SOURCE: Ribkoff, Fred. “Daphne Marlatt's ‘Rings’: An Extension of the Proprioceptive.” Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (fall 1993): 231-46.

In the following essay, Ribkoff examines Marlatt's adaptation of Charles Olson's “proprioceptive” poetics in “Rings,” as evident in her shift to prose poetry, a more expansive form, and her effort to evoke the immediacy and simultaneity of physical experience through dynamic linguistic and syntactic effects.

DM: … I'd say that what happened was that Kit's birth finally located me in a tangible & therefore absolute way in my own body. I'd been lost from my body until that point.

GB: One of the things that babies have—you're talking about how you feel as if you're reborn—is that the world & themselves are not separate. Is that the sense you got? That the outside world is body as well.

DM: Yes. The thing that just amazed me about Kit was how much at...