TtD supplement #309 : seven questions for Daphne Marlatt

Vancouver writer Daphne Marlatt is a critically acclaimed poet and novelist, known for her novel, Ana Historic (1988, 2004, 2013), Vancouver Poems (1972) and Liquidities (2013). The bicultural production of her Canadian Noh play set on the West Coast, The Gull, received the 2008 international Uchimura Naoya Prize. And her long poem in prose fragments, The Given, won the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Award. In 2012 she received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.  Talonbooks issued her Collected Earlier Poems, 1968-2008, edited by Susan Holbrook, in 2017. In 2025, Chax Press, Arizona, released recent poems, Splinters & Streams. Her latest title is the chapbook So Now (above/ground press, 2026).

Her poem “playing it out” appears in the fiftieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “playing it out.”

A: First of all, in the context of that poem for Phyllis, there’s extension in “playing it out” – how a fishing line when cast extends in air before it lands, as reading Phyllis’ poem in the light of our darkening political time now extends the significance of what she was signalling in that poem. So, extending and playing out the meaning of what she points to. Also, there’s playing the fish (which is meaning) until it lands fully onto the line or several lines down.

When a poem first comes, line by line (well, for me, word by word, phrase by phrase) onto the page, it feels like the tentativeness of that looping fishing line before it lands in water.

Then, in the larger context of the act of writing: as a poem gradually extends/comes into its full import, “playing it out” also points to the simultaneity of overall message/meaning beginning to appear in the act of composing (I like the musical meaning of that word, “composing”) which, moment by moment, brings words into relation with one another, so musical/semantic relation (both), as they begin to connect in the extending line. So there’s play there, play as the elasticity of musical relations and semantic relations.  Including the breaking down of a word like “triumphant” into its incipient political syllables.

Q: How does this poem compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing?

A: On this Vancouver June Sunday of surprisingly heavy (winter) rain, I’ll try to answer your question (grief in the background for those in this life lost to mischance, happenstance, or simply age): “playing it out” is one of several poems to Phyllis Webb that have appeared in 3 of my books: first in the Later Poems section of Intertidal – “Locative, for Phyllis” – then more recently in Splinters & Streams – “further common-tary” – & now in So Now – “playing it out.” 

I was happy to get to know Phyllis in the early 90s when Betsy Warland and I lived on Salt Spring Island because the island, its weathers and fauna, its bird inhabitants, are so present in her later poetry, along with her very human concerns. I respected and loved that later work, was happy to have a hand with John Marshall in the first publication of her “anti ghazals” as the Island chapbook Sunday Water in 1982. So my poems to her occur in some sort of dialogue with her concerns, particularly of language, and the immediacy of her perceptual/political/philosophic attentions (her attention to all of these at once is startling). Each of my own 3 poems attempts to engage with that, though my main concern today is environmental. They move from long lines, even sentences in the first, to direct address in the second one, its sentence breaking down to “sheer event,” while the one in So Now engages one active verb in its first section (“voice”) which can also be heard as a noun, and breaks into political word play in the second, more fragmentary.  

Q: I’m curious about your conscious efforts to engage with Webb’s language. Is this kind of purposeful prompt one you’ve worked with poems by other poets? Is it an attention to the particular language that prompts or, as you say, a particular attention you wish to engage?

A: So answering this calls for a bit of life history. I was aware of Phyllis’ early work but not very interested in it. However, her Wilson’s Bowl was a turning point for me as a reader, especially the later poems underlining its title. And then when I found the spareness of lines in her earlier Naked Poems, well, they spoke to me. In the early 80’s I was working with the Vancouver Island poet, John Marshall, on his little mag, Island. So when he decided he wanted to publish a series of small poetry chapbooks under Island Press and one of them was Phyllis’ Sunday Water, “Thirteen Anti Ghazals” (1982), I was delighted to read them closely. Also some time in the late 1970s, Roy Kiyooka and I went over to Salt Spring to camp with my young son, and in Ganges he introduced me to Phyllis, who was living on the island – I think that was the first time I met her in person. By ‘83 I too was living on Salt Spring Island with my then-partner, Betsy Warland, so we saw more of Phyllis, the pleasure of encountering her quick intelligence, the intelligence that informs all her writing, and her acerbic sense of humour, all of it so evident in both her poetry & critical prose. Later, after I had moved back to Vancouver, I’d take the ferry over to visit her for the same reason.

