leaf leaf/s Reading

In a forthcoming essay in Open Library of Humanities journal, Karis Shearer writes about this audio recording: “West coast feminist writer Daphne Marlatt appears on more than a dozen recordings in the SoundBox Collection, including several early recordings made by Warren Tallman when Marlatt was in her mid-twenties and still an emerging writer. Marlatt had spent several years in the United States after finishing her B.A. degree at UBC in 1963. After publishing her first volume of poetry leaf leaf/s in 1969 and giving birth to her son in May of the same year, Marlatt found occasion to record an interview and full-length reading with her former professor Warren Tallman in July of 1969 in Vancouver. While Marlatt does not recall the reason the recording was made, the scope of the interview suggests Tallman was trying to understand how Marlatt’s poetic practice had developed since her time when he was her professor at UBC and to offer her the opportunity to describe on record the evolution of her poetic influences. Indeed, during her time in the United States, Marlatt had encountered the poets Dee Alexander and Clayton Eschelman whose thinking on linguistics and conversations about language opened up new dimensions for Marlatt’s poetry. In leaf leaf/s one can see an attention to sound and image, as well as an unusual-for-Marlatt use of the short poetic line” (no pag.).

Marlatt’s reading of leaf leaf/s has been the source of numerous events and research-creation projects at the AMP Lab. These include “Performing the Archive” that paired the archival recording with a live reading by Marlatt in the present, and an exhibition (co-curated by Karis Shearer and Klara du Plessis) that remediated the recording without relying on playback. One of the works showcased at this exhibition was Xiaoxuan Huang’s soundwork “leaf leaf/sounds).)“

—Karis Shearer and Klara du Plessis