Tuesday,
February 7, 2017
I
have decided to embark upon a reading diary of the works of Lisa Robertson. I’ve
purloined this idea from Benjamin
Friedlander whose own reading diary on Lisa Robertson was published in the Chicago Review Issues 51:4 and 52:1,
Spring 2006.
LR
talked about her book, The Weather
(New Star Books, 2001) and also “From the Office of Soft Architecture,” which
became part of Occasional Works and Seven
Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Coach House Books, 2010). I
became fascinated with the idea of creating an entity as the voice of a poem. I
tried it myself. The notion of basing a long poem or a suite of poems on a
concept was new and intriguing to me. I had only started reading contemporary
poetry in 2000.
I
begin with Cinema of the Present
(Coach House Books, 2014), LR’s penultimate book because it is a library book
with a due date. I have renewed the book three times, scrawled in it in black
ink and dog-eared it, so I shall have to buy a new copy for the library.
CoTP
is a long poem made up of individual sentences alternating between Roman typeface
and Italics; these sentences are in the first, second and third person. This method gives the
impression of multiple voices that interrupt one another or complement one
another. Many of the sentences are about form and language: “Curiosity, limbs
and momentum: because of form, you keep playing.” (p. 22). “Form requires of
you a reticence.” (p. 30).
This
rebelliousness against/exploration of form is one of the reasons why LR’s
writing has always resonated with me.
The
sentences are a collection of different types: declarative, interrogative, imperative,
exclamatory, fragments, reported or indirect speech. I haven’t done a thorough
grammatical study of the book, of each sentence to determine whether they are
mostly simple or include compound and complex sentences, but the work seems to
encourage an examination of systems and patterns.
I
read somewhere that LR wishes to corrupt the pastoral in her work. It may have
been in an interview in the Chicago
Review’s special issue from 2006 cited above. There are instances in CoTP
where nature is shown as unidyllic or where it is corrupted by urban spaces and
time. “You entered the university of vines and crumpled mosaic, hot sun, the
cracks in the walls, the balconies peeling and collapsed.” (p. 63).
LR’s
sentences have cadence and sound: “Flanking the clatter and shriek of
migrations.” (p. 24).
Running
through the entire book is list of the materials that make up a gate. The
materials become more and more absurd and textual as the poem moves along. Reminiscent
of an art installation. Contemplation of the notion of a gate, what it holds
within or shuts out. “A gate made of gold, metal rods, driftwood, glass,
concrete, peacock feathers, wood.” (p. 83.) Writers can be gatekeepers of
language.
There
are several mentions of the present in the poem and its relationship to
language, the constraints of language: “You’re interested in the brutality of
description: it is the transversal of infinitely futile yet fundamental and
continuous space called the present.” (p. 27) This makes me muse about how
writing distorts reality. These sentences aren’t linear. They don’t offer an obvious
narrative, they aren’t in any kind of conventional order, such as chronological;
they don’t tell a story. Don’t think that I’m complaining about this. The way
in which to address or not to address narrative in poetry has long been an
obsession of mine. Questions I always have come to me as I’m reading this work:
Do these sentences work together to form a cohesive whole? If so, what? Is
cohesion important? Will readers engage with a text that doesn’t have an
obvious narrative? Who is LR’s reader?
“If
you speak in this imaginary structure, it’s because other choices felt
limiting.” (p. 31).
“That
your mouth lovingly damaged the language.” (p. 48).
“Then
you felt lyric obscenity both erotic and rhetorical.” (p. 50).
“At
times you had only wanted to float upon the norms of a beautiful language,
obedient.” (p. 59).
“You
had wanted to believe that language needs us to witness its time.” (p. 59).
“You
are only lyrical if you’re harsh.” (p. 65).
“You
ask what if language is already beyond itself?” (p. 46).
“You
may no longer use better words.” (p. 84).
“You
carried the great discovery of poetry as freedom, not form.” (p. 75.)
Cohesion comes from the repeated subjects, and also from repetition of sentences. Several of the sentences are repeated
numerous times. These repetitions act as a refrain, become incantatory. I’d
like to reread this book to note the sentences that are repeated.
While
the sentences seem objective, emotions, such as sorrow, loneliness, scorn are
mentioned. There is a feeling of constraint however: “Time is short; you need
to constrain your feeling for the sentence.” (p. 59).
Wednesday,
February 8, 2017
I
have long been fascinated with the concept of “plenitude” or abundance, the
horror vacui fear of the blank page. Somewhere LR talks about inflation and in
CoTP, “Sometimes the concept of plenitude is a help.” (p. 46).
I
enjoy the way the sentences cause my mind to wander, lead outward:
“The
countess of prose in your abandoned orchard.” (p. 49 and repeated.)
“You’d
rather be a dandy than a writer.” (p. 50).
“Tattered
Europe caking up in the corners of abandoned rooms.” (p. 60 and repeated.)
“Let
feminism be the girl raging at a chandelier.” (p. 80.)
“So
you came to nilling.” (p. 98). [the title of an entire book: Nilling (Book Thug, 2012).
The
role of the pronoun is also the subject of several sentences:
”The
I-speaker on your silken rupture spills into history.” (p. 50).
“Its
pronoun plays a social rupture.” (p. 59).
“What
is a pronoun but a metaphor?” (p. 62.)
“An
unknowing expands within your pronoun but it feels convivial.” (p. 89).
The
poem contains references to sex, to the body, to feminism and to being a woman.
It also examines the concept of the
city. There’s so much here. I could do a study on the use of the gerund alone,
the verbs/nouns: “becoming/burning/trembling/rotting/crumbling” as states of
being, of transformation.
As
Stephanie Gray writes in her review in Jacket2, there is a cinematic quality to
the text, each sentence moving from one frame to the next, a kind of unreal
quality to the present, as if one is watching it rather than participating in
it per se. The sensing of the present, the present as character in an
avant-garde Man Ray film.
Cinema of the Present
made me want to also collect and assemble sentences, to try to engage with the
ineffable, the inchoate, the ludic. In answer to the question, who is Lisa
Roberton’s reader, I will say that I am. I’m fascinated by the concept of
assemblage, the collage of concepts, ideas and images that aren’t obviously
related, the interrogation of form, playfulness in language, lush imagery,
attention to sound.
See
also
Ella
Longpre’s review in Entropy:
Jacqueline
Valencia’s essay “Poetry as the Conceptual Experiment of Language” in AllLitUp:
https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2015/Poetry-as-the-Conceptual-Experiment-of-Language
