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Double Negative
Book by Marlatt, Daphne, Warland, Betsy
- GenresPoetry
56 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1988
5 people want to read
About the author
Daphne Marlatt
53 books12 followers"Nationality: Canadian (originally Maylasian, immigrated to Canada in 1951). Born: Daphne Shirley Buckle, Melbourne, Australia, 1942.
Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960-64, B.A.; University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1964-67, M.A. 1968. Career: Has taught at University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Western Ontario, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, McMaster University, University of Manitoba; second vice chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, 1987-88.
Awards: MacMillan and Brissenden award for creative writing; Canada Council award. Member: Founding member of West Coast Women and Words Society.
Other Work:
Plays
Radio Plays:
Steveston, 1976.
Other
Zócalo. Toronto, Coach House, 1977.
Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1998.
Editor, Lost Language: Selected Poems of Maxine Gadd. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1982.
Editor, Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. Vancouver, Press Gang, 1990.
Editor, Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1997.
Translator, Mauve, by Nicole Brossard. Montreal, Nouvelle Barre du Jour/Writing, 1985.
*
The National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
Critical Studies:
Translation A to Z: Notes on Daphne Marlatt's "Ana Historic" by Pamela Banting, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 1991; "I Quote Myself"; or, A Map of Mrs. Reading: Re-siting "Women's Place" in "Anna Historic" by Manina Jones, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993; The Country of Her Own Body: Ana Historic, by Frank Davey, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993.
"Although I think of myself as a poet first, I began writing both fiction and lyric poems in the early 1960s. My collections of poetry have usually had a loose narrative shape as I tend to write in sequences, or "books." As an immigrant, I'd long held the ambition to write an historical novel about Vancouver, but Ana Historic actually critiqued and broke open the genre, as it also increased my fascination with the potential for openness in the novel form. Influenced by the development of "fiction/theory" in Quebec by feminist writers there, I see open structures combined with a folding or echoing of women's experiences in different time periods as a way to convey more of the unwritten or culturally overwritten aspects of what it means to be alive as a woman today.'"
* * *
Read more: "Daphne Marlatt Biography - Daphne Marlatt comments:" - http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4556...
Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960-64, B.A.; University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1964-67, M.A. 1968. Career: Has taught at University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Western Ontario, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, McMaster University, University of Manitoba; second vice chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, 1987-88.
Awards: MacMillan and Brissenden award for creative writing; Canada Council award. Member: Founding member of West Coast Women and Words Society.
Other Work:
Plays
Radio Plays:
Steveston, 1976.
Other
Zócalo. Toronto, Coach House, 1977.
Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1998.
Editor, Lost Language: Selected Poems of Maxine Gadd. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1982.
Editor, Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. Vancouver, Press Gang, 1990.
Editor, Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1997.
Translator, Mauve, by Nicole Brossard. Montreal, Nouvelle Barre du Jour/Writing, 1985.
*
The National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
Critical Studies:
Translation A to Z: Notes on Daphne Marlatt's "Ana Historic" by Pamela Banting, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 1991; "I Quote Myself"; or, A Map of Mrs. Reading: Re-siting "Women's Place" in "Anna Historic" by Manina Jones, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993; The Country of Her Own Body: Ana Historic, by Frank Davey, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993.
"Although I think of myself as a poet first, I began writing both fiction and lyric poems in the early 1960s. My collections of poetry have usually had a loose narrative shape as I tend to write in sequences, or "books." As an immigrant, I'd long held the ambition to write an historical novel about Vancouver, but Ana Historic actually critiqued and broke open the genre, as it also increased my fascination with the potential for openness in the novel form. Influenced by the development of "fiction/theory" in Quebec by feminist writers there, I see open structures combined with a folding or echoing of women's experiences in different time periods as a way to convey more of the unwritten or culturally overwritten aspects of what it means to be alive as a woman today.'"
* * *
Read more: "Daphne Marlatt Biography - Daphne Marlatt comments:" - http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4556...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 26, 2022
13:50
Mannahill
none of either
saltbush, mulga dotting earth's red skin
'scrub' and 'plain'
scrubbed clean from plain as day she's just a plan Jane
who lives here
stares back unseen from windows we flash past
in constant motion lulled by the movement carrying us
forward into ourselves
we are fed we sleep are held nameless and content
umbilical track leading us to names on a map
Yunta, Paratoo, Ucolta, Yongala
words we head for down this birthing canal
'the oldest living language' shaping out tongues lips
to speak it out (though we do not known the meanings)
magnetic field of sounds
mouths move in anOther motion
* * *
'We entered this'
as if (blue note) water doesn't sing (ka . tomb . ah) an air of the under wells up urely from hydrostatic pressure. o the permeable stratum you sank well into. this is what the women know sunk in upholstered couches opening their doors and closing them creates a threshold children cross. this under. this world the private. into. one another. your ka crosses mine to all intents and purposes invisible. intent in the shadow a closed door creates a stone rolled over the mouth. the mouth groans sings its fervid blue note. 'you you' muffled under the weight of the others the ones who do not sing out loud. and the children coming for something peer into other worlds as the doors open and close on private places. in transit publicity across the Great Dividing Range that places most of this continent in a rain shadow. this shared weather does not mean the mixed grey of our coast monumental thighs breasts slide into (islands touching under the water). this is the brilliance of rainless weather everyone discrete a brilliance flesh dryly supports. bu they are opening doors and when they glance up water artesian wells in their eyes.
