Lisa Robertson: The Men & The Chicago Review

I'm really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in cabinets.
— Lisa Robertson, "Lifted: An Interview with Lisa Robertson" by Kai Fierle-Hedrick

Back again into the theme of theme issues (see my notes on previous here) comes the new issue of The Chicago Review with their feature on Canadian poet (and current resident of France) Lisa Robertson, featuring poetry and prose work by Robertson, an interview conducted by Kai Fierle-Hedrick, critical pieces by Benjamin Friedlander, Christine Stewart, Jennifer Scappettone and Joshua Clover, and a checklist of her published works. It's rare enough for a Canadian journal to have a feature on a particular Canadian writer at all, let alone a poet, so it seems that much more impressive that a foreign journal would decide to do the same (see also the recent George Bowering feature in Australia's Jacket magazine, for example, or the anthology of Canadian poets edited by Canadian poet-expat Sina Queyras). There have been arguments made for years that if Canadians dismiss the work done by their own, than how is anyone else supposed to take what we do seriously? Fortunately, for much of the sake of our own foolishnesses, the work is still getting out. At the same time, Jay MillAr's Toronto publishing house BookThug has released a lovely collection of Robertson's, The Men, as a long poem broken up into shorter long poems.

The men carrying his thoughts beyond his school
beyond all experience beyond idealism the men beyond.
I see it everywhere. Their immanent use will not damage
me. My place is grasped by my auditor. Their work is a
textbook. Without finding the world sufficient they give
it some liberty. To consider the power and domination
these bodies have I suckle them. There is not a man
alone there is not sufficiently nor geometry but there is
beauty and greatness and thirst.






The
Men are enjambed. (p 17, The Men)

Lisa Robertson, after years in Vancouver around various bits of the art, including involvement in Artspeak and The Kootenay School of Writing, is in the rare position of working very much a very individual poetry that is difficult to categorize, and even harder to compare with any other contemporary writers. As Kai Fierle-Hedrick writes in her interview, "There is something about your work I can't liken to anyone else's. I feel the same way about Erin Mouré's work, actually." (p 46). I suppose it would appear to obvious, then, to talk about the irony of suggesting the inability to compare a writer's work by making a comparison… Still, when talking of Robertson, Mouré's name does come up, as do the names of other Kootenay School writers during her time there, such as Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley, Nancy Shaw, Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart; no matter what else might happen, the mind continues along that need to group, even such a diverse field of un-group.

One of the more interesting pieces was one written by Benjamin Friedlander. His critical/journal piece "A Reading Diary," was originally written and published in 1995 as a response to Roberston's XEclogue, and reprinted here with a new epilogue. As he writes in his 2006 epilogue to the original piece:

In any case, to have touched on tradition in my reading of XEclogue would have
meant, in 1995, touching on those matters of local origin that Lisa worked so
hard, and so effectively, to overcome. I did, to be sure, take up those matters
in setting "nature" against "language," but there my own allegiance was to
language, and I felt little risk that my remarks would be mistaken for polemic
or distract me from attending to what seemed most essential in Lisa's book. So
far as tradition was concerned, what seemed most essential was not her deviation
from present-day literary taste, but her recognition that one could only engage
tradition meaningfully by coming to terms with its distance. (italics mine, pp
63-4)

There is something wonderfully resonant in that idea, coming to terms with its distance that I simply can't shake (perhaps I might write of it further later on). In a prose piece about her own work included in the issue, "On Palinode" (pp 26-7), Robertson writes about that idea bandied about for some time now, about "poetry and knowing," ending with:

Resistance and reception confounded themselves. So a shade of shapeliness
persists within the gesture. Testing, not retreating, passivity scares me. The
attending gesture needs no action: it awaits x, inevitably. The fear pertains to
the uninterpretibility of material. The palinode is the most passive thing I can
imagine. There is a doubled sensation. Therefore it's obscene. This is a comedy.
This is why it interests me. Thus I systematically forget the poem. Unknowable
matters could arrive. What can one receive? What is desertion? What is the
extreme of reception? (p 27)

As she writes in the long poem "Palinodes":

