TY - JOUR
AU1 - Szabo-Jones, Lisa
AB - In an estuarine habitat, flux is constant. The river’s mouth, a transitional environment of material and historical converging and churning, forces of turbidity, of ripping currents transforms place through the processes of predictable and unpredictable interactions. Water flows inland, seaward, downward, and upward, transported alternately by tides, floods, runoff, currents, clouds, rain. Salt and fresh water mix; land and water blend. Because of this influx, because rivers tend to meander, their edges erode, many often believe that all that pours into a river eventually makes it out to sea, and there, disperses, disappears, leaves behind little or no residue: a sense that nothing holds fast. Yet, while water and sediment flows alter substrates, shores accumulate matter: river washed stone, soils, a half-buried toilet seat, a matted knot of nets snaking out of cordgrass, the sodden and rotting remains of a seagull speckled with sand, an empty mayonnaise jar, endocrine disruptors. And, within these matrices, generations of life thrive, survive. The adjoining land and its more resilient inhabitants (human and other-than-human) adapt to this estuarine roil. Daphne Marlatt’s 1974 long poem, Steveston, brings the eponymous fishing town and experimental poetics into this convergence of ocean and river and terrestrial ecosystems to expose thresholds, the precariousness of homing, resiliency, and transformability of human and other-than-human communities reliant on and disrupted by fishing industry, and to a large extent, determined by the discriminatory politics of colonial-settlement.2 Through the river’s mouth, Marlatt reveals vestiges of historical and current social-ecological contexts hold fast, do not so readily wash away generational injustices. In Steveston, the delta’s material articulations, the mundane objects of daily living and work, mingle with social discourses to compose both the Japanese-Canadians’ and salmon’s epic migrations and returns. Through this complex material interplay emerges Steveston’s fraught human histories of colonialism and industry, dislocation and return: Coast Salish, Japanese-Canadian. Marlatt’s material poetics perform this confluence as a social-ecological translation of materialized waste—human and other-than-human lives—a material agential mattering that discloses alternative politics of return and environmental literacy to the toxic discourses that degrade the estuarine ecosystem. Marlatt’s open form creates an experimental poetics that captures the material discursive intersections emerging between diverse human and salmon cultures that destabilize the Fraser delta’s social-ecological integrity. The material discourse, the objects embedded in and encompassing the human community, performs a horizontal ecological networking that embodies and translates the precarious and exploitive social-ecological dynamics of the Steveston community. The discursive quality of matter, its performative capacity to translate these social-ecological relations not only challenges the predominant market economies of waste, but also by having salmon, waste, and delta converge with historic practices and events, gives voice to the matter that historically matters rarely, yet has persistent unsettling, emergent influence on human material and social politics. Steveston consists of a cycle of twenty-three poems connected by ongoing formal conventions of experimental language, linked thematic threads, and first-person narrative. Steveston, the town, located in Richmond, British Columbia, was, in the early 1970s, a remnant of the former bustling fishing and cannery industry of pre-World War II. Steveston implicates humans in the material processes of the Fraser estuary, reveals how mistreatment of the river and salmon find corollaries in historical and current mistreatment of marginalized indigenous and non-Anglo-European settler groups. Marlatt’s evocation of industry’s exploitation of river, salmon, First Nations, and the Japanese-Canadians posits Steveston the town as an amalgam of complex, competing material and cultural inflexibilities and resiliencies, a politics of exclusion and adaptation. It is this which maintains Steveston’s relevancy forty-three years later. Matter has a way of slipping around cultural constraints. She establishes how a town’s—a community’s—threshold collapses under competitive and exploitative constraints. The town’s functioning, built around “running” (11) industry, illustrates the founding narrative, “its container, uncontainable” (15), “ringed with residue” (11), is incapable of washing away the “undesirable” contents that enable industry to operate. Under such force, surrounded by a river that “is alive” and “swollen” (15) with matter, the town cannot maintain “as it stands.” Its edges give way under the “burning” (11) and “urgency” (15) of converging and emerging material and cultural (colonial) detritus. What overflows under this pressure pushes readers to reimagine a town not imagined but one that has always existed in variant forms. On the surface, this is a town that builds industry perched on unstable “silting islands” where people and things, caught in the “seizing silver wealth” of “Boomtown” (30), “stray into settlement” (29). Yet, Marlatt observes that boom “settles down into an order of orders” (30) of racialized hierarchies tied to a single resource industry, “fortunes/made & lost on the homing instinct of salmon” (56). The Pacific salmon story as “homing instinct” runs alongside the “homing” stories of the Japanese–Canadians: from their migrations to and settlement in Canada, to their hand in building Canada’s Pacific fishing industry to experiencing their livelihoods and acquisitions stripped from them as they became targets of discriminatory government policies and competing industry interests, then to their internment during World War II under the War Measures Act, and for some of those who survived, an eventual return to the coast of British Columbia. At a time when non-European settlers’ roles and indigenous histories in Canada’s nation building history were under- and mis-represented in educational institutions, through Steveston, Marlatt challenges that neglect. She illustrates how the material traces, those material discourses of industry and daily life