Mediation and Lived Experience - Daphne Marlatt Performs With Her Younger Self

There will be one poem read in my 1969 voice, and then I’ll read something from the book following that. We’re going to go from the beginning to the end but we’re certainly not going to read all of them.

Marlatt's cadence picks up on "certainly not" and as she laughs we can also hear laughter from an audience close by.

Laughter

The texture of the laughter tells us about the situatedness of this reading. It’s a small, packed room with over 70 people. The room seems to shape these moments of audience reciprocity as ones of intimacy: audience members are close together and close to Marlatt. This particular reading occurred at a record store in Kelowna, BC, called Milk Crate Records which was open for 8 years before it was required to vacate its location with less than a month of notice in 2019. This night was the final event before the closure of the store’s location, and the event was co-sponsored by Inspired Word Cafe poetry collective and the AMP Lab. The situatedness of the event in time and circumstance as well as space shapes the sense of intimacy that is audible in the recording.

Laughter, reciprocated from the audience

And I should say, by way of introduction, that the first part of these poems—it’s in two sections, the book—were written in Bloomington, Indiana, when I was a young woman, married at that point, trying to figure out who I was. And studying comparative literature at the university there. And translating the first book of prose poems by the French poet Francis Ponge, and they’re all poems about things, objects. It’s called Le Parti pris des choses (On the Side of Things). And it taught me a lot about language. The second part of the book was written in Napa Valley, California, where I was teaching part-time in a highschool there and suffering a great deal as a result of that.

My then-husband was doing a practicum in clinical psych at the Napa State Hospital.

Uptalk at end of sentence

Uptalk at the end of French-language title

In listening to her revisit this time, we hear a change in her vocal delivery when Marlatt talks about her younger self: she uses more uptalk, or high rising terminal, in this early biographical narrative than she does in other portions of the recording. Today, uptalk is most often identified as a feature of the speech patterns of young women and girls (see Warren 2016), but this vocal feature didn’t become predominantly associated with young women until the last couple of decades. There is an interesting overlay, here, of a newer trend in young women’s vocal style onto Marlatt discussing her youth. For us, it indicates discomfort and a recollection of the uncertainty and unhappiness Marlatt describes. The echoes that this discomfort has with contemporary gendered speech reveals Marlatt’s situatedness to us as listeners who interpret her speech patterns through our own context.

I was trying to figure out language, how to move in language. Language had become, thanks to the American poet Dee Alexander a very alive thing to me. Dee was a linguist, and he taught me a lot about the textures of language, how to think of language not in terms of how it relates to a thing—which Ponge certainly did not do—but how it relates to itself, musically, and in terms of meaning.

Extended o sound in "move"

In this discussion of Ponge and Alexander, Marlatt turns to a discussion of language in which she performs the poetics of embodiment that her poetry would come to be known for. The drawn out-vowel sounds in verbs that stretch the rhythms of her speech and then condense into direct and indirect objects. What Marlatt performs is a retrospective narrative of her development as a poet, away from objects and towards what language and bodies do. Rather than becoming legible in narrative events, she performs this development through her shift in vocal delivery that increasingly adopts the social voice, the self-reflexive “unique voice that signifies nothing but itself.”

Extended i sound in "alive"

So these poems are all experimental in that sense.

In this recording from 1969, Marlatt's vocal quality is at turns precise and rounded, articulating sharp consonants and mouthing the vowels of her poem. This delivery is at once part of the conventions of poetry voice at the time and part of Marlatt's colonial education which instilled particular oratory styles (see McArthur 2008). The background of the recording is quiet, almost muffled. As Shearer has learned through oral history interviews with Marlatt, this recording was made in a living room, likely Warren Tallman's.

i

that petal’s veins
rift blue
pared with razor

edge
tired eyes against the
gold dust, daisies

in a jug dyes
slowly into water
seeping pink.

ii

moon drops
early

roused rocks
dry already a
fire fly

threats rain it
flickers
greenlight over
night
sink’s
rust.

iii

white hood of a white
pickup parked on
green

trucks can be
steam risers, lettered
white

hollyhocks

of a sun a whirl,
cezanne, in a

tall tree.

iv

like it
flowers hai

l outside our
back door stars

saw as worm
clots trod

morning

glories in deeper
small shells.

rustling pages

As Marlatt switches to reading in 2019, her delivery leaves more space between words and less sharply delivers consonants. The portion of the poem that she reads is conversational, which further softens a now conversational vocal delivery.

made tenuous
love is not
the line’s run into
fishwater pulls up

nothing, loses

whatever named tree
silk or wet sleeves
hustle sky

love a word
without roots, light
bends a line going under
water as forms do, that wait to be gript

provocative extent a
jerk
not to be measured

no
sky bends down shoulders’
force the
fluttery tree
burns against it

growth measured form
shoulders care for
such extent.

down be
low the river
blows

caught
in its stride ice
sharpened houses
fishing for

out
the house, love’s
tyrranized yr mouth
throws up gates

hold?

if you think
so then let’s
go or let

some rapid’s in the ditch

yr cheek how
light pinkens on the in
side step
thru windows &

sun its starred
tongue!

the ways we’ve taken any
ways congeal &
glitter.