* * *
Two women in a birth
what is there between them? in this in. desire in their desire room in their room somebody in the body of not in but in doubling of. mise en abyme. out in the outback we are in the desert then or the abandoned. the desert of ice of love of stolen dreams desert of the heart. but what if the boundary goes walking? refuses to be that place the hero enters with his gold his drums his caravans - o the desert generals the desert fathers the desert rats the desert revolution. (we saw hoofprint of camels and never camels but scrub and many varieties of: we stood in the middle of nothing and it was full.) bleak obstacle-boundary-space to and for his adventures ground to his figure and exploits grave-cave she has rolled over in all that red dust (the year in endless here) given herself a shake and birthed into subject. the inconceivable doubling herself into life no slouch-backed beast (even double humped) heading for Bethlehem but the doubling of 'woman' into hundred camped in the middle of desert outside Pine Gap's nuclear base, and the voice of the desert is the sound of their singing out their anger relentless and slow as dunes walking. we are off the train in order to be in the desert no longer the object of exchange but she-and-she-who-is-singing (as the women have always sung) this body my (d)welling place, unearthed.
* * *
Imagin-a-nation in the heart of
as the heart surrounded by all this flesh feels its weight (the pressure of pumping blood through such a system) throws up its hands in surrender the heart is never isolate never away (women cannot get away) as the people who inhabit this emptiness will tell you heartland laid waste (desert is not waste) dug up for uranium irradiated in nuclear testing (the fragile ecosystem the heart is) will fence off sacred sites to keep out the acquisitive the heart is consumed the heart is not allowed to throb for pleasure in what surrounds it (imagine a nation at home in the 'deathless body') the heart must be used (up) (imagine a nation uncommitted to surplus profit) working for love not pay imagination is at home with emptiness imagination a-muses herself with the emptiness of words and boards the train of the sentence empty handed and makes off with it de-riding the end point of the Final Product (she is not for termination after all) she is well on her way to de-railing the 'long straight' which can only see its own track while she is out on either side (surrounded she knows does not mean surrender) she is also she is desert come in waves the waves she rides she rises up and overflows the words a round around the word surround
Mannahill
none of either
saltbush, mulga dotting earth's red skin
'scrub' and 'plain'
scrubbed clean from plain as day she's just a plan Jane
who lives here
stares back unseen from windows we flash past
in constant motion lulled by the movement carrying us
forward into ourselves
we are fed we sleep are held nameless and content
umbilical track leading us to names on a map
Yunta, Paratoo, Ucolta, Yongala
words we head for down this birthing canal
'the oldest living language' shaping out tongues lips
to speak it out (though we do not known the meanings)
magnetic field of sounds
mouths move in anOther motion
* * *
'We entered this'
as if (blue note) water doesn't sing (ka . tomb . ah) an air of the under wells up urely from hydrostatic pressure. o the permeable stratum you sank well into. this is what the women know sunk in upholstered couches opening their doors and closing them creates a threshold children cross. this under. this world the private. into. one another. your ka crosses mine to all intents and purposes invisible. intent in the shadow a closed door creates a stone rolled over the mouth. the mouth groans sings its fervid blue note. 'you you' muffled under the weight of the others the ones who do not sing out loud. and the children coming for something peer into other worlds as the doors open and close on private places. in transit publicity across the Great Dividing Range that places most of this continent in a rain shadow. this shared weather does not mean the mixed grey of our coast monumental thighs breasts slide into (islands touching under the water). this is the brilliance of rainless weather everyone discrete a brilliance flesh dryly supports. bu they are opening doors and when they glance up water artesian wells in their eyes.
* * *
Two women in a birth
what is there between them? in this in. desire in their desire room in their room somebody in the body of not in but in doubling of. mise en abyme. out in the outback we are in the desert then or the abandoned. the desert of ice of love of stolen dreams desert of the heart. but what if the boundary goes walking? refuses to be that place the hero enters with his gold his drums his caravans - o the desert generals the desert fathers the desert rats the desert revolution. (we saw hoofprint of camels and never camels but scrub and many varieties of: we stood in the middle of nothing and it was full.) bleak obstacle-boundary-space to and for his adventures ground to his figure and exploits grave-cave she has rolled over in all that red dust (the year in endless here) given herself a shake and birthed into subject. the inconceivable doubling herself into life no slouch-backed beast (even double humped) heading for Bethlehem but the doubling of 'woman' into hundred camped in the middle of desert outside Pine Gap's nuclear base, and the voice of the desert is the sound of their singing out their anger relentless and slow as dunes walking. we are off the train in order to be in the desert no longer the object of exchange but she-and-she-who-is-singing (as the women have always sung) this body my (d)welling place, unearthed.
* * *
Imagin-a-nation in the heart of
as the heart surrounded by all this flesh feels its weight (the pressure of pumping blood through such a system) throws up its hands in surrender the heart is never isolate never away (women cannot get away) as the people who inhabit this emptiness will tell you heartland laid waste (desert is not waste) dug up for uranium irradiated in nuclear testing (the fragile ecosystem the heart is) will fence off sacred sites to keep out the acquisitive the heart is consumed the heart is not allowed to throb for pleasure in what surrounds it (imagine a nation at home in the 'deathless body') the heart must be used (up) (imagine a nation uncommitted to surplus profit) working for love not pay imagination is at home with emptiness imagination a-muses herself with the emptiness of words and boards the train of the sentence empty handed and makes off with it de-riding the end point of the Final Product (she is not for termination after all) she is well on her way to de-railing the 'long straight' which can only see its own track while she is out on either side (surrounded she knows does not mean surrender) she is also she is desert come in waves the waves she rides she rises up and overflows the words a round around the word surround
Displaying 1 of 1 review