that allowed one story to dominate and suppress others, when taken up in the confluences of that living river’s economy, weakens. That which seems to have been swept away, leaves “deposits” (30) that “[cling] to now as evidence (in time –)” (31), resistant, resilient, takes root in and unsettles the singular colonial “story” (31).3 Resiliency has four aspects: latitude (the greatest degree to which a system can be altered before losing its capacity to recover); resistance (the degree of obstacles to changing a system); precariousness (the proximity to a system’s limit or threshold); panarchy (the interactive social and ecological influences on stability and flux of a system) (Walker et al., n. pag.). To perceive an ecosystem as sustaining a singular, uniform threshold promotes a mis-reading because an ecosystem’s resilience—its attempts to attain a stable state within an environment of flux—is constituted by “cross-scale dynamics” (Walker et al., n. pag.), a complexity of interrelational levels. Negotiations of adaptation, resistance, organization, and transformation occur at and across multiple scales between and across diverse biotic and abiotic elements. A cross-scale dynamic perception foregrounds, as Walker et al. contend, how “changes happening simultaneously” can, because of “the complexity of the situation [become] a barrier to understanding and action” (n.p.). Stacy Alaimo underscores matter’s role in helping to grasp this complexity because, as she observes, “[r]esilience, when considered from a more-than-human perspective [ … ] reminds us of the worldly agencies, energies, and transformations that can generate unexpected vital beings, life forms, and relations” (“Bring” 1). This understanding makes more apparent anthropogenic interference and intervention. As such, Susie O’Brien argues, resilience provides percepts for “making sense of breakdowns as a constitutive process rather than an accidental element of complex systems” (4). In Steveston, breakdown takes multiple forms: matter, relations, communication, economies, communities, thresholds, resiliency. Resilience and breakdown course through both town and poem. The material traces reveal the instabilities of historical and current discourses that undermine the potential for healthy coexistence and subvert any “profitable” gains in sustaining an adaptive social-ecological system. Performing a syntax that strays from traditional linguistic constraints, and incorporating dialog of Steveston residents, Marlatt exposes corporate waste. Marlatt challenges “This corporate growth that monopolizes/the sun. moon & tide, fish-run” (18) as to who or what determines what healthy determiners of a community’s thresholds are: the bodies that pollute or polluted bodies. Her writing as performative process constantly engages in the moment of interaction of discursive thresholds and so constantly determines, challenges, redefines. The material transgressions, recreations, and observances of thresholds, materially constrain and enable discourse in Steveston, manifest through poetic form. And, as with any discursive constraint, in a poetic translation of matter, as Don McKay reminds, language as tool—technology—is predisposed to breakdown (21). Breakdown transforms matters, collapses that space between word and world, makes visible the hidden, so as Marlatt writes in “Steveston as you find it:” “the subhuman facets of life […] we live off” translate the “human” facets of life (19). The biophysical world must be thought of as relational, resilient, and in constant flux, but there needs to be in place material discursive percepts for making visible thresholds, a pragmatic application of personal and collective constraint(s). The challenge that surfaces is how we translate constraints when we are interacting with a material agency that sets up its own sets of exchanges and constraints and/or that may countermand any good-intentioned human efforts. The constant may be change, but unpredictability is also ever present. Rather than situating constant flux as undermining any potential for stable ethical relations with the other-than-human, Samantha Coole’s observation underlines that matter’s unpredictability helps to draw attention to “enduring continuities—such as patterns, path dependency, institutions, systemic logic—whose turgidity and congealing remain particularly important for the analysis of power” (453). Her point suggests, that in uncertain power dynamics, we can see which material interactions are beneficial to sustaining the health of an ecosystem, while also keeping in sight how precarious their continuity truly is. Material agency sets up, I would argue, a respectful cautionary power dimension through percepts that set up physical forms and permutations of dialogic4 practices that trace, contest, open, and mobilize sight (environmental literacy) and action, but which in their agential capacities make us tread lightly in relation to these responsive material constraints. What becomes imperative to reading literature like Marlatt’s Steveston, is paying attention to matter’s translational performativity as these percepts enact (to adopt Coole’s words) “the resistance, recalcitrance, and resilience of matter in social explanation” (454). Constraints facilitate a human self-reflexivity that cannot readily divorce itself from matter as matter, cannot be so readily separated from social conditions. Matter re-orients ourselves to “the way concepts and experience, meaning and matter, emerge historically and reciprocally as embodied actors with/within material and social environments” (Coole 455). Resituating these relationships as corporeal engagements foregrounds discursive practices as physically located immersive practices, to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s conception, of bodies affecting and being affected by bodies (xvi). As the poem’s title suggests, “Steveston as you find it:” is about “the physical matter of/the place (what matters)” as animate and thus always shifting in place. Marlatt sets “what matters” as a parenthetical aside, lodged between the enjambment of “the physical matter of/the place” and “meaning” (19). The parenthetical offset, however, foregrounds the statement rather than situates it as an incidental, secondary thought. And, lest the reader think such a statement