In her later poetry there is such a quickness of response as each line arises in the immediacy of writing, a perceptiveness of both inner (mind) & outer (environment), which is probably what’s prompted me to write several poems to/for her work. It’s what I aim for in my own work. And I love her ironic wit, her engagement with the writing of others, her analysis.  The spine of my copy of her 1982 book of essays, Talking, that spine is permanently broken so the book falls open to her “On the Line” with its wordplays, tonal shifts – “I play by ear. And the eye.” Yes.

And to reply to your other question: yes, in all my poetry there are quotes from other sources, some of them poets, others various prose sources. In fact, there are 6 pages of notes documenting those sources at the back of my Intertidal: The Collected Earlier poems, 1968-2008.  Why?  They seem to be touchstones that feed the developing thought of a poem or poetic prose piece.  Echo notes. Resonators.

Q: How do you see your more recent poems in conversation with Webb’s work, as compared to those earlier poems, also working in conversation with Webb’s work. Do you see it as a further part of the same conversation with and through Webb, or is it something more complex? I always return to the idea of Robert Kroetsch, who said that literature is a conversation. Is that an idea that resonates with you, for your own writing?

A: Yes, definitely literature as a conversation resonates with me, rob. Over the decades my work has been in conversation with many others, by no means all writers, or even people. My very first book, Frames of a Story, was something of a conversation with the work of Hans Christian Anderson, his Snow Queen story.  Steveston began in actual conversation with the photographer Robert Minden and with several Japanese-Canadian fishermen and one Finnish fisher-woman in and around Steveston. It was also, and perhaps even more so, in conversation with the Fraser River as it pours into the Gulf of Georgia/Salish Sea. Vancouver Poems (later, Liquidities) were all in conversation with the city and its history. Then there was Double Negative, a poem-by-poem conversation with Betsy Warland as we crossed Australia by train. Reading Sveva was very much in conversation with the life and work (paintings and writing) of the Italian-Canadian artist Sveva Caetani. Enduring resonances stem from the writing/thought of poets Robert Duncan, Nicole Brossard and Fred Wah. I could go on... 

And then there are the faint traces of the ages-old roots of many of the words we use – these interest me, as if they are a meaning-resonance of our deep linguistic unconscious. 

As poets, I think we have our ears open for resonances of many kinds. More lately these seem to take the form of non-human living beings around me, whether trees or birds – partly because we are in danger of losing so many through increasing climate change from fatal human inaction. Turning a blind eye vs. keeping an ear open.

Q: Is that how you see your work, then, in terms of response or conversation? As you say, keeping an ear open? How do you think such an approach began?

A: Yes, very much as response on both sound and thought levels.

How did this start? Well, I think that being an immigrant kid from colonial Penang, Malaysia in 1951 and being astonished by how different the English language sounded in a Canadian context might have had something to do with this – I had to start listening acutely to my elementary school teachers and the kids around me in order to understand what they were saying. As for writing poetry, well, my earliest influences, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, all had distinctive voices that sounded uniquely present in each of their works and were quite different from one another. I think it was principally Duncan who taught me to listen to the verbal music of a poem, and that has stayed with me, maybe intensifying in my later poetry. A link to Phyllis’ early essay, “On the Line” in Talking – “the poem as listening room” – not just a CBC listening room but a much larger/more open listening room with that double sense of “room.”

Q: Do you see a difference across your collections in not only your approach, but in how you might articulate some of that active listening into composing new work? You’ve been writing and publishing now for decades, so one can’t help but wonder if you see a shift in how you engage with your own writing.

A: Hmm. Certainly there’s a shift in the form/s I’m using these days, as I’ve already mentioned. But “how I engage with it?” Given my age, the attention span is shorter which may account for the short-line poems. But I’ve also been working on something that seems to move between lines of prose & very short lines, transforming as it runs across the page. There seems to be as much engagement with the empty (resonant) space of a page as there is with the words that come to trace their way across it. No doubt there’s an influence here from my ongoing, decades-long Buddhist practice.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Who one keeps reading seems to be not only those poet friends one loves to keep up with (like reading “poetry news”) but, as you put it, those who “re-energize” my work. So I return to those like my longtime poetry companion Fred Wah, who always inspires me with the ingenuity of his sound/sense connections, Erin Moure, Nicole Brossard, bp Nichol for the same, and Larissa Lai, Phil Hall, Catriona Strang for their acute ears. I’m drawn to the work of those poets who combine a sense of place/community with verbal acuity in their various ways, Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Thesen, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Jaspreet Singh. When I return to the older poets I’ve learned from, it’s mostly Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky and HD. In addition, my work of the past several decades has been further informed by the spare lyricism of Japanese Noh dramas. More immediately, my current reading has to do with climate change (how could it not, given so many BC fires this summer?). I’m currently finding Rowan Hooper’s Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations inspiring.