Verse (free verse, laid out with spaces indicating pauses) locates.³

In Marlatt’s formulation, poetry locates the event and recognizes or realizes the world. To locate – from locus, Latin for place – means to discover, to place, or to nose out. To recognize signifies re-cognition, and to realize means to conceive vividly as real or to bring into concrete existence.⁴ Marlatt’s poetry-making is here declared to be of the kind that problematizes description or expression of the already known.⁵ Rather, this poetics would discover – it would bring into being – "the world, both inner &