Rustling pages

A microphone clunk as the tape from 1969 switches on

As the reading switches between 1969 and 2019, we hear sounds like movement and clunking, alongside changes in the static background noise that differentiates between 1969—a staticky recording, but in a room that sounds muffled and muted—and 2019—a clearer recording in a crowded room. One sound, pages rustling overlaps with these changes in the sound quality of the recording. It is likely that the rustling pages are from 2019, but it’s not entirely clear which time they belong to. This indeterminacy suggests that the situatedness of sound media may also be indeterminate. Here, what Trent Wintermeier calls the “unverifiability of listening” in this anthology is also an unverifiability of mediation. We would venture that unverifiable mediation is similar to the "grain of address and its expressive physiological textures" that make up social voice, here expanding the concept of voice to the technologies that capture and shape it.

lynne who has been
shoveling snow

wet hair a cold the
cold gleams you wet
fortune’s turned

yr card given
crystals reflect you
rains enrich
yr finger ex
tended wants to know

you type?

showing you my fingers do
walk their, speak hair caught
dropt water barrettes
better than a million
movies kept

when they tore off the
roof rain bowed the
tractor’s claw dug walls fell
a pack of cards topt
the whole

hell

o face you aren’t
accustomed to look at life
savers you
offered me lime
greens yr mouth

bird dropt in, linnet
how’s yr new house?

In Bloomington we were living in Pigeon Hill which was a very poor part of town. It was the only part of town that as graduate students we could afford to live in.

Soft laughter from the room

Lynne was a little girl who lived across the street in a house that only had a dirt floor. The house was eventually torn down, and this was a poem for her and her curiosity about typing. I don’t think she’d ever seen anyone type before. 

Clunk/static sound from microphone; soft rustling

Okay, so two more from this period. 

Uptalk after "more"

Soft rustling

Actually, I think these are…yeah ok. I’m just going to read one. 

moon accoutered
faces
home in on
field mist

wheels float the
pavement
pillows back

we can expect
crickets

but the windows
close to tight
sided lanterns

shield our ears our
inexplicable hurry

as moth furred faces
toward light

Ok, great. [softly]

Marlatt signals to the audio technician to begin the recording.

“sun rises moon
rises too
in the east”

white
they stand long
leg’d in grass

their shadows in
star’d under
earth.

so
good the
morning ghostless
peaches here

bear room now
sun’s
done jealousy
as a wreath

bread tastes
sweet, peaches
fur to
hands’ feel

all that’s ripe
is.

You never know, when you're preparing for a reading, you feel like reading one poem and then when you get up there, you feel like reading another.

Laughter begins in the room before Marlatt finishes her sentence, louder than before, possibly from one person

Marlatt ends in lilting laughter that echoes the laughter in the audience

I’m just going to read the first part of another poem, “From Whose Dark.” This is from the second part of the book, written in California. 

i

these imprints
periods be
speak an anger
presses

keys

till such dark
holds the house
flares up a draft or

draught you spelt it
letting
in a wind no man
Stands the “trees

are all turning…
brown & yellow from the
draught”

as if the land were

an empty
hole with no
obscure fog
to mend it turns

integrate a
rime of hard like
lihoods these

days mean nothing looks
but looking out in fine
drizzles

draw me
to
the eucalyptus

leaves

Rustling pages

i

who moves as she
can will or choose
the body of her

wordless downspine the

choice’s non
existent place a
star vertebra’s
sun does
glow/grow a pace

contractions measure

extent as the upshot of her
radiance/raindance/dalliance

timing of a sort
of pleasure

ii

her

means are made
light of

iii

energy coiled
at spine
tip you touch
hisses

heat
too in
friction

that I want & not
wanting turn
sinister
(half of the moon lies

but that’s no star
light

all of a piece

iv

left is what I’m glad of some
times tired love
should be so mouthed about
this area of our
habitual pull, scarcely
luminous by such day dark is
what I love you in

after all given to
sun

in you (that, coming
stars in
eyes’ night

v

gravity lies in
yr weight, mass, under
stand

pull exerts a continual
skin to skin weather in
ternal or out
(as you said it’d
orbit:

how little that is, love, I do
go from you.

this door I thought
went under
(ground being
no house, or

door that was a thought
caught, creeks, houseless
in the wind on weak
hinges
left a

jar’s a limb one
live oak on
another.

By the end of the recording, Marlatt’s vocal delivery has lost much of the self-conscious performativity of the beginning. Even in these moments of situated voice, where she addresses the audience, she is focused on the poems that she sorts through and the decision of what to read. In this moment, we hear the reading voice begin to overtake speaking, situated, and social voice. It may be that Marlatt is more tired, or perhaps more comfortable in front of her audience. But what we hear is also the ways that written poetry, which she holds in her hands, becomes her object of attention. It would be tempting to interpret this shift within a conventional approach to literary audio, given primacy to the pre-existing textual artwork. However, we think instead that we hear the material object of the poem begin to shape Marlatt’s performance and embodiment. There is a compelling resonance, then, with the contrast between object and action that Marlatt sets up near the beginning of the recording. The mediated object of the written poem is shaping the action of reading, not just the sounds that Marlatt articulates, but her situatedness within a room and her relationship to audience.

Okay I’ll just read one. This is a short one. 

ab
sent ab
sunt

frogs in
short grass hands
turn off the hose

hop in
simul
taneous thot/

jumps you there
where it stays
hot nightlong

hours till dawn down
the dropt wind’s audible
steps now as walnuts
hit
ground.

In this final poem, Marlatt seems to blend the past and present reading conventions that we have heard in the recording. The poem she chooses demands the precision and round, assonant vowels most prominently featured in the 1969 clips. But it is brief poem, and her 2019 reading is also present in a softness and spaciousness which which she delivers the poem. Here, in a social voice, Marlatt is perhaps aware of her own voice across time.

Soft laughter, rustling

Well, that was…

Marlatt's final words, possibly addressed to someone sitting beside her, are cut off.