Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt

by Daphne Marlatt, Susan Lynne Knutson (Editor)

Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatt’s poetry stands out as an essential engagement with what matters to anyone writing with a social-environmental conscience. Rivering includes poems inspired by the village of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. Also gathered into Rivering : lesbian love poetry from Touch to my Tongue ; a transformance of Nicole Brossard’s Mauve ; passages from The Given , winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional “Kuri” song from the Noh drama, The Gull ; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera “Shadow Catch.” Difficult, beautiful, heart-breaking realities of the twenty-first century are urgently immediate in selections from Vancouver Poems Then and Now . All of the poems speak to Marlatt’s poetics of place and of language as passage between distant or disparate human beings, and between human beings and the more-than-human world. The selections are framed by Susan Knutson’s deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatt’s “immediacies of writing,” a new lyrical essay investigating the act of writing. Closing with a walking meditation situated by her Buddhist practice, Rivering is both a “pocket Marlatt” and an introduction to one of the best poets of our time.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

"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...

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

used to live here, used to
the sweep of kabun's broom
edge of a tideline morning used
to run her energy along, alone
exulting in birdsong, liquid
trills, squawks

the long
reversible arc of his arm
swept up grass, not up, around
a kind of sortilege, kabun
at the bottom of the garden, not
looking up at the under
side of sky, in the easy
sweep of his arm, the long
advance of noon, a tide

poured through his broom
she ran, through crests of song
wave on wave, recede, while the broom
continues its faroff rush, like surf
coming in, she's gone

- Coming in, who, pg. 5

* * *

a confusion of times if not of place, though you understood when i
said no not the Danish Tearoom - the Indonesian or Indian, was in
fact that place of warm walls, a comfortable tarot deck even the
lamps pick up your glow, a cabin of going, fjords in there, a clear
and pristine look the winds eave through your eyes i'm watching
you talk of a different birth, blonde hair on my tongue, of numbers,
nine aflush with cappuccino and brandy and rain outside on that
street we flash down, laughing with no umbrellas, i see you face
because i don't see mine equally flush with being, co-incidence being
together we meet in these far places we find in each other, it's
Sappho i said, on the radio, always we meet original, blind of
direction, astonished your hand covers mine walking lowtide
strands of Colaba, the lighthouse, Mumbai meaning great mother,
you wearing your Irish drover's cap and waiting alive in the glow
while i come up worrying Danish and curry, this place full of
contradiction - you know, you knew, it was the one place i meant.

- This place full of contradiction, for Betsy Warland, pg. 23

* * *

skin and its evidents

to think to write
something resembles in
undecidable features

fiction culture cortex

M A U V E

M A U V E

cortex fiction culture

stains the other
mew maiwa mauve
malva rose core text
fiction rings round
skin immersed in
resemblance takes
the stain, sense
roseblue in tissue re-
membering

- from Mauve, for Nicole Brossard, pg. 30

* * *

"we make ourselves complicated"
Rinpoche in the gompa
yellow sail / swallowtail
large as a laugh
attaches itself to his sleeve

sitting simply "this
human body" vivid &
"at last attained"
(fuchsia perfect
fragile & changing
with each breath

(large as a laugh
& flutter-brief

wind-, lake-, pine-
mothers all round
tsombus, devas, pretas
all breath-beings & non-breath sky

offered thus

- "Complicated", pg. 42

* * *

walking out, walking our solid and intimate bodies down neighbouring
streets lesbian-friendly or not, noting the houses other dykes enter, the
rooms of artists of one stripe or another. taking note of averted faces,
elderly shoppers, ferocious dealers and those strung-out. or those who
nod and smile hello. walking our passing bodied down streets of
layered lives, lapidary, set in cement. the remains of stories.


touching the tree
touching the fence
alley alley house ...


or moments like that warm expanse of shallow ocean coming in,
body of water rippling sandflat history in names (Malaspina,
Narvaez). cool up to our knees, the dog cavorting free of heat stupor
(Sutil, Mexicana and Discovery). fur sprinklers glisten. late light's
almost amber, super-natural, islands to the west mere silhouettes
(Valdez, Galiano, all that's left of their encounter with Vancouver
some two centuries ago and just offshore - the same and not the
same river-ocean then).

we cavort, wade, turn to go - and there, hallucinatory, banked in
ahistorical distance, a vertical construct of glass and concrete flares
its dazzle, flashes "world-clasee city," the city Vancouver did not know
that there would one day be....

- Walking, pg. 52