anticipated by the evocative term “meaning” will lead to abstract reflection, the speaker pulls the reader up short and admonishes, “don’t get theoretical now,” as she directs the reader to the place (what matters): “the cannery” (19). The cannery though seems less like place than organism: “It’s wet,/& there’s a fish smell. There’s a subhuman, sub/marine aura to things.” (19). The cannery is “slick on the surface,” and “packs,” chops, and contains the human lives that do the same to salmon bodies. That which is living is “Reduced to the status of things” to “matter that doesn’t matter” (19). The “things” (human, salmon, aprons, gloves, box, forklift, “nonsensate” and “insensate” non-bodies and food) are as we find them. Yet, each time, just as the speaker seems to get into the rhythm of describing the town as “you find it,” she pulls up short, interrupts the flow to declare, “That’s not it” (19; 20), and then again attempts to rearticulate how “you find it” (19). In such a paradigm, no thing is passive, and no thing free from its originating contexts and constraints, its discursive processes. Marlatt’s conflation of human, salmon, artefact, and industrial machine into a seemingly singular indivisible materialized animate entity is this ongoing composing of a singular interactive but not definitive world. Her conflation is punctuated by her indeterminate challenge to the refrain, “It’s life.”: “Their life?” (21). Whose life? Workers, salmon, cannery? The answer is not one but all, as in the poem’s final three lines, human, cannery, salmon, river converge, “pounding with the pound of machinery under mountains of empty/packer pens at night, the endless (white) stream of flesh passing under the knives,/to be given up, gone, in a great bleeding jet, into that other (working) world” (21). Marlatt’s conflation of human, technology, and animal flesh (natural resource) as production flowing as a steady stream into the “(working) world” refuses to let human discursive matters wash away. In that mixing are churnings: erasures, submergences, reemergences, exclusions, adaptations, transformations, and new materializations. As that “great bleeding jet” pours “into that other (working) world,” matter’s discourse (vital, responsive, affecting and affected by) and human languages immersed in the elucidation and giving (their) voice to human and other-than-human matters are co-constitutive (21). They are indivisible. In the case of Steveston’s salmon culture, those constraints, conditions, and practices perform through “the pounding of the pound of machinery”; hands wielding knives generating and processing flesh day in, day out fill the river’s mouth. Matter translates itself—materializes—and escapes into the language of Marlatt’s poetry: an iterative, interactive material poetic performance of community composed of mattering and breakdown of containment. It becomes a netting and mattering of fish, human, machine, house, marsh, water, blood, offal, odors, spitting, giggling, clanks, and currents of a “(working) world”: “enmeshed as it is with all the other bodies that give it life” (Marlatt, River’s 39). This estuarine mixing retains not just traces of the biophysical matter but the sociopolitical naturalized practices that enabled their mixing, test their resiliencies. To see these naturalizing practices, Marlatt’s poetics initiates “a simultaneity of experience” (Marlatt, What Matters 70) that finds form through a tension between free-form poetics—loose, long lines and punctuation play—which paradoxically draws attention in that seeming free-flow, the limitations of language and constraints on imagination. As part of perceiving the details that compose Steveston, her paradoxical poetic processes make visible the creative currencies of natural and human matter as they interact in and respond to their social-ecological contexts. She opens Steveston, for instance, with a double imperative: the title “Imagine: a town” and the first line “Imagine a town running” (31). Imperatives are finger snaps, calls to pay attention: directives on how to do something. Marlatt employs the imperative to instruct readers how to initiate the process of mattering that compounds the term’s culture and material into an indivisible cultural and material exchange. In “Imagine: a town,” Marlatt propels the imperative forward with quick movement, only to have it trip up, preventing imagination from running rampant headlong into a fire or into the river. She writes:  Imagine a town running             (smoothly?  a town running before a fire  canneries burning         (do you see the shadow of charred  stilts on cool water? do you see enigmatic  chance standing just under the beam? (11) Though she does not inhibit imagination, she appears to caution restraint—or at least, to cultivate an imagination that sees past the “shadows” that often cloud reality for the sake of appearances. Otherwise, one might “go off the edge” (Steveston 11). Marlatt’s form is influenced by Black Mountain poet’s projectivism, in which movement, sound, breath is conveyed through formal elements, such as syntax, punctuation, spacing. The language captures “‘the stimuli produced within the body’ as the body of the poet meets and responds to the outside world” (Ribkoff, n.p.). The pauses, the obstacles in Steveston, inhibit the reader from letting the imagination run rampant; yet here, regardless of her attempts to slow the reader down, as the poem progresses, the “chance” of running over the edge is inevitable. Running over the edge, however, does not necessarily lead to chaos. As a poetics that writes out of the self as response to external influence, Marlatt resists writing about the self and seeks ways to break down the discourses that constitute the self as subject. In this way, the writing process becomes a material, a physiological process between material bodies that draws attention to the ways in which perimeters of subject identity have been naturalized. Here, the confluence of human bodies and physical matter as they are called to be imagined is Marlatt demanding readers recognize that “the ecology principle in words forming one or many phrases runs whatever lies outside & forms also what we see—to say what kind of ground we walk on or whose air we breathe” (Marlatt qtd in Knutson xiii). Such a view insists that language