Water and Ecopoetry

“What is water in the eyes of water?” asks the poet Alice Oswald. Please join us for an evening of conversations with four distinguished poets who have spent considerable time paying attention to water. Daphne Marlatt, Rita Wong, Fred Wah, and annie ross. The event will be hosted by Green College’s Writer-in-Residence.

Award-winning Vancouver poet Daphne Marlatt’s many publications include poetry, fiction, critical prose, and drama. Steveston, her 1970s long poem collaboration with photographer Robert Minden, conveyed the lives of fisher people at the mouth of the Fraser (Sto:lo) River, then already polluted. Liquidities (2013) reprised her earlier Vancouver Poems, adding a new title section merging the contemporary city with its environmental situation. Her recent poetry, including a forthcoming title, Splinters and Streams from Chax Press, Arizona, intensifies this eco-awareness focused mainly around water.


 

Poet-scholar Rita Wong attends to questions of respect for life, language, water and land. Co-editor of the anthology Downstream: Reimagining Water, Wong is the author of several books of poetry including current, climate (2021) and was awarded the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize in 2024. Wong lives on unceded Coast Salish lands and works at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She calls for collective action to address the climate crisis and systemic inequities with an economy of care and solidarity.


 

annie ross (Maya/Irish) is a Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University. Began education at home with plants, animals, art, Indigenous hand work, storytelling, and history in Compton, California, from parents dispossessed of their traditional lands. Developed and taught courses focusing on rights and title, environmental justice, and testimonio as a means to remedy from past political oppressions; Indigenous art histories, technologies/studio/craft, weaving, poetry and poetics, and printmaking as part of a panoply, a canon, of what we mean when we say Indigenous Bioregionalisms.

 

Fred Wah lives in Vancouver and the West Kootenays. His writing includes Diamond Grill, a biofiction about growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café, Sentenced to Light, collaborations with visual artists, is a door, a series of poems about hybridity, and Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991. More recently High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem, Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations, and with Rita Wong beholden: a poem as long as the river.