Daphne Marlatt and the Spirit of a Bioregion

To dwell with conifers. Eaves drip, echo cedar’s arm
shedding water down Spray scales waxy (cover
you lost.

-Daphne Marlatt from the poem UnderLiquidities Cover
published in Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now

Daphne Marlatt

Daphne Marlatt

My cultural investigation of the bioregion known as Cascadia continues with Daphne Marlatt, one of the best known Canadian poets, a participant in the seminal 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, feminist and Buddhist. It was in segment five of our January 11, 2014, interview in which she read the poem from which the above snippet was excerpted and she gives us a sense that water clearly shapes Cascadia more than your typical bioregion. Water, as mist and fog, may have a huge role in how things get masked here as well and I am thinking of the legendary passive aggression here and Daphne Marlatt does not get into it, but this is a little taste of what workshop participants will get when she facilitates the only workshop at the upcoming Cascadia Poetry Festival. The workshop is halfway sold out at this point and registrants will be limited to 15. I suspect that events like this will likely will be seen as quite important when the history of this bioregion is being written in the future. We should be as focused, perceptive and dedicated as writers like Daphne Marlatt. Hear segment five here.

In a Word, or Many: Where Language meets Terrain
Limited to 15 participants.

This poetry workshop (which does not exclude prose) will investigate the ways words come to us in the act of writing when we situate ourselves on the threshold between our outer and inner worlds, with language as the sill for that threshold.  We will look at how perception works linguistically, moving through lexicon and syntax, and relationally, within the locale, creatures and persons that sustain us. There will be writing time in the workshop as well as time for discussion and exchange.

Bio: Daphne Marlatt has published more than twenty books across a wide range of genres, including poetry, fiction, criticism, and theory.  She has also been the founder of ground-breaking journals, including Tessera and periodics, and an editor on several other journals.

She has published three innovative novels: ZocaloAna Historic, which received critical acclaim, and Taken.  Her early poem sequence, Steveston, led to the writing of The Gull (2009) an award-winning Noh play based on the traditional Japanese drama form.  Marlatt’s The Given (2008), a long narrative poem, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.  She was awarded the Order of Canada in 2006 for her contributions to Canadian literature.

 

About Splabman

Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
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