and external world are shaped through exchange: each responding and influencing the other. The imperative of a running imagination disrupts a mechanistic for an alternative, organic world view, a more realistic, dynamic view in which unpredictability undermines assumptions of ecological and cultural equilibrium. Marlatt thus lets the imagination run, but in this instance the imperative direction seems to uphold Don McKay’s claim: the poet “is supremely interested in what language can’t do” as gesture to the biophysical world, to “use language in a way that flirts with its destruction” (32). Such a gesture becomes an enactment of a movement or action of artistic process through a medium (text). The thoughtful poet, then, lets language go wild, run off edges, lurk in shadows under the pilings, and play with chance. As the first section of the collection, imagination, leaping from generic “town” to personified “town running,” is itself set to “running”—imagination flows out into the white space of the page, drops into a blank indented space only to smack into a parenthetical stop that barricades the interrogative “(smoothly?” (11). The typographical layout prolongs and runs the enjambment into a convex “wall,” which gives the visual impression of bouncing back, “running” backward to return to the first line, implying that this is not going to be a smooth run. After the interrogative pause, again she urges the imagination to run “like a town running before a fire / canneries burning,” only once more to run off into the white space of the page, drop into an indented white space, and smack against another parenthesis, which now encompasses two open-ended questions—questions, like the first one in the poem, that cause the reader to pause and check her impressions, to translate what it is she actually sees, not as the poem begins, to imagine (11). Death, at first glance, seems to be Steveston’s dominant trope—returning and dying salmon, a toxic river, ghosts, graves, “dead-end” jobs, and the demise of the salmon industry run deep. However, to get caught in the net of death is to lose sight of the countering transformative trope throughout the poem, and as I later illustrate, ends both the 2001 and previous publications of the cycle of poems: generation. Return, generations, and generating, in Steveston, resist the finality that death proposes and reconfigure it as transformative potential. Marlatt leaves readers with the sense, thus, that this town, this river, these people, these wharves, these canneries, and “pilings” of “bodies of men & fish corpse piled on top of each other” are a single, constant shifting currency that emerges from matter, which in turn creates matter and so on (11). But these currencies, language among them, have their limits, caught in the nets of politics, translation, and discrimination. In Steveston, Marlatt reconfigures ecopoetics (and thus diminishes language’s power) by depicting language and matter as inseparable in a re-visioned ecological exchange. In a recent reflection, readers see that Marlatt maintains such views: To get beyond the limits of what we think we know, we need to immerse ourselves in both [language and ecosphere], ditch our manipulation of them for our own particular ends. Language is a site of inter-relations that require listening. Listening is not only in relation to culture (idiom) or person (emotion), but to relations within the melodic and the semantic play of language itself. This approach can open up the ways in which language determines what and how we recognize our physiological interconnections with, even our inter-dependency on what exists both within and outside our habits of thinking. (“Sites” 35–36) Exchanges of Ecological and Economic Matter Marlatt’s play on the tensions between language and market and ecological returns in Steveston enacts a process of (de-)materialization, which occurs in colonizing tendencies. Her emphasis on different forms of currency proffer a way to a decolonized thinking that not just resists but transforms the purviews and practices that support monocultural stasis. Her “economy of nature” runs on social-ecological currency, a refusal of denying anthropogenic influence, as in the pun of “re-turn” throughout Steveston (which I explore more fully later). Her ecological model calls for an organic study of emergent forms, processes, and ultimately values, but not those based on financial “net” gains. The current market system that is supposed to keep the economy “running” in Steveston is creating detrimental “net” losses. Though competition is a part of an ecosystem’s functioning, she asserts, cooperation is an even more significant characteristic in maintaining a habitat’s health. Competition, Donald Worster points out, is an element of modern economics, but economics also, like an ecosystem, relies on complex systems of interdependencies: “self-reliance, it would seem, is a thing of the past” (293). But Worster importantly suggests, in corporate terms interdependencies are too often a code for inter-relationships built on variances of exploitation, capacity for or resistance to unlimited economic growth: “Cooperation is defined, and absorbed by the functions of production and consumption” (293). Worster’s assertion emphasizes, thus, that the outcome of thinking in these economic relational terms leads us to transferring and applying human expectations of efficiency and managerial practices to the other-than-human world. A material agency foregrounds how absurd and dangerous this thinking is. We live in a biosphere that has “always-changing, non-steady-state systems where chance—randomness—is inherent” (Botkin 285). If we remove the equation of unpredictability, we overlook the other multi-scalar forms of exchange at play in the world that can effectively collapse human economies. Marlatt posits a condition of exchange that is not based on financial returns, but on reciprocal debts borne out of an open collective exchange between tangible affected and affecting bodies. Karen Barad claims, “’Individuals’ are infinitely indebted to all others, where indebtedness is about not a debt that follows or results from transaction but, rather, a debt that is the condition of possibility of giving/receiving” (“On Touching” 214). In social-ecological terms, this return is often a collectivity