INTIMATE ENCOUNTERS WITH VIOLENCE: MEDIA AND TRAUMA IN THE WORK OF PHYLLIS WEBB AND DAPHNE MARLATT by © Collin Campbell A Dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Memorial University of Newfoundland May 2021 St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador i Abstract This dissertation looks at the work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt, two West Coast Canadian poets who explored questions of media technologies and trauma violence in their work during the latter half of the twentieth century. This thesis takes up contemporary phenomenological and feminist analyses of the connections between media technologies and trauma, especially war violence, in relation to both the creative and practical careers of these two writers. Research into the histories of media technologies such as the letter, radio, photography, and television shows how these technologies have shaped our experience of violence both globally and locally, from nineteenth-century colonial garrisons in Canada to the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War to the 1991 Gulf War. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that these two poets offer new phenomenological interpretations of the ways in which media technologies shape our perception of historical, hidden traumas. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Joel Deshaye for endless patience and insight in supervising this dissertation. And thank you to the administrative staff and faculty of the English department at Memorial University. I am also endlessly indebted to the staff at Memorial University’s Queen Elizabeth II library for their dedication and ingenuity. Thank you to Library and Archives Canada and its staff for permitting and facilitating my research into the Phyllis Webb fonds, and also to the archivists at CBC Radio for help in searching for Phyllis Webb’s early radio and television broadcasts. I am grateful as well to the helpful staff at Vancouver Art Gallery’s Library and Archives. And thank you to the Steveston Branch of the Richmond Public Library for picking up a long-distance call and patiently answering the questions of a stranger. I would like to thank Daphne Marlatt and Robert Minden for their challenging and insightful commentary on early versions of the third chapter. And again, thank you to Robert Minden for permitting the reproduction of his photographs in the pages of this dissertation. And finally, thank you to Becky for patience, support, and a careful eye. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures v Introduction: Can Media Speak? 1 Chapter 1: Intimations of Grief: Mourning, the Letter, and Wilson’s Bowl 29 Chapter 2: Radio in the Dark: Phyllis Webb’s Late Work and the CBC 66 Chapter 3: Labour and the Lyric Camera: (Re)viewing Robert Minden’s Photographs in Steveston with Daphne Marlatt 123 Chapter 4: Daphne Marlatt’s Taken, Intimacy, Clarity 171 Conclusion 217 Works Cited 229 iv List of Figures Figure 1: Map of radio propagation ................................................................................... 90 Figure 2: Map of 18th-century fur-trading posts .............................................................. 100 Figure 3: “Herring, 1974” ................................................................................................ 157 Figure 4: “Cannery Workers, 1974” ................................................................................ 158 Figure 5: “Canadian Pacific Camp, Spring 1973” ........................................................... 167 Figure 6: “Gill Net, 1973”................................................................................................ 169 v Introduction: Can Media Speak? It is the contention of this thesis that media not only make perceptual demands on us, on how we process and understand violence in our world, but they also make ethical demands. In other words, the perceptual possibilities and constrictions that come with each medium also harbour ethical responsibilities and consequences. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that the invention of the camera disrupted how we look: “The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless [. .] It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as on the vanishing point of infinity [. .] The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. The visible came to mean something different to them” (16). As Berger does here, many scholars of media trace the correspondence between a specific media technology and the emergence of a new form of perception. Berger insightfully notes that the photograph was mistakenly thought to “capture” a scene; however, what it truly represented was a scene at a specific moment in time, that is, a photograph actually captures both a where and a when. Thus, the invention of the photograph as a medium reveals that all sight is always time-dependent, always at the mercy of the moment. Berger links this fracturing of the timeless observer to modernist and postmodernist ideas about the decentering of perspective and a skepticism toward transcendental truth. He suggests that the medium of the camera produces a new fundamental relationship to looking that seems to simultaneously usher in and reflect these changes in twentieth-century Western philosophy. The camera, for instance, challenges the idea of an omniscient “God’s eye” perspective by emphasizing how sight—corresponding to Enlightenment knowledge—changes radically based on 1 perspective. What is more, for Berger, the new relationship to reality that the camera provides is tied up with questions of power and how we understand, or “see,” the past. What this ultimately means, then, is that the camera technology, via the new conditions of perception that it provides, enables alternative (in this case fractured, destabilized) relations to power, or, put another way, the camera enables new ethical potentials. This thesis follows a similar trajectory to Berger’s analysis, but it looks at contemporary theories of violence rather than modernist and postmodernist theories of truth. I ask instead how certain media technologies—the letter, the radio, the photograph, and television news—shape and are shaped by feminist and phenomenological philosophies of trauma and violence. To investigate sensitive ethical responses to the proliferation of media and violence in the twentieth century, this thesis looks at the work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt, two Canadian poets who are deeply concerned with media and the ways in which our intimate relations with each other speak to our obligations toward global histories of pain, including war, imprisonment, and suicide. In a 2016 interview with Laura Moss and Gillian Jerome, Daphne Marlatt discusses her experiments with the long line or the run-on sentence that appear in Rings (1971), Vancouver Poems (1972), and Steveston (1974). A new form of the poetic line for Marlatt enables a new kind of perception, which she explains as “the doubleness of how we’re situated, both in the present moment and in our harking back to the past (history included) or anticipating the future” (260). Marlatt’s poetry shows this sensitivity toward the situatedness of perception not only as an aesthetic quality but also as a radical reformulation of the ethical obligations of creative work, specifically in the ways in which the shifting perspectives of the long line counter narrative authority as a reification of 2 patriarchal Western art. But the “doubleness” of perspective, the resonance between the particularities of our context and the historical past, the shifting, uncertain vantage point, all also correspond to the fundamental changes in perception and their attending ethical implications that Berger notes in reference to the widespread use of camera technology. Indeed, one could argue (as the third chapter of this dissertation does) that Marlatt’s work is particularly camera-like, especially in the ways that its alternative forms of perception work to forge new relationships to the world and those around us, creating new ethical possibilities. This thesis takes poetry, and specifically the work of two West Coast Canadian poets, Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt, as a sort of “proving ground” for the ways that media technologies (such as the letter, radio, photography, and television) articulate, reframe, misrecognize, and interrupt how we perceive violence and trauma in our world. Part of the dovetailing of poetry with media is due to the poets’ own interests and subject matter. For instance, as the first chapter, “Intimations of Grief: Mourning, the Letter, and Wilson’s Bowl,” explains, Phyllis Webb’s 1980 book of poetry, Wilson’s Bowl, revolves around an intimate exchange through the medium of the letter between two friends in the few years before their suicides. Webb herself worked in the medium of public radio for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) from the 1950s to the 1970s. She served as an executive producer during the conception of the CBC Radio program Ideas in the 1960s and continued to write and voice radio broadcasts for various CBC programs. The second chapter, “Radio in the Dark: Phyllis Webb’s Late Work and the CBC,” covers Webb’s work in public broadcasting. As the third chapter details, Daphne Marlatt in Steveston expanded the boundaries of poetry by collaborating with the photographer 3 Robert Minden in order to create