When I embarked upon an email conversation with Susan Knutson about her experience as editor of Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt, I could not have anticipated the warmth, depth, and thoughtfulness with which she would answer my questions. Her responses were rich with insight, and inspiring, about the impact of Daphne Marlatt and her work, about Marlatt's place in Canadian literature and the women's movement, and about the healing, live-giving power of poetry itself. 

For Knutson, the last point is no metaphor. While editing Rivering, Knutson was involved in a near-fatal car accident, and she credits reading and re-reading Marlatt's poetry as integral to her recovery from brain trauma. 

In our conversation, she tells the story of her accident and recovery, and how these came to inform her experience as editor of Rivering, and also what she learned from all of this about poetry a "live-giving" force. 

*****

49th Shelf: I've never encountered Daphne Marlatt's work before, and while I found it very difficult and demanding, the book was a really wonderful introduction to her poetry. So thank you for that. You've created a really engaging, fascinating book. A beautiful selection, indeed. 

For this interview, I am interested in your experiences editing the book from a professional point of view and also what it meant to you personally as you began to recover from your car accident. As a writer and an academic, you might have supposed yourself to have a thorough grasp on the nature of poetry, but I wonder if you learned something new about what poems are for and what they do as you engaged with editing Rivering during such a difficult period in your life? 

Susan Knutson: Thank you for your interest in the voyage that is Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt. I think the story of it is worth telling.

In July, 2012, after consulting with Daphne Marlatt, I signed a contract to edit a selection of her poetry for the Laurier Poetry Series. Louise Forsyth had edited Mobility of Light: The Poetry of Nicole Brossard, for that series, and I loved how it introduced Brossard’s important and challenging work in one volume, with an illuminating introductory essay by a scholar whose work I admire. Immediately I hoped to see such a volume for Marlatt, as in significant ways, her career and Brossard’s have been parallel. Happily, everyone agreed it was a good idea.

We were just getting going, however, when I was almost killed in a violent head-on collision on Highway 101 outside Bridgetown, NS, on the peaceful sunny morning of September 13, 2012.

I pulled through in the ICU at the Halifax Infirmary, under the care of an excellent surgeon who specializes in polytrauma. People prayed for me, and I felt it, and my consciousness of the invisible world expanded. In October, I was transferred to my “home hospital” in Digby, NS, where I began to read through the volumes of Marlatt’s poetry, making notes for the future collection. I think I read through all of the volumes three or four times. Each time, I would forget what I had thought, and so I would begin the process again.

In her theoretical work and in her poetry, Marlatt has traced how language and cognition are intertwined in our human minds. What we can think, and know, comes into consciousness through the labyrinthian passageways of words, sounds, sentences, letters and stories. Richly layered language full of musical and semantic surprises, disclosure and play—poetry—courses through our human minds like water over the earth. Meaning grows.

Before the car accident, I was studying language and cognition. Afterwards, during my seven-month stay in three hospitals, with my mind traumatized into forgetfulness by shock and morphine, I felt the life-giving water that poetry is gradually re-open the channels of my mind. My short-term memory and capacity to think improved.

So, in answer to your first question about what I might have learned about poetry that I did not know before, this is the answer. I knew before that poetry is supremely intelligent, and beautiful, and critical, and wise. Now, I understand that poetry is something like water. It is life-giving, for our human minds.

49th Shelf: I love the idea of poetry opening up channels in the mind—such an image seems inevitable when I consider the poems in Rivering (and its title!). 

What were your priorities and intentions for the collection when you began this project? How did your accident change your overall vision for the book?

SK: You ask about our original priorities and intentions for the collection and I had to think about this—so much intensity has come between then and now. I am speaking not only of the car accident, but also of the intense “second wave” women’s movement and the ways that many women writers and scholars, mostly young at that time, took up Hélène Cixous’ call in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” to rebuild our lives around the potentials of women and writing and language. This back-story is crucial. 

Rivering began its journey at Congress, in late May of 2012, when I visited the WLUP book table and came across Mobility of Light: The Poetry of Nicole Brossard. This WLUP series, now at 20 volumes, is publishing selected works of key Canadian poets.  Each book is put together by a volume editor who selects the poems and writes a scholarly and accessible introductory essay, and each volume features an original afterword by the poet or, where that is not possible, by an eminent scholar-poet in the field.  The series is in the spirit of the New Canadian Library begun in 1958 by Jack McClelland and Malcolm Ross, and it is part of the current process of institutionalization or canonization of the Canadian poets whose work is represented there.

