On 19 September 2019, in collaboration with Kelowna’s Inspired Word Café, Daphne Marlatt read live alongside the archival playback of an excerpt from a 1969 recording of leaf leaf/s. As she specifies, “there’ll be one poem read in my 1969 voice and then I’ll read something, following that.” With the temporal gap of 50 years and the mediation of recording technology and preservation, her voice from the past is juxtaposed and brought into relation with her voice from the then present. Of course, this dichotomy of liveness and mediation is complicated by the layered recording and the audio file’s now doubly archival status.
leaf leaf/s is an important collection in Marlatt’s oeuvre and in the broader field of west coast and Canadian poetics. In her brief introduction, she references her influence by Francis Ponge, stating that “I was trying to figure out language, how to move in language.”—Klara du Plessis
| Bibliography
Marlatt, Daphne. leaf leaf/s. Black Sparrow Press, 1969. Print.
| Metadata
Marlatt, Daphne. “DHL Tape [Warren Tallman Interview of Daphne Marlatt, Vancouver, 1969.” 2012.002.016, Warren Tallman Fonds, UBCO. Spokenweb Search Engine. https://search.spokenweb.ca/catalog/4550