“A NEW LISA ROBERTSON BOOK is both a public event and a private kind of bacchanal. I tried to hide my copy of 3 Summers because I knew that I would put everything aside and read the entire book at one go, then start over again right away, which I did.”
“To the uninitiated, I present Robertson as a kind of model “lyric conceptual” poet, a poet who positions lyric modes in conceptual frameworks and in so doing creates a visceral, sculptural transmission of an intimate thinking between speaker and audience, between author and reader.”
“Some call her work difficult. Cerebral. If you think Anne Carson is difficult, as some do, I imagine you will think Robertson even harder. I don’t agree that either is unduly difficult, though Robertson’s work often “defies immediate analysis,” as Michael Redhill points out in a short essay on Robertson’s third book, The Weather. More exciting for me however, is the way that both poets can expand, and even change, the way you read.”
“For example, The Weather was my introduction to Robertson’s work. It was a totally immersive experience. From the three floating blue circles in a white box on a sky-blue cover, signaling a Canadian pastoral poetry I had never before encountered, to the mix of conventionally paced lyric poems contrasting the justified prose blocks, it was, as she would say, a “sweet new style.””
“I didn’t immediately understand the relation to Virgil, or the pastoral, or Cambridge, but the book opened up more than Romantic thinking; it was also a kind of master class in feminist ecopoetics before I knew such a thing existed.”
“is another gift of both Carson’s and Robertson’s work — they introduce one to other texts and authors.”
“The Weather is also a master class in the prose poem, in ways of creating sentences.”
“The Weather was difficult in the sense that there was a good deal of pleasure before any understanding occurred.”
“A Robertson poem is wrought of eloquent and ludic sentences, and the poems themselves are housed in contemporary design.”
“You won’t find the kind of extravagant, and some would argue (I’m not one of them) gimmicky designs of say, Anne Carson’s Nox or her more recent Float. Yet Robertson’s poetry collections, too, exude design, and like Carson, the work creates a space of copious, well-lit joy.”
“Also like Carson, the breadth of Robertson’s projects is grand — her first three books were reimaginings of Virgil, and the conception and realization of her revisionings are consistently startling.”
“Alone we encounter books of poetry, but together we digest them, and that’s in part why a Robertson publication feels more like a vernissage than a book launch — the poems feel inhabitable, visual, sculptural, and performative.”
“I also include The Weather in my poetry workshops, and it is always a pleasure to watch undergraduates enter into Robertson’s work and find their footing. What is happening, they say, as if I have tipped them into a swimming pool while they weren’t looking. Then we begin our conversations about prose poetry, vocabulary, syntax, the notion of research and reading as essential components in a poetic practice, of threading philosophical and intellectual inquiry and formal beauty.”
“Robertson’s work has always been directly engaging with or in collaboration with visual artists and, indeed, other poets.”
“3 Summers is elegiac and of course, not necessarily about summer, let alone three summers. Or, if it is, it is indirectly concerned with those summers. Or, it evolved out of a decision to write a poem as a way of taking account of a year, as one does in the month of one’s birth, which for Robertson is July. Or, it is about the desire to find formal balance — in the body, in the text, in the season. Or, it is about reading. Or Lucretius. Or form. Or formlessness. Or losing form. Or, it is about all of these things at once.”
“That final statement is probably closest to the truth. “I got lost here to transform myself,” she notes, and, reader be warned, Robertson is a poet who dismantles in order to reassemble.”
“Material is always a concern of Robertson, and her feminism is always at the edge, defining itself in the face of the hurling present.”
“The body, in particular, the female body and the process (costs, conditions, and pains) of inhabiting one for the long haul is a key theme, along with the hormone, that regulatory secretion of the body that forces women of a certain age to take up their fans.”
“The hormone, toxins, what we take in, what we make meaning of, what regulates the way we make meaning or are able to make meaning of our bodies in time.”
“Robertson is interested in thinking about the physical realities and limitations of the female experience, which, she says, she didn’t see depicted anywhere in poetry, at least, one assumes, not in a way that satisfied her yearning.”
“The book is about time, about the body as a concept we all share in confronting time.”
“More is more, Robertson’s work argues. And the more is always textured. Complex.”
“But also, as Erín Moure reminds me, Robertson writes a radical present that receives fully, without screening. That Steinian impulse to see (and accept) outside of the usual contexts.”
“This is what makes Robertson such a great poet to introduce to new poets: she role-models a kind of simultaneous respect for and disavowal of the limitations of formal poetry and poetics.”
“She is both resolutely present and entirely rejecting of identity or an uninterrogated lyric subjectivity.”
“She is a rigorous thinker and reader: “I never write without spending extended times in a library, or archive,” she has said”
“She models a kind of deep connective writing that is immediately engaged with discrete, unpredictable lines of inquiry that seem both otherworldly and wholly contemporary (Calais, Brexit, Aleppo).”
“She has written mini-essays on the subject of sincerity, Hannah Arendt, John Clare, Wordsworth, Virgil, tapestry, architecture, Eva Hesse, the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, translation, Lucretius, stone, and the origin of a given piece of clothing.”
“In fashion, you can see everything, the iconic style guru Iris Apfel has said; you can discern the entire socioeconomic record of the time of production. So too with the sentence.”
