SOURCE: Banting, Pamela. “The Reorganization of the Body: Daphne Marlatt's ‘Musing with Mothertongue.’”¹ In ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture, edited by Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson, pp. 217-32. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Banting discusses Marlatt's poetics of the physical body and her effort to relocate language and writing in the human organism itself, which Marlatt identifies as the literal and metaphorical source of all experience and signification.

We have seen previously that, caught between the sense we give to reality and the non-sense patriarchal reality constitutes for us, we are most often forced to adapt our lives to simultaneous translation of the foreign tongue.

Nicole Brossard, The Aerial Letter, 112

Sober and enraptured, already familiar with the place where you know how to put your hand so as to bring about the effect of reality: lovhers. While i am still trying to...