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The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference: Robert Creeley’s Contexts of Poetry with selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journal Entries

The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference: Robert Creeley’s Contexts of Poetry with selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journal Entries

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Editor: Ammiel Alcalay
40 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding

Lecture and conversation with Allen Ginsberg from the landmark 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, with excerpts from the journals of the prominent Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt, chronicling her attendance as a student. Additional archival materials from Margaret Randall discussed in accompanying afterward.

Author Biographies:

ROBERT CREELEY was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in
1926 and died in 2005. He grew up in adjacent Acton and has often
written of the very particular qualities of life there. In 1943 he
entered Harvard University only to leave for the American Field Service
and duty in Burma and India from 1943 to 1944. Although he returned to
Harvard, he ended up getting a degree from Black Mountain College where
he also taught. Establishing the Divers Press in Mallorca, Creeley’s
work as an editor and publisher were instrumental in defining new forms
of American literature, as was his intense correspondence with Charles
Olson through which, among many other things, they came to define a very
unique notion of the “postmodern.” Teaching would become a beloved
vocation and he taught in many places, to many ages, and in many
contexts, finally settling into a long-term position at SUNY Buffalo
where he stayed from 1967 to 2003, only leaving then to accept a
position at Brown in Providence, Rhode Island. The relationship of
Creeley’s work to his life is intricate and vast, a kind of archipelago
of intimate and sustaining relationships, with all the difficulties
implied, that may come to define an age. Embedded in his poems, prose,
critical work, and correspondence, we can find a history of American
literature in the second half of the 20th century written more densely
than in almost any other source one can think of.

Poet, novelist, essayist, and editor DAPHNE MARLATT was
born in Australia in 1942 after which her family moved to Malaysia
before settling in British Columbia when she was nine years old.
Educated both in Canada and the United States, Marlatt was profoundly
affected by her encounters at the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference.
Taking that experience to heart, her work has consistently pushed at the
borders of form and subject, and at the limits of personal, political,
historical and sexual identities or conditions. In a 1979 interview with
George Bowering, Marlatt said: “I love that phrase, the body of
language. And I’m trying to realize its full sensory nature as much as
possible. We live in the world. That’s my basic assumption. I don’t want
to get out of this world. I want to learn everything I can about what
it is to live in this world, to be mortal, which I take to be in the
body.” Her earlier relationship to place, reflected in such works as
Vancouver Poems (1972) and Steveston (1974), when she stated “I’m
interested in the interaction between the eternal & what’s
time-bound, & what’s particularly local,” gets taken to even further
lengths in her novel Ana Historic (1988). Here desire itself has a
history as Marlatt weaves many different sources into a complex
reimagining of limitations. While celebrated in Canada, Marlatt’s work
is not well enough known in the United States, particularly given the
strong affinities she had, at a crucial point in her writing life, for
American writers.

Selected Archives: