Daphne Marlatt
Daphne Marlatt
Biography
Born in Australia, Vancouver poet Daphne Marlatt immigrated to Canada from Penang, Malaysia, as a child in 1951. She is a critically acclaimed poet and novelist whose cross-genre work has been translated into French and Dutch. Her long poem, Steveston, with photographs by Robert Minden, has been taught regularly. The bicultural production of her Canadian Noh play, The Gull, received the 2008 international Uchimura Naoya Prize and The Given, her long poem in prose fragments, was awarded the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Award. In 2005 she was appointed to the Order of Canada and in 2012 received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Her recent poetry titles include Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (2013), selected poetry Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt (2014), edited by Susan Knutson, and Reading Sveva (2016). In 2017, Talonbooks published Intertidal: Collected Earlier Poems, 1968–2008, edited by Susan Holbrook. This was followed in 2021 by Then Now, a hybrid form of archival excerpts, poetic responses and new poems. Marlatt has taught and served as writer-in-residence at various universities across Canada, as well as at the Banff Writing Studio and Sage Hill Writing.
Poetics Statement
“Poetry, because it enacts the mutability of both language and perception, can reflect the constant mutability of our world. In the underground verbal webwork made by the roots of words and their changing semantic accretions through time, I find prompts I wouldn’t have thought of. The various ways in which words connect – from semantic offshoots to the variety of melodic clusters that poetry has always worked with—these links form a verbal analogy to the ecological webwork we actually live within.
I want porosity, spaces in the mesh of syntax, that will allow contingency to operate, those casual chance coincidences between sound and meaning which arise unintentionally. This pushes me beyond the borders of what I think I know into unfamiliar territory, moving closer to what is fundamentally the mystery of our existing at all. A mystery that has to do with the interweaving of our singular existence with that of so many other beings, with what we inhabit in common: a vast radiating web of mutual life-support we continue to irreversibly damage.”
“In common usage we have the phrase reaching for words, as if the words we want are elsewhere but it seems to me that in poetic composition (and I like that sense of a putting together that “composition” implies) words come in waves marked by gaps. These gaps function minimally within the movements of ongoing thought and are registered by line-breaks, or they occur in a rolling wave of several phrases as in a long line, or else in a series of line fragments marked by a “stanza” gap. In the writing process, this gap may indicate a tangential wave of thought coming into view at a cross-angle, creating a disturbance. Then there’s waiting, in the gap, for that disturbance to take shape in further words or lines.”
Sample of Poet's Work
l’heure bleue
below freezing warm red mist off Astoria’s all-night sign
cut by house roofs here one bright back porch two rooms aglow
alley dark bulk of mountains apparition snow halflit
here, here
atmospheric scattering of the not-yet
can’t find my way back to monsoon heat with S who walks faster
through Chulia Street’s motor bike zip by parked cars cement
blocks dodgy underfoot tiled walkways crammed bike-by-rattan
seat grey husky chained to a platform backpackers chat up resident
eaters snack at white kopi or kedai or cappuccino she’s looking for
bee hoon me for char kway teow
so we get to the padang’s white colonial government porticoes
seat of state & static rain trees lift dark crowns to fading
light it’s rainbow drift as if from sea level some mystique
through horizon light the trees the esplanade en flot oh
a man blowing
bubbles for kids’
outstretched finger reach
pffft and gone
transiency
the breath-world / seeded / placed / piece after piece
Fred Wah
wind tree rustle rimming the park’s joyous hubbub one-block green pierced by kid cries a dad’s indulgent laugh dog bark a skimming
Frisbee someone’s mom pulls her child from hysterical play as
wind catches our blind in repeated knocking …
piece after piece
who planted those giant chestnut trees? who recalls the residents of crowded wooden houses firewood stacks small veggie plots long
hours in laundry or shops?-- this whole block cleared to make
a park
time’s signature
change in today’s rhythm arrives with warm weather drunks on benches waterpark play odd musical outbursts morning tai chi and midnight screams ‘you fuckin asshole’…
resonant through body the block’s inner-city transition
breathing day to day