Suppose I never saw deception
No distinctions—just the fear of isolation

That structure was not finally my medium
I am an animal I don’t know

Nor an orchard nor a single soul nor
A dog nor a leather purse nor subjection

Nor trivialization nor worthlessness
Nor apples and stars when the festival

Of war unfurls from garden suburbs and
Decks the patios in grand coloured

Swags flipping upwards in the breeze bringing
The shampoo scent of blossoms

It would be nice
To interfere with the accuracy of the world. (p 22, The Chicago Review)

It seems interesting she would mention "the double" in her piece on the poem. Even in her collection The Men there is the talk of the double, moving regularly from the "I" into "we" and vice versa. There is the collective and then there is the individual, as she writes in the poem "MEN DEFT MEN" from the same collection:

We are weary in the watching.
I am. (p 22, The Men)

What is this double-speak she speaks of? What is this kind of doubling? Writing herself as herself, writing herself as man, writing herself as the men. Writing herself or writing narrator. It was something prairie poet Andrew Suknaski wrote of again and again, predominantly when referring to Eli Mandel (and therefore, Borges) in various of his critical pieces, writing:

No, it isn't just the prairie that drove some of us mad. It was the mutants in
the lineage. Shakespeare taught us that. Borges reaffirmed it in a healthy
obsession with doubles: Christ/Judas; Cain/Abel; Othello/Iago and others —
fleshed-out binaries of the tormented, human mind. No, it ain't easy to follow
Mandel. ("out of narayan to bifrost/the word arresting entropy," Brick magazine,
1980(?))

Or writing:

Eli, as I began to pass the Bergman Apartments, your words faded in that coldest
of all cold nights I'd ever known. I didn't look right to what had once been your window. I did remember, again, how you once talked of seeing your double at
the Cave n' Basin Hot Spring that one summer. I think it was about then — as I
looked back once at the place that once doubled for home to you — that your dead
ringer began to peel my name off the cold aluminum sky illuminated by the city's
light: "Andyyy! Andyyyyyyy! Stop! Don't do it!" It didn't stop me. What actually
slowed my pace were the faint words of a woman I once loved. Miraculously, her
words surfaced again in my memory: "Andy, whenever I thought of you somewhere, I imagined this Towering Spirit moving across the Prairie . . . ." I stopped one
block past the Bergman Apartments. Abandoned my premeditated long walk east
across Wascana Lake where I might have confirmed the word with flesh. ("Mandel
Memoir," Essays on Canadian Writing, issue 45/46, winter/spring 1991/2)

In Robertson, it seems easy to talk about the double, even in the example of her poems including words with Canadian spellings, even as parts of her speech in the interview include American spellings. Was this a magazine decision, or a transcription one? Was she, in fact, speaking American speech during the section of the interview conducted in England, even as she writes in Canadian (i.e. British)? Is there even a difference? Does it matter at all to anyone?

Part of the strength of the section on Robertson (at nearly one hundred pages, makes up only %40 or so of the issue) is the fact that it includes a bibliography of not only her books and chapbooks, but her poetry in periodicals, essays and reviews on poetry, art and architecture, and her contributions to anthologies. For the sake of further context, I will include her list of books and chapbooks (as included in The Chicago Review) here:

Books

XEclogue. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1993.
Debbie: An Epic. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997. [Published in the UK by Reality Street Editions, 2001.]
XEclogue. 2nd revised edition. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999.
The Weather. Vancouver: New Star Books, 2001. [Published in the UK by Reality Street Editions, 2001.]
Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Astoria, OR: Clearcut Press, 2003.
The Men. Toronto: BookThug, 2006.

Chapbooks and Pamphlets

The Apothecary. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1991. [Reissued in 2001.]
The Barscheit Horse [with Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart]. Hamilton, ON: Berkeley Horse, 1993.
XEclogue II-V. Vancouver: Sprang Texts, 1993.
The Glove: An Essay on Interpretation. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, 1993.
The Badge. Hamilton, ON: Berkeley Horse, 1994.
Earth Monies. Mission, BC: DARD, 1995.
The Descent. Buffalo: Meow Books, 1996.
Soft Architecture: A Manifesto. Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery, 1999.
A Hotel. Vancouver: Vancouver Film School, 2003.
Face/. New York: A Rest Press, 2003.
Rousseau's Boat. Vancouver: Nomados, 2004.
First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant. Belladonna 75. Brooklyn: Belladonna Books, 2005.