Liquidities - Softcover

Marlatt, Daphne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889227616 ISBN 13: 9780889227613

Publisher: Talonbooks, 2012

Synopsis

Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now 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.

Vancouver Poems were a young woman’s take on a young, West Coast port city as it surfaced to her gaze in the late 1960s. In these “re-visions,” it remains verbal snapshots, running associations, sounding locales and their passers-through within a shifting context of remembered history, terrain, and sensory experience. Phrases break open in successive instants of perception, moving outward to observation and inward to linguistic play. Irony shifts tonal levels and traces the effects of imported colonial culture paving over local indigenous cultures.

“Liquidities” (from liquid assets, cash): the slower, more introspective rhythms of the city some forty years ago speed up in this new series as wordplay intensifies to verbal collision. Images traffic faster, with quicker jumps through milieu and temporal strata. Forest terrain transforms to high-rise architecture. On edge, littoral, surfacing through the litter it leaves, the city’s genius wavers in and out of focus through its tidal marks of corporate progress and enduring poverty.

About this title

About the Author

Daphne Marlatt was born in Melbourne in 1941 and spent much of her childhood in Malaysia before emigrating to Canada in 1951. Marlatt was at the centre of the West Coast poetry movement of the 1960s, studying at the University of British Columbia and with many of Donald Allen’s New American Poets, most notably Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Much of her postmodernist writing would be attuned to the adjustments, struggles, and accomplishments of immigrants. While Marlatt attended UBC (1960–1964), her literary associations with the loosely affiliated Tish group encouraged her non-conformist approach to language and etymological explorations.

She was a co-founding editor of two literary magazines: periodics and Tessera. She co-edited West Coast Review, Island, Capilano Review, and TISH. In 2004 she was appointed as the first writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in three decades. She directed the Fiction stream of the Banff Writing Studio from 2010 – 2012.

Her early writing includes prose narratives on the Strathcona neighborhood of Vancouver and of the former Japanese-Canadian fishing village of Steveston, and several poetry books. Selected Writing: Network is a collection of her prose and poetry, published in 1980. More of her writing can be found in The New Long Poem Anthology: 2nd Edition (2000), edited by Sharon Thesen. Daphne Marlatt’s This Tremor Love Is (2001) is a memory book – an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from her first writing of what was to become the opening section, A Lost Book, to later, more recent sequences.

Marlatt has been a featured poet on the Heart of a Poet series, produced in conjunction with Bravo! TV. Her recent work includes The Gull, the first Canadian play staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese noh theatre, and winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize.

In 2006, Marlatt was appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of a lifetime of distinguished service to Canadian culture. In 2009, she was awarded the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry, for her innovative long poem The Given, and in 2012 she received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

after noon’s bill put paid to young and out of our heads with ecstasy driven re-current (over the hump that 1930s bridge) all-new drive or lift-off from collision with what’s closing in debt paralysis now light’s red they’re racketing through cost incline inclined to sail sign for mercurial sparks of evanescent brands we’re leaning into the wind of our passing on acrylic legs in line in rhythm in astro-visors unimaginable to those 1960s ones who jumped from bridge billboard ledge fourth avenue windows looking for seventhheaven’s magnolia flesh or sought a way out from (through) midnight’s evacuated depth sufficiently peopled with our own reflection tower on tower eclipse since Blackball’s splash since Peace Parades’ high hope it’s high enough for tugs at flood tide Taylor’s coach-lamp pillars raised a glow above that human flood some 7,000 in from RR yards the wangies stickers pokey stiffs with canned heat, crack now, flaring up through vein flambeaux or stained our mirror glass is electronic tweets ten secs at most gone Digital Native If you lived under this bridge you’d be home by now

Edition details

• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0889227616
• ISBN 13: 9780889227613
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96