Annotations for Year: 1969

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

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?

“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.

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.

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.