“Always aware of fashion, of scaffold, architecture, textures, design, and of the visceral ingredients of everything from shoes to shawl, Robertson has described herself as a gentleman collector of the sentence, which, rather than the line, is the unit of composition she most often employs.”
“Robertson’s is a poetics of assemblage, or accretion more than collage. This is what gives her sentences their timeless, sculptural quality.”
“They embody both the coolness of the iconic and the warmth of the material craft, but always, I think, giving way to the core of form, which is the body: “The lust of the eyes / rarely obeys anything.””
“The time it takes to develop a unique style in an organic way — and I use that term un-ironically — is difficult to impart to new writers in our era.”
“It is hard to explain how long and varied life experiences are sought and ravaged for material in the way that Robertson has done — years of working as a bookseller, living in isolation in a cabin on an island, in California, in France, diligently attending to her reading practice, to her collecting.”
“It is hard, too, in this time of conceptual cataloging and intense appropriative accumulations, to impart to young poets how a practice of copying sentences can eventually become a practice of copying one’s own sentences.”
“And to urge them to trust that the “in relation to” will come over time if the collection continues to grow, and if they attend to their practice.”
“By “the collection,” and “in relation to,” I refer to Robertson’s practice of using her own writing as a kind of found material.”
“If the relationship between the body and poetry is an ongoing question for women, how (and what) to think in poetry is equally important.”
“I read in a Megan Marshall article in a late October issue of The New Yorker about Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Bishop discussing how to include everything and not fall into the anguish (and distastefulness) of the confessional. How, in other words, to tame identity but include the body, to think, to be passionate, but to be objective.”
“Where can we turn to find the interrogation of embodiedness alongside a mutually rigorous brocade of literary and timely writing? Or, perhaps we don’t want that distance? Or, we want a more ludic distance?”
“How does she do it, we ask of Robertson, how does she sound so ancient and contemporary, so masterful and yet embodied and individual, which is to say, vulnerable? “Embodiment is ongoing formal experience,” she writes, “and it’s always political.””
“So, how will we speak? In what form? With what rhetoric? With what affect? Or, as we encounter in the powerful, allegorical poem “The Coat,” how can we measure a person? What can contain us? How do we account for our friends? How do we hold them, or lose them? How do we care for each other’s bodies? Who fashions the buttons on our coats, and are buttons any less useful, or beautiful, than couplets?”
“She writes poetry, Robertson seems to suggest, because she thinks, but also because it’s portable, and Robertson knows something of precariousness of labor, poetry, the body.”
“What is most invigorating about the work is this affirmation of a poetics of grappling with nowness:”
“Seasoned readers especially look forward to encounters with her expansive vocabulary, which remains startling in its specificity: “cuticle of silence,” “hormonal forest.” The new reader, the student who feels tipped into the deep end, finds her work bracing, but quickly refreshing. And for the uninitiated that is the question: How to confront a text that is essentially “smarter” than one is in a given moment? How to assuage the unsettled nature of a first encounter? Well, one doesn’t, but being unsettled isn’t a bad thing.”
“Great poets create poems that teach you how to read them, and that is the case with Robertson. So, though at times the work may feel opaque, it is generally about exactly what you suspect it is just below the surface of your conscious responses.”
“The condition of encounter then, is a kind of wilful suspension of one’s resistance to style in favor of linear lyric poetry, or what Robertson has termed, “porch verse” (i.e., lyric poetry which can be commented on from the sublime vista of one’s domestic plateau).”
“That is a provocation, and intended with the general good humor of Robertson’s prodding.”
“Robertson’s signature style grazes through time, bringing a heightened awareness of the grand and the small in the present moment.”
“Her sentences, lessons in possibility, range from high to low with equal affect.”
“All the while, we see the “we” at the core of the poem. And the radical inclusivity of that we. The men, for example, the way Robertson receives and writes about them is both adroitly feminist and not bound (or limited) by social codes. Her men are complex and erotically drawn; for example, the men “tremble a little bit while / speaking about passivity – / They’re all right,” she owns, “I could compare them / to a song.””
“The intense and tender discourse presented here feels more intimate than Robertson’s earlier work, and quenches my thirst for such conversations. As a reader, I often need poetry to create a utopic space. All of Robertson’s work has been concerned with female friendship, feminist utopias, power. It affirms a desire to wrench free of propriety. To do cartwheels. To do back flips across boardroom tables. To laugh.”
“Mind the gap, Robertson’s work suggests. Also mine the gaps. Her poems encourage experimentation, collaboration, empathy, and love of self and body: those “Hormones, humour like, are produced by light / in order to unaccountably transform us.””
“Robertson models a kind of poet persona that is errant, unruly, deadpan, unwavering; a virtuoso of bawdy and raucous feminism.”
“But ultimately it’s this active resistance, this very particular jouissance, the ideal of Sapere aude that is so refreshing.”
“Obey nothing that is not joyful, this poet reminds me; create no art that is not piercingly intelligent; reject all modes of easy, but do embrace ease (that and good canine companionship).”
“Her practice is entirely modern and yet it exists outside of social media and instant gratification, which has not only shrunken our desktops, but also our points of references, our reading habits.”
“Reading Robertson reminds us of the ways we limit our minds, and how we need not limit them, how we too can be audacious in our knowing, assembling, and resisting, but perhaps more radical than all of that, in our self-accepting.”