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(Image by Michael Sowdon)
Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now, forthcoming from Talonbooks in March, gathers many of the poems from Daphne Marlatt’s 1972 Vancouver Poems, somewhat revised or in some cases substantially revised, and follows them with “Liquidities,” a series of recent poems about Vancouver’s incessant deconstruction and reconstruction, its quick transformations both on the ground and in urban imagining.
When asked to write for the Vancouver 125 Anniversary Issue of Poetry is Dead titled “Vancouver: Influence” in 2011, author Garry Thomas Morse elected to write the following piece about the influence of Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems on his own poetry.
When musing over poetic representations of our fair weather city of sea and rain and sun and fog, the work that continually resurfaces in my mind is Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (Coach House Press, 1972). Marlatt once described our beautiful city to me as “disjunct,” and this modifier also touches upon her style, which aside from being informed by American epics, finds a forerunner in the tidal rhythms of Earle Birney’s poem “November walk near False Creek mouth”:
And similarly in Marlatt’s poems, there is often a mysterious sensation of water lapping through logs or stone:
Beyond the lyrical line of many predecessors, Marlatt has a Braque-ish approach to writing our city of surfaces, heaping image upon image in collagist fashion until the reader’s sensorium is positively overwhelmed by incessant reportage:
Also, like bus or streetcar, Marlatt’s poetry surges forth and then brakes to create a most profound effect:
And for anyone who has heard Marlatt’s operatic cry of “O gioia” from Verdi’s La Traviata will recognize her characteristically ecstatic cry in the following fragment:
One fascinating thing about this collection of poems is Marlatt’s tendency towards epic, which evades the referents and tropes and intrusive authorial voice of many other poems that contain history. In other words, the reader is offered a mythical depiction of our city that is rooted in locality and the experiential, albeit with a frequent nod at the surviving artifacts of immemorial time. Is she riffing upon dusty latinate lines about Ilium or talking about the Great Fire of Vancouver in 1886? Or speaking about more recent tent cities?
In addition, perhaps more than any other collection, Marlatt’s poems shore up the lost and forgotten fragments of our city—along with the names that rouse and revive our memories, such as Blackball Ferry, Sylvia, Joe Fortes, Aristocrat, The Bay, Hastings Mill, Victory Square, Carnegie Library, Tomahawk, CNR, Ivanhoe, etc.
Or is there value in remembering local or national history when it is so swiftly subject to obliteration? At the time of writing, when we purchase our highly recognizable blankets and Olympic sweaters at the oldest company in North America, does it matter to us that the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company is owned by a private equity firm based in America? Does it matter to us that the architecture loosely based upon the Parisian Arcades has morphed nicely into The Hudson condo developments?
One may speculate the role of the poet is to help us remember, and even more than in her novels, the voice of Daphne Marlatt becomes a means of preserving our collective memories as a city, as with the Robson we have lost forever:
For my own part, as a Native of Vancouver in every sense of the word, I consider this book an outstanding cornerstone of my poetic heritage. For once, I feel the poet is acknowledging my so-called territory in a kindred spirit without imposing enclosures or cultural dividing lines. On another level, in accordance with the myth-gathering that went on in the 70s, Marlatt raises more than one of my own ancestral ghosts in her poems, including “Bukwus” and “BaxbakualanuXsiwae”, the cannibal spirit of my mother’s people, the Kwakwaka’wakw:
In terms of lyrical influence, I would be quick to credit George Bowering for disclosing aspects of William Carlos Williams in his work, to say the least. However, it is Daphne Marlatt who has not only revealed disjunctive poetic forms that challenge the lyrical voice in order to record local history and geography, but it was originally her influence that helped me to allow for an emotional sensibility that was to synthesize with rapid undercurrents of thought in my work, starting with the prose poem and moving on to various stories and novels. And after the fact of writing my latest book of poetry Discovery Passages (Talonbooks, 2011), I realized that she had somehow influenced the crafting of the work on a subconscious level. Without a doubt, for better or worse, I would not be the writer I am without Daphne Marlatt or without her poetic key to the city.