Canadian Literature is pleased to announce the publication of Emily Bednarz’s prize-winning essay “Assembling Urban Archives: Reading Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now.” Emily is the 2017-2018 winner of the ACQL Barbara Godard Prize for Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar, a prize presented annually at the ACQL conference. Emily’s article is now available on our website. In it, she writes:
Given its malleable urban geography—its fluctuating sub/urban character witnessed over centuries of industrial development—the city of Vancouver is a place haunted by previous iterations of itself. Many Canadian poets over the past century have observed the city’s changing geographic, architectural, and industrial dynamics. This is perhaps most notable in Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver collections, beginning with Vancouver Poems (1972) and on to the expanded and modified Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (2013). While Marlatt’s texts, forty years apart, are thematically concerned with the way in which historical events shape the contours of urban space decades (even centuries) after they occur, Liquidities also echoes back to, or is haunted by, its first edition. Here I will not only trace Marlatt’s depiction of historical hauntings in urban space but I will also compare the editions of the texts as representative of such urban hauntings.
—Emily Bednarz, “Assembling Urban Archives: Reading Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now”