An Excerpt from the Feature Article

by Lia Light

Writing the Net: A Fine Mesh Sense of Story

she keeps insisting herself on the telling

because she was telling me right from the

beginning stories out of life are stories,

true, true stories and real at once—this is

not a roman/ce, it doesn’t deal with heroes

     -Daphne Marlatt in Ana Historic

This year, poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt, came to Vancouver Island University to deliver the 2008 Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet Lecture. Her presentation, “At the River’s Mouth: Writing Migrations,” focused on her collection of historic poems Steveston, and was paired with the release of a CD of her poetry recorded from the Steveston collection. Marlatt is typically a genre bender, and her poetry CD competently crossed and muddied the boundaries between different art forms. Words, spoken by Marlatt, were accompanied by sounds, haunting sounds from various unique instruments, including a saw blade played with a violin bow, and a conch horn from the sea bottom.

     The migrations Marlatt describes in Steveston are multiple. The subject matter on the surface is partially that of migrating salmon, and the release and return of the tides. What Marlatt also deals with in the work are life cycles—not only of fish but of the people who live to the dictates of the fish and then, with the fish’s absence. She writes of the progression of the town of Steveston itself, its own kind of migration; a transformative movement through time, from one state of being to another. Steveston started as a fish cannery boomtown but over the years became a corporate cannery town, and finally, when the salmon had gone, mostly due to exploitation by over fishing, barely a fishing town at all. Sensual and exact, the language of Steveston plays on the mind, and on the body imagined, to invoke mourning for things lost, but also to provoke understanding and desire.  

Full version can be seen in PORTAL 2009

Portal 09 would like to thank the following Friends of Portal