Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt

Biographical Note

Biographical Note Daphne Marlatt (née Buckle) was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1942, spent her early childhood in Penang, Malaysia, and immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, in 1951 with her family. In 1964 she received her B.A. in English and Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, where she studied poetry and poetics with Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson and was involved with the Tish group of poets. In 1968 she graduated from Indiana University with an M.A. in Comparative Literature. Her first book, Frames of a Story, appeared from Ryerson Press in 1968, followed by leaf leaf/s from Black Sparrow Press (Los Angeles) in 1969. She returned to Vancouver in 1971. The subsequent years of her work were shaped by interest in the struggles of immigrants and the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. First with Maya Koizumi and then with Carole Itter, she collaborated on two aural histories, Steveston Recollected (1975) and Opening Doors (1979, 2011), and then with Robert Minden on Steveston, a long poem series with Minden’s photographs (1974, 2001). Her novel Ana Historic (1997, 2013) also stemmed from this concern and from her interest in the history of her adopted city, first announced in Vancouver Poems (1972). This interest in the spirit of the city and its various historical periods continues in recent work, The Given (2008), awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (2013). Much of her work is entwined with concern for the natural environment and for recognition of First Nations peoples and their living cultures rooted in this terrain. Early on her work was marked by a feminist awareness (Rings, 1971) and a critique of imperialism (How Hug a Stone, 1983). In the 1980s she was active in helping to organize the 1983 Women and Words conference in Vancouver; initiating the 1988 Telling It conference while occupying the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair of Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University; and co-founding the influential bilingual feminist journal Tessera. Her novels, Ana Historic (1988) and Taken (1996), together with poetic collaborations with Betsy Warland in Double Negative (1988) and Two Women in a Birth (1994), have been read as signi ficant feminist texts. Her collection of essays, Readings from the Labyrinth (1998), documents that period of feminist literary thought and engagement. A later poetry collection, This Tremor Love Is (2001), presents varied facets of love in the context of a Buddhist sense of transiency. xi Collaboration has been a significant aspect of both her editorial work and her writing. In the 1970s she co-founded a new prose magazine, periodics, and served on the editorial boards of several magazines, including The Capilano Review. Subsequent collaborations have led to a script for a short film, The Portside, directed by Aerlyn Weissman, which won the audience award at the 2009 Queer Film Festival; a contemporary Canadian Noh play The Gull, produced by Pangaea Arts and awarded the international 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize; and, more recently, a Noh-inspired libretto for the chamber opera Shadow Catch, produced by Pro Musica in 2011. At half a dozen universities across Canada she has taught literature, feminist studies, and creative writing and mentored younger writers as writer-inresidence . She has also mentored at the Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Studio, where she co-directed the Fiction/Narrative section from 2010 to 2012. Marlatt has authored and co-authored thirty books and chapbooks, several of which have appeared in subsequent editions. Her poetry has been collected in numerous anthologies; some of her work has been translated into Japanese, French, and Dutch. She is the recipient of two honorary doctorates as well as the Order of Canada, in 2005, and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2012. Daphne Marlatt continues living and writing in Vancouver. xii / Biographical Note ...