of cooperative reciprocal processes. Marlatt’s Steveston remains an ongoing reminder, as she observes in “Life Cycles,” that “we’ve managed to forget: this urge to return, & returning” (48). Marlatt’s open-ended system of poetics in Steveston, to employ Barad’s conceptualization of debt, pronounces “specific material relations of obligation—being bound to the other—enfolded traces of othering. Othering, the constitution of an ‘Other,’ entails an indebtedness to the ‘Other,’ who is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the ‘self’” (“Quantum” 266). The ethics arises in the constitution of the relation itself and so not “a calculation to be performed” (266), but an opening “for reworking the material effects of the past and the future” (267). As with entanglements, there remains also the potential for disentanglement: the opportunity for returns, for unravelling, making amends, and forming new configurations, new knots of translation, networks of relations, new and suppressed stories. “Steveston, B.C.,” which ends the 1974 edition, and “Sun & Moon thru the Japanese Fishermen’s Hospital (1898–1942)” serve as echoes to “Generations, generations at the mouth,” added to the 2001 edition. Read together they complicate and blur the distinctiveness between object and subject and initiate insight into the differing forms of temporal, economic, and intersubjective thresholds to which the town negotiates. “Steveston, B.C.” plays on the origin of town as both geographically located in British Columbia and its geo-temporal and ideological location (before Christ). The narratives embedded in the title find reinforcement and resistance in the poem through abbreviated histories of Steveston. The condensed histories that open the poem, paradoxically in their poetic economy of language, signal that words can never say enough to account for the social-ecological injustices. Further, in their economy, what falls short or is left out becomes a questionable pronounced absence that would make these more comprehensive histories. For instance, Marlatt begins the poem with four short verse paragraphs, each beginning “Steveston:.” She then defines the place in different ways: first, as general geographical, second, by commercial successes and failures, third (the longest), as site of social injustice, and fourth, as “continuing” story (56). Her progressive repetition of variants of locate throughout the poem (“located,” “locations,” “locating,” and “locates” (56–57)) lead to further variants on local: “(in situ)” (57). Coinciding together with the question “(where are we?)” (57), Marlatt challenges the impulse to fix location. In her multiple attempts to locate and to define Steveston, this question, she proposes, can never entirely be answered because “(in situ)” (57), also framed in parentheses, drifts as a typographical boat through a poem of moving confluences of water and unpredictable language, drifts in a poem where the initial parenthesis never closes. Further, the fourth iteration indicates “hometown [is] still for some, a story: of belonging” (57). Unlike the other three abbreviated descriptions that locate in material artefacts and events, the fourth Steveston is something more ephemeral, a questionable “continuing?” as “a story: of belonging,” and dislocating. The question mark alludes to unpredictable outcomes that emerge from the historical cultural and ecological convergences and disturbances, which in Steveston serve as points for re-convening in the present. It is not that history necessarily repeats itself, but that “We obscure it with what we pour on these waters” (57) or leave many lives “undeciphered, / unread” (57). Through its repeated variants of reading or not reading, Steveston suggests that there is a history of neglecting the biophysical and cultural relations that perpetuate the same singular patterns of “story” emerging (and so their compositions become predictable). But as Steveston’s multiple iterations and her choice of the article “a” delineate, it is not the story. It is only a story told by some, but not by all. In “Sun & Moon” Marlatt shows, particularly through appositives, how reading abandoned and ruined matter translates on these “unread” stories as empathetic effect. U. Yamamura, an American-Japanese dentist, horrified by the living conditions of the Japanese in Steveston, established on the property of Phoenix Cannery in 1898 the modest beginnings of the Japanese Fisherman’s Hospital. The Japanese community funded the hospital. (Steveston Recollected 37). The hospital helped deal with the obstacles of language and the racist treatment received at the main hospital located in Vancouver, discrimination further fueled by “anti-Japanese” governmental policies (labor restrictions) (Steveston Recollected 35–36). The hospital’s closure date of 1942 coincides with the Canadian government’s denouncement and internment of the Japanese-Canadian community as a potential national security threat. The poem entwines the affect of the return with historical allusion to Japanese-Canadian experience. Like “Steveston: B.C.,” history is embedded in the title and its full scale emerges through material traces of the hospital ruins. In this respect, Marlatt creates another abbreviation: Steveston is “generations, generations” and a “ghostly place” (Steveston 50). An ambiguous “you” accompanies the speaker as she explores the building and grounds, and only as we come to the last verse paragraph of the poem, do we sense “you” may be Steveston. Marlatt personifies Steveston, though, in such a way that the “hand on the weathered planking” as they climb “up the stairs” of the hospital (49) does not seem an exaggerated troping. Because the body only appears as disembodied hand and eye, the human form appears ghost-like, yet lingering upon or touching wood, hospital sign, marsh, and boat, the body blends into the surroundings. This transformation emerges more clearly, if not still ambiguously as the speaker repeatedly addresses “you.” The address seems an unformed appositive gesture, you, Steveston. This reading finds resonance in a moment earlier in the poem:  siding, planks we climb up (the stairs:  there is no way I can avoid  looking your look as you turn:                 wharf, boat, yard arms  & the moon glimmering its strange eye down river, down where the mouth is. (49) The image of “planks we climb” void of punctuation lets the noun drift, which again sets up the possibility of reading this as another appositive planks, we. Further, the odd phrasing “there is no way I can avoid/looking your look as you turn:” evokes not a doubled gaze, seeing what “you” are seeing, but seeing “you” as you look when you turn. Blocked by a colon, “turn” suggests a metamorphosis. And, it is at this point “you” undergoes a transformation. “You” becomes “wharf boat, yard arms” that seem to stretch toward “the moon glimmering its strange eye down river, down where the mouth is” full stop (49). Steveston is not just the generations of Japanese-Canadians, but through “eye,” “mouth,” and “arms,” is a presence made material by the hospital. The generations of Japanese-Canadians are as established in the community as the cycles of “Sun & Moon” that shine “thru the Japanese Fisherman’s Hospital” before and from 1898 to 1942, and as Steveston documents, post World War II. When Marlatt returns nearly thirty years later to write “generation, generations at the mouth,” this alternative currency, the generative processes of the Earth, as Lorraine Weir reads this line (60), are further compromised. The interrelational exchange between corporeal flesh and matter still struggles to free itself from the “networth” of a market economy. The insights gained from “Sun & Moon thru the Japanese Fishermen’s Hospital (1898–1942)” is a local transmission of place as a “webwork” of “connective tissue” of words that link to the ecological networks that sustain us (Marlatt, River’s 28). What has emerged in this “re-turn” is an accretion of waste, not an arrival at selvedge/self end but a sense of being at “stuck / edges [ … ] a frozen exchange streaming emptiness” (Steveston 62). Three decades later, the salmon, Steveston’s interconnecting web of tissue, are compromised as commodities of over-consumption: clans of salmon, chinook, coho, gathering just off shore, backbones no longer intact, steam-pressured in millions of cans, picked clean barbecue leavings in a thousand garbage bags ripped open by cats, rats, they can’t find their way back (Steveston 61) Salmon (“millions”) stripped of their mettle (“backbones”) and packed in another kind of metal leave in their wake an apocalyptic vision of ecocide. This vision asks what kind of “return” is this as an economy, as a culture, as a “blueprint” (Steveston 61) for sustaining the health of a biophysical environment when there is no reciprocal exchange, no space for regeneration. The “giving/receiving” (Barad, “On Touching” 214) is lost, and so “they can’t find their way back” (Steveston 61). The “millions” and “thousands” caution the emergence of a tipping point, a threshold that prevents regenerative return. Marlatt’s approach, which is contingent upon the movement and exchange of languages and material, makes matter matter through pronouncement of an ever-elusive absolute grasp of the biophysical world. In “generation, generations at the mouth,” Marlatt’s writing demonstrates how that elusiveness extends to conceptualizing long-term thinking of place through the extraction and consumption of resources. Her open formal structuring demonstrates how languages and materials migrate across, over, through, and beyond the text to evoke how other-than-human agency eludes human appropriation and thus dominance and remain vulnerable to colonization and entanglement and degradation. These “matters” of concern in Steveston converge as intertwining nets of artistic literary and material expression. “Poetry,” Marlatt observes, “because it enacts the mutabilities of language and perception, can reflect the instability of our world” (River’s 25). It is the awareness of instability, further emphasized by what Ribkoff calls Marlatt’s form’s “punctuation and grammatical incoherence” (n. pag.), that opens thinking on human limitations, particularly communication. Worster explains well, and Marlatt demonstrates, that ecology took much from economics, but economics took little, if anything, from ecology. If this were not the case, then built into economics of growth would be an awareness of “the environmental limits to man’s growth” (Worster 294). How social-ecological collapse and resiliency occurs in Steveston remains a testament to how forty-three years later, in 2018, caught up in the unpredictabilities of constant flux, belief in unlimited growth remains fixed. Marlatt stresses the incongruity of the conflicting models in “generation, generations at the mouth.” The scarcity of end-stops creates a buildup of language matter (elisions, enjambments), captures the waste and potent transformative possibilities latent in Steveston’s waterways. The regenerative cycle of return that “we’ve managed to forget: this urge to return & returning” (48), which the “first peoples” promoted, has become lost, and in its place the river is “choked,” strangled by “urban outfalls” (61). All of this picked over and “ripped open” (61) waste must go somewhere. As humans exploit the ecological web works, such as the overfishing of Fraser salmon stocks, so too, language becomes a similar mode of exploitation (of both humans and environment) to meet “our own immediate ends” (Marlatt, River’s 28). Marlatt claims these ends equate as “industrial success” (River’s 39). Reading her language/ecology analogy, “industrial success” then indicates not just a degraded ecosystem, but also homogenization (degradation) of the diversity of communication in a region. In an interview with George Bowering, Marlatt notes, “Language is leafing out, it’s everything that is growing that is organisms, that is body [sic]. It’s a body … We live in the world” (42). The “mouth” of the poem thus takes on double meaning: living estuary and language. Generations of “progress” running on industry result in the river’s deterioration. Diminishing regeneration leaves us poorer, dependent on a materialistic and discursive “progress.” The trashing of and refusal to acknowledge the ecosystem’s human–material interactions compromise and inhibit healthy relations with the ecosystem, and subsequently with each other. In the outfall of these toxic relations, “[w]ith the salmon disappearing, what is our imprint on this ecosystem?” (Marlatt, River’s 39). She asks and replies, what happens when we “refuse, refuse our interrelation, refuse to pour back/what is the body’s blueprint? Impermanent, shifting energy blocks in its own becoming” (61–62). That which is immanent—potential benefit—atrophies, disappears. As with “Sun & Moon,” in “generation, generations at the mouth,” Marlatt enacts another metamorphic turn of bodies: back to the roil of salmon, river, and human. Although at the onset she clearly identifies the body as salmon, “body” becomes something else, something more. Her word choice combined with the complex material interactions of “impermanent, shifting energy blocks in its own/becoming” (62) force us to see the emergent interconnections that are yet to be. Those multiple generations of industrial and colonial discourse manifest as toxic materializations that “block” a social-ecological thinking that would benefit the ecosystem’s integrity and by extension human health. In this manner, Steveston, to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (5). If one considers the composition (or decomposition) of salmon, detritus, pollutants, salinity, and siltation in a river delta, then the river does not so much project fluidity—smooth running—as it does, to borrow Laurie Ricou’s paradox, as map a system of “nets and networks—containers made up of holes” (207). As Marlatt’s poetic translation of material processes enacts, the boundaries have limits to how far certain matter can transgress those boundaries, the integrity of thresholds to contain or let slip through matter. The water’s material composition does not reflect a “fluid movement of subjects in and out of intersubjective connection” (Relke 186), as the skepticism in the poem’s opening interrogative implies. Marlatt’s purpose for conflating human and other-than-human interaction into ecosystem function anticipates Stacy Alaimo’s point regarding transcorporeality: it “denies the human subject the sovereign, central position. Instead, ethical considerations and practices must emerge from a more uncomfortable and perplexing place where the ‘human’ is always already part of an active, often unpredictable, material world” (Bodily 17). Marlatt draws humans into ethical consideration by placing them in their own waste. Waste takes on multiple valences—literal and metaphoric. In this manner, to adopt Alaimo’s word, Marlatt “ruptures” market economics of transaction. Marlatt’s answer to her question is that we need a materialist “re-turn” (62): “verbing the noun out of its stuck / edges and into occurrence, currents, curre- … we’ve lost the verb” (62). Her play on consumption and denial in this section accentuates the reciprocal transformative exchanges involved in ecological and cultural processes. The convergence proposes an emergence of possibility: as “bodies feed on bodies” (River’s 39), bodies constitute bodies. We are not just what we eat, but we are what we discourse, indivisible human and material discourses affecting and being affected by one another. She confirms this transformative process by blending culture and material together so that readers cannot tell what or who constitutes the bodies of language, salmon, river, humans: “at the mouth of the river, clans of the possible are gathering, the chinook, / the coho rivering just offshore are us” (Steveston 62). Her ambiguous placement of “rivering” centered between “coho” and “us,” and the omission of punctuation between “just” and “offshore” blurs the poem’s opening distinction of who the “clans of possibility” are. The indeterminacy undermines assumptions of an ecosystem’s impermeability. Sewage outflow, industry runoff, corpses, garbage—bodies of wild and penned salmon that travel/inhabit offshore absorb these toxins while their own polluted bodies decompose (those not netted, canned, consumed), feed, and pollute other organisms. They cannot find their way back. For them to navigate their return, humans must return their sense of homing. Waste and culture are of the same mix. Waste made visible, as Stacy Alaimo points out, does not “[allow] us to imagine ourselves as rarefied rational beings distinct from nature’s muck and muddle” (Bodily 8). As matter created from our own bodies and interactions with other bodies, in Steveston waste is us in alternate form; we become part of that mix of “muck and muddle” we deny, that we “refuse” (61). Marlatt conflating human with spawning salmon body immerses readers in a degraded world (of which we are complicit) that is vital, (mal)functioning, and “dying” from this outfall (62). Yet, Marlatt also allows for hope to fall out of that “outfall,” suggests that there is a way to reverse or retard our condition, which she embeds in her typographical emphasis: we’ve lost the verb in our currency, a frozen exchange streaming emptiness (they’re fishing in London now) at the mouth of the river, clans of the possible are gathering, the chinook, the coho rivering just offshore are us (62) As the waste is us and we are our waste, so too it is not difficult to realize that as the coho and the chinook we eat inhabit these polluted waters and absorb the toxins, so too we become polluted bodies. Potential gathers in seeing the kinship between these toxic bodies as “clans of the possible [ … ] just offshore” and “us.” Though hope resides in the salmon’s return, Marlatt further points to a greater hope from another place, another river. Hope drops out of the outfall of “our / currency, a frozen exchange streaming emptiness,” a parenthetical “(they’re fishing in London now),” an allusion to the revitalization (“return”) of the Thames River’s health. The closed aside floats in white space. On the page, it is a netted school of words that swims between two banks of lines. As it moves toward the edge of the page, as the last closed parentheses of Steveston, a small raft of hope continues toward its becoming as it slips through the net, heads along that “river” into the larger open-ended parenthesis that opens Steveston with the interrogation “(smoothly?” (11). The answer emerges as an open net. The way that the parenthetical aside pours out of that streaming toxic outfall into an open space and drifts into an unclosed parenthesis points to an “ever-becoming” “possible” return. Not a return to a specific geographical or temporal location, but to a different homing. Again, the emphasis on “verbing”—how we use and translate language—points to how this may be achieved. Linked to an interrogative adverb, “verbing” alerts us to function, to conduct. To change our environmental practices, we need to change our language of currency and our currency of language. Marlatt emphasizes we take pause, question, and verb the noun return “out of its stuck / edges and into occurrence, currents, curre-” because “we’ve lost the verb in our / currency” (62). This offers further hope. Change the currents of our language, acknowledge our limits, then perhaps we can change the currents of the market economy that run relations to place. Rivers are a “storehouse” (Worster 303) of energy flows, but the more we degrade their body and the parts that constitute it, some of that flow ceases. Donald Worster writes, “[t]he ecosystem of the earth, considered from the perspective of energetics, is a way-station on a river of no return. Energy flows through it and disappears eventually into the vast sea of space; there is no way to get back upstream. And unlike water in the hydrological cycle, energy once passed through nature is forever lost, irretrievably lost” (303). Past the tipping point, cut off, the current ecosystem collapses and something else takes its place. The material traces translate what has been initiated but may help prevent collapse. Steveston remains a warning, forty-three years sounding on the threshold: “Somehow they survive, this people, these fish, / survive the refuse bottom, filthy water, their choked lives, / in a singular dance of survival, each from each” (43). But I wonder for how much longer. We feast and famine, but rarely stop to think that there are other bodies feeding on bodies in this world, feedings essential to the healthy flows of the planet, and bodies of matter we are trapping predictably in the inevitable outcomes of their emergent unpredictabilities. Footnotes 1 My generous thanks to those who have helped me see this article, an adaptation of my dissertation chapter “Daphne Marlatt's Steveston: New Materialism and Ecoliteracy,” through its various stages of drafting and support: the anonymous reviewer, Cate Sandilands, Travis V. Mason, Dianne Chisholm, Liza Piper, Julie Rak, SSHRC, and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. 2 Marlatt published three editions of Steveston: Talonbooks (1974), Longspoon Press (1984), and Ronsdale Press (2001). All my primary readings are from the 2001 edition. The 2001 edition ends with a new poem commissioned by Ronsdale Press. The poem also includes, at the end, photography by Robert Minden. In this essay, I focus only on the poem. 3 See the 1976 publication by Ken Adachi, The Enemy that Never Was, for a contemporary historiography of the Japanese–Canadian experience. 4 I use dialogic in its denotative meaning of relating to dialogue, exchange. Works Cited Alaimo Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self . Indiana UP , 2010 . Alaimo Stacy. “Bring Your Shovel.” Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities 1 , no. 1 ( 2014) : 1 – 2 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Barad Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning . Duke UP , 2007 . Barad Karen. “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I am.” A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23 , no. 3 ( 2012) : 206 – 23 . Barad Karen. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Now 3 , no. 2 ( 2010) : 240 – 68 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Botkin Daniel. The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered, from Climate Change to Species Extinction, How Life Persists in an Ever-Changing World . Oxford UP , 2012 . Bowering George. “Given This Body: An Interview with Daphne Marlatt.” Open Letter 4 , no. 3 ( 1979) : 32 – 88 . Coole Diana. “Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with NewMaterialisms in the Political Sciences.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41 , no. 3 ( 2013) : 451 – 69 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Deleuze Gilles , Guattari Felix . A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Trans. Massumi Brian . U of Minnesota P , 1978 . Knutson Susan. “Introduction: Daphne Marlatt’s Embodied Language Poetics.” Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt . Ed. Susan Knutson. Wilfried Laurier UP , 2014 . Marlatt Daphne. “Sites of Deep Immersion.” The Goose 14 , no. 2 ( 2015 ): 34 – 36 . Daphne Marlatt , ed. Steveston Recollected: A Japanese-Canadian History . Aural History, Provincial Archives of British Columbia , 1975 . Marlatt Daphne. The River’s Mouth: Writing Migrations . The Ralph Gustafson Lecture, Vancouver Island University, 23 Oct. 2008. Nanaimo : Institute for Coastal Research , 2009 . Marlatt Daphne. What Matters: Writing 1968-70 . Coach House , 1980 . Marlatt Daphne , Minden Robert . Steveston . Ronsdale , 2001 . McKay Don. Vis à Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry & Wilderness . Gaspereau , 2001 . O’Brien Susie. “Creative Destruction and a Sliver of Hope.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1 , no. 1 ( 2014) : 1 – 4 . Ribkoff Fred. “Daphne Marlatt’s ‘Rings’: An Extension of the Proprioceptive.” Essays on Canadian Writing 50 ( 1993) : 231 – 46 . Relke Diane M.A. Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women’s Poetry . U of Calgary P , 1999 . Ricou Laurie. “Phyllis Webb, Daphne Marlatt and Similitude.” A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women . Ed. Neuman Shirley , Kamboureli Smaro . NeWest , 1986 . 205 – 15 . Walker Brian , Holling C.S. , Carpenter Stephen R. , Kinzig Ann . “Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-ecological Systems.” Ecology and Society 9 , no. 2 ( 2004) . Weir Lorraine. “Daphne Marlatt’s “Ecology of Language.” Line 13 ( 1989) : 58 – 63 . Worster Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas . Cambridge UP , 1990 . © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Matters of Poetics and Resiliency in Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston1
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isy040
DA - 2018-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/matters-of-poetics-and-resiliency-in-daphne-marlatt-s-steveston1-0evmCt0ueg
SP - 377
EP - 395
VL - 25
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -