Daphne Marlatt at Selkirk College (1973)

Daphne Marlatt reads from Vancouver Poems, Rings, and “Steveston” manuscript.

Part 1: Daphne Marlatt reads at Fred Wah’s class at Selkirk College in 1973. From the recently published Vancouver Poems (Coach House Press, 1972), she reads “Strasse,” “Light. gets.” “Slimey,” “Go on,” “Our city is ashes,” “Visjna,” “Past Ten,” “Femina,” “Morning,” “Who could know,” followed by a coffee break.

“I think I’m going to read a series of, really, place poems,” Marlatt says early on in the reading. “Vancouver [is]the city that is my home city,” she explains, exhibiting a sense of familiarity and affection for the city in a series of studies of specific locations, including English Bay, Carnegie Library, and more. While “a lot of these poems seem terribly romantic” to Marlatt, they also include a somber note, reflecting on the high suicide rate in Vancouver and the death of a friend.

Part 2: After the break, Marlatt reads a final poem “Alcazar, Cecil, Belmont, New Fountain, names,” before shifting to reading section four of Rings (Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, 1971), about giving birth to her son Kit—compare this literary description of the birth process with Gladys Maria Hindmarch’s, A Birth Account, also available as part of the SoundBox Collection.

Marlatt closes the event with a reading from what she describes as “a piece called ‘Steveston,'” based on a gentrifying fishing community that used to be a, according to Marlatt, a primarily Japanese town and “the salmon capital of the world.” Keywords “fish, paper, words” accrete throughout the work. Marlatt and Robert Minden’s book Steveston would appear the following year (1974) from Talonbooks.

The sound quality of this recording is particularly high, making for an exemplary documentation of Marlatt’s voice and work from a particular historical moment. Apart from Fred Wah, acting as host and mentioning that George Bowering will be reading next in the series, the student audience’s voices are not audible.

—Karis Shearer & Klara du Plessis