Today we are proud to release the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, number 153 in total, which addresses Daphne Marlatt's "Arriving," taken from her 1981 collection Here & There. This special program was recorded on location in Vancouver, British Columbia at the home of friends Richard Cook and Lucy Oh Cook, where host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included Meredith Quartermain, Fred Wah, and Marlatt herself.
"'Arriving" ... seems to have been written during — and in any case is about — a summertime gathering of artist friends and others in the Kootenays in July 1980," Filreis notes in his PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode. "Here & There is dedicated to 'my fellow swimmers.' And 'Arriving,' the first poem in the group, bears a dedication reading 'for Fred & Pauline,' and they would be Fred Wah and Pauline Butling, her hosts those summers — both present at Lucy and Richard’s home." He continues, explaining that "the poem records Daphne's nine-and-half-hour journey from the city of Vancouver to that remote haven in a steep mountain valley, and in its lines we sense a body in motion, the rushing occurrence of the environment, an 'ambushing' of the natural, and a sense of being seemingly always on the way, or a towardness."
You can read more about this latest show, read Marlatt's poem, and listen to the podcast or watch the unedited video footage of the session here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.