I was thrilled to see that Nicole Brossard is represented in this series, and to see the name of her editor, Louise Forsyth, whose scholarship on Quebec’s women writers is irreplaceable. Brossard was one of four women poets represented, and I believe she is still the only francophone—her poems appear with facing translations. I struggle to properly convey Nicole Brossard’s stature in a few phrases. Since the 1960s, when she first appeared on the Quebec literary scene during the heyday of the Quiet Revolution, her thought—as embodied in her poetry, novels, essays and educational and editorial work—has been crucial. Her engagement as a lesbian feminist writer, theorist and activist is unparalleled, or very nearly so—this is where we come to Daphne Marlatt, where there are powerful parallels. 

Both Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard published first poetry collections in the 1960s, when they and their mostly-male collaborators were breaking ground with language-centred, experimental poetics and far-reaching social change. Deeply committed to their local environments—Greater Vancouver and Montreal—and responding to their particular experiences as women, both became activists in the feminist movement of the 1970s and ‘80s where their poetry, fiction and theoretical writing engaged dynamically with a wide range of readers and helped to create a public for feminist and lesbian ideas and texts. 

In 1981, Barbara Godard organized Dialogue, a women-focused conference that brought together writers from English Canada and Quebec, and it was there that Marlatt and Brossard first engaged in a serious way with each other’s work. From that point forward they collaborated formally or informally on a significant number of feminist projects and publications including Tessera, Women and Words/Les Femmes et les mots (1983), Gynocritics (1987), Mauve (1985), Character/Jeu de lettres (1986), the Third International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal (1988), and “Only a Body to Measure Reality By: Writing the In-Between” (1996).  My own career is implicated with their collaboration, as I would write a doctoral dissertation (1989) and a book, Narrative in the Feminine (2000), placing their work side-by-side.  All of this is why, when I saw Mobility of Light at the WLUP table at Congress, I looked right away for the volume that would become Rivering.

Questions of feminist literary historiography aside, Marlatt’s poetry deserves inclusion in the lps by any measure, and I am very happy to have facilitated. Rivering is a beautiful book, and its creation has been a source of deep solace to me during this difficult time. That solace is something I could not have foreseen at the beginning of the project.

49th Shelf: Marlatt is not an easy read. What guidance do you, as a reader and a scholar, have for those of us who are, in Rivering, encountering her work for the very first time? 

SK: Earlier in our email conversation, you articulated an important context for me when you characterized the poetry as “difficult and demanding ... and requiring of ... attention.” I have found that both your question and that context are, in effect, excellent questions. Your words have provoked a lot of thought.

The easy part of the answer is that with its publication, Rivering has very likely just become the best point of departure for a reader encountering Marlatt’s work for the first time. It is the intention of the book to invite readers into the world of Marlatt’s poetry in a manner that no single collection would be able to do. The selection of poems, Marlatt’s signature afterword, and my introduction, “Daphne Marlatt's Embodied Language Poetics,” together provide lines of entry into her work.  My essay situates Marlatt’s poetics historically, and identifies critical social and environmental justice issues that arc through the book—the fight against racism and class exploitation, the WWII Japanese-Canadian internment, salmon fishing on the Pacific Coast, feminism and love between women, the environment and protest against toxic pollution and ecological destruction. Marlatt’s afterword, “immediacies of writing,” illuminates the poetics that she has developed over many years of writing, revealing their particular relevance for today.

The poems in Rivering are ordered chronologically according to the date of composition, so that the book traces Marlatt’s life as she moves from Malaysia to England to Vancouver (with her eyes on Steveston), to Salt Spring Island and then back to Vancouver. Several poems, and perhaps especially “Street opera,” “Complicated,” and “Lift. step. drop,” speak to the role of Buddhism in Marlatt’s life, forming another thread that a reader might choose to follow. Another kind of coherence is created by the language play—Marlatt’s poetics of listening to the semantic, the phonetic, the musical.

My current favorite poem in this collection is “Comes walking.”  Many of the elements I have mentioned are powerfully present: the city of Vancouver (shared home, threatened), language play (bitter bittern), difficulty (readers need to do a little chemistry research), all building to a searing heart cry of environmental protest, spoken by a bird. Marlatt ventriloquist.

I have been running through some points of entry for a reader encountering Marlatt’s work for the first time—elements of coherence. Before I stop, however, I want to agree with you that the poems are difficult, and do require attention. But—as you know—it is the gift of poetry to require attention—this requirement is what makes poetry transformative.  As a species, now, we must transform, so in this sense, poetry is more important that ever.

Susan Knutson was born in Vancouver but moved in 1988 to the francophone Acadian community of Clare, Nova Scotia, to teach at Université Sainte-Anne. She has authored numerous articles and one book, Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard, and has edited Canadian Shakespeare (2010) and the interdisciplinary review Port Acadie.

Daphne Marlatt, poet, novelist, essayist, oral historian, and Noh dramatist, has been writing and publishing for four decades. Her many titles include Vancouver Poems, Steveston, and most recently, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now, as well as the novels Zócalo, Ana Historic, and Taken. Her novelistic long poem, The Given, received the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Award. She was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in 2012.