Lisa Robertson's Creative Confusion

Dougals Barber, from the journal Canadian Literature, on Lisa Robertson's enchanting sentences, which lie just south of the sensible. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, a compendium of the author's work since the mid '90s, came out in 2009:

The Many of One

Lisa Robertson keeps telling it ever more slant. In Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, she whips many souls into subtle shapes, as various “I”s speak learnedly, if obscurely, about a world itself far too complex to pin down in lyric description…. [H]er writing refuses the singular, static, egocentric, and convention-bound. Robertson writes beautiful sentences and lines that almost make ordinary sense but never quite fall into that trap. As a “quotation” suggests, “Her pronoun is sedition unrecognized as such.” But that’s only one screen of a “Voice-Over for Split-Screen Video Loop.” Which simply extends the on-going construction of confusion that is this book.

Robertson is one of our most crisply intelligent writers, and the poems and prose pieces in Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (that possessive signaling one particularizing quality of this text), with their allusiveness (in all senses: history, philosophy, art criticism are but a few of the implied intertexts), continually knock readers off their conventional responses, asking that they follow the curlicues of thought-in-motion the writing displays. One poem that deploys all of Robertson’s gifts, “On Painting,” begins with a reference to Pliny’s thoughts on the art, slide to Egypt as possible origin, back to Pliny on painting and war, with asides on other possibilities, until its first part moves beyond Pliny:

Each earth has a property and a use. Pliny speaks of each.
But generally it’s worth repeating: the earth is an island mixed with blood.
In its furnace we concoct colour.

In the next two parts “painting” becomes a person, a social effect, something government will silence if it can. Yet the tone remains cool, there is no “political” rhetoric; rather there is an invitation to think the possibilities along with the poem.
“On Painting” provides but a modest taste of what Robertson offers in this volume. All the pieces, whether verse or prose, are essays in the old sense, attempts to make the process of thinking (with heart) visible, “lisible.” Take “The Story,” in which the narrating “I” attempts verb after verb, until:

And all the roads grew dark
with my longing and my tears. It snowed
in darkness. I strewed, I strove, I swelled all night.
The truck sheared through the Night.

Or any other of the pieces: Lisa Robertson writes along a line between language that mocks meaning and facile conventions. Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip insists that language moves, with exquisite care, along that knife-edge, dangerous and cool, emotions banked but fiery beneath the text’s apparently calm and collected surface.

-Douglas Barbour