Saturday 19 December 2009

And a Portuguese phrasebook

The writing of Daphne Marlatt has always had high notability quotient--writing so live you want to read in every direction, a reading experience so active you have to quit it every two seconds to write.  This of course keys into a piece of advice my father used to give me: Read with a pencil.  Causes marginalia, is the only problem.  The endpages of my copy of The Given have run out of room.  Writing that opens into its own past and present, says the first note.  The story in so many fragements, it is fragment where all the action is, says the last (awkwardly).  The way I'm thinking about my work in the next while, some Marlatt and maybe Paterson and one or two other books is all I'll take with me to Europe.  That'll give me plenty to read my own material through.

3 comments:

Brenda Schmidt said...

Thanks to you and your upcoming adventure I just pulled out my copy of The Given.

Gerald Hill said...

How about page 2--"in the still of the day we bring something we burn. the".
In reading from this book earlier this year, Marlatt remarked (with bemusement, not concern) that she has written novels people see as poems, and poems people see as novels. That's why I so want to work with her--a wobble/dance in a space among genres.

Brenda Schmidt said...

A wobble